Sherlock Holmes fans will be delighted to know that there is a new play featuring the great man. In it Holmes, 72, bored silly by retirement and bee-keeping in the Sussex Downs, is back living at his old haunt of 221B Baker Street and reunited with the widowed Watson. The case that lands in Holmes’s lap concerns a reported outbreak of fairies in the Bradford area. Thus we are plunged into the Cottingley saga, a mystery that fascinated the public in the 1920s.
The play is by Fiona Maher, a fairy-lore expert, organiser of the Legendary Llangollen Faery Festival (she’s known as Tink) and author of a very well-researched book on the Cottingley affair that sheds much new light on the hoax. In the play, the great detective’s sleuthing mirrors her own detective work.
Holmes represented exactly the kind of person who condemned Doyle for his belief in fairies and spiritualism
But before we get on to Holmes, the fairy-photograph story goes like this.
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