In today’s post, Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Dr Watson (Nigel Bruce) visit Washington, D.C., on the trail of an ‘international spy ring’ of dastardly Nazi agents. Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943) was the first Sherlock Holmes film to deviate from an original Conan Doyle story, and the third to be set in the modern era. Today’s post (Friday), as always, is for the paid subscribers. And I will be back again on Sunday, with our regular free subscriber slot, which can be read by anybody and everybody.

Lots to discuss. Is Basil Rathbone the Sherlock Holmes? Does Sherlock Holmes require gaslight, bustles and the rattle of the Hansom Cab? And America in the Late 1930s/Early 1940s:

“… And I have a theory. That in the very late 1930s and the early 1940s, the Anglophile American East Coast was the most civilised place in which to live; certainly it seems rather luxurious, or at least on film, the ginormous refrigerators (think Tom and Jerry, chickens and a bottle of milk), the streamlined automobiles, the cocktail-bar railway cars, and comfortable, chintz-decorated Connecticut farmhouses with all mod-cons, coupled with rather good-looking people who spoke proper (i.e. with Anglicised accents) and rode to hounds…”