There has been interest from others connected with the film and funding on Unbound has now reached 64%.
Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles) has also been supportive. The satirical novelist Jonathan Coe (What a Carve Up!, The Rotter’s Club) has promised an interview about his own obsession with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Patrick’s had lots of interesting support so far. I use a couple of the stories as a way of commenting on what’s going on in his life: The Man with the Twisted Lip (my personal favourite) and A Scandal in Bohemia.’ ‘His boss recommends them to him when he gets upset about the arrival of the film crew, and over the course of the novel he becomes a fan. ‘At the beginning, my main protagonist, Jim, has never read a Sherlock Holmes story,’ Patrick explains. And of course, it’s interested in his sex life!’Īlways a devotee of the canon, I had to ask whether anything from it features in The Continuity Girl. It doesn’t just give us more of Holmes, it tries to unpick what lies behind his character. ‘It’s very Millenial, it’s fan fic before there was fan fic. Patrick is a life-long Sherlock Holmes fan and feels that the film has become very important to the way we view Holmes, as well as inspiring Mark Gatiss and being key in the development of BBC Sherlock. Patrick was inspired by a trip to the Highlands on his honeymoon, and a boat tour of Loch Ness complete with a real-life Nessie hunter who was there during filming of The Private Life. In 1969, dedicated Loch Ness monster hunter Jim Outhwaite is put out by the arrival of a film crew in the vicinity, until he meets the film’s continuity girl, April Bloom… Nothing is quite how it seems, however, and – much as in a Billy Wilder film – it’s not always clear who you can trust.’
#YA NOVEL SHERLOCK HOLMES CHARLOTTE FULL#
In 2014, the discovery of a full cut of Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes leads film scholar Gemma MacDonald to make contact with the movie’s continuity supervisor, April Korzeniowski (she’s my invention – it was really Elaine Schreyek). Patrick describes The Continuity Girl as, ‘A comic love story with two plots that eventually converge. His story, ‘The Doll and His Maker’ was published as part of the ‘Sherlock’s Home, The Empty House’ anthology and remains my favourite in the collection. This gave Patrick a thirst for writing which has remained a passion. He has a PhD in Shakespeare Studies from the Shakespeare Institute and used that research to write his first novel, a detailed historical book about the run-up to the Gunpowder Plot. He’s a thoroughly decent bloke, a writer going it alone without the backing of an agent or large publisher – writing away furiously while still holding down a full-time job as an English teacher. I bumped into Patrick in his home town of Coventry and we had a good old natter about all things Sherlock Holmes, publishing and The Continuity Girl.
#YA NOVEL SHERLOCK HOLMES CHARLOTTE SERIES#
Could this be the sort of palate-cleansing treatment we need after the emotional roller coaster ride of Sherlock series four? It’s a fusion of things Holmes fans will love, and an altogether different story with universal appeal. But for me, this one stands out as offering something a little different. There really are so many books and short stories out there involving Holmes that it’s becoming a landslide. Husband says: ‘Yes but why are you writing about it? There are loads of Holmes books and projects out there, so why this one?’ In other words, ‘Why have you given ten of our hard-earned pounds to some bloke from Coventry who’s done a book?’ You can pledge as little as £10 to become part of the project, and have that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone – even if you are secretly thinking, ‘If this becomes a film, I might get to hob nob on set for a few days…’ Patrick is looking for pledges on the Unbound publishing platform towards his new novel, The Continuity Girl – a book set around the filming of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Billy Wilder in 1970. But give author Patrick Kincaid a tenner, and he’d be cock-a-hoop, and you’d get your name listed in the back of his book as a patron. There’s no use phoning up the likes of Mark Gatiss or Guy Ritchie and saying, ‘If I give you a tenner, can I be part of your next project?’ because they’d probably tell you to get lost – assuming you could even find their phone number in the first place. What if you could get involved in the next bestseller in the Sherlock Holmes universe right from the start?
0 kommentar(er)
