The first mystery, "The Adventure of the Nameless Corpse," was launched in mid-1987. The script had withstood persistent questioning, revision and study. Actors had been hired and rehearsed.
"But I still had precious little faith in myself as Holmes," Sherwood said. "I was so unconvinced that anyone would believe me in the character that I made myself ill." In fact, he spent an hour during dinner, lying on a restroom floor, trying to regain the equilibrium he'd lost to stress and too much tobacco from Holmes's pipe.
"I was severely intimidated by the prospect of playing a character I never dreamed of portraying in my lifetime. It took me several attempts to grow comfortable in the role and to allow it to 'possess' me. I now know exactly what Doyle, Rathbone, Brett and others have talked about when they've said that the character has a weird and somewhat disconcerting life of its own."
After a few performances, however, Sherwood's confidence in himself, the format and the mystery grew. Visitors told the Villa's staff about the enjoyable time they'd had, and immediately booked for the following year.
Sherwood found conjuring up the first mystery extremely difficult, even though "The Nameless Corpse" ultimately proved to be among the most satisfying of his original Sherlock Holmes theatrical pastiches -- and the most performed.
"Heaven help me if people keep coming back and I have to keep writing new mysteries every year," he mused to Gibson after the first year's success. "How did Doyle do this month after month?" Doyle himself grew so weary of plotting his Holmes stories that he tried a number of times to end the series, going so far as to "kill off" Holmes for 10 years before writing "The Hound of the Baskervilles."
Sherwood found himself in much the same boat, but with a full year's time to write the next mystery. On the other hand, Doyle had the luxury of not having to find a cast of performers and properties to flesh out each of his stories. Sherwood insisted that he truly needed that time to pull everything together, year after year.
"We've been fortunate to have a few extremely faithful Sherlockians as well as faithful non-Sherlockians who know how to 'play the game' and kept coming back to learn and do more," he said. " I was certain that I was going to disappoint them at first, but by the time I was writing the seventh mystery for the Villa, I discovered that I'd learned 'how to do it.'
"Coming up with plots for the cases written from 1995 until 1999 actually was relatively easy. Some of the later cases actually were spun out from tiny, unresolved threads in the earlier ones, bringing closure to some issues and tying several disparate cases together. Each case stood on its own, but it was fun for some of the repeat guests to try to recall details of mysteries they'd worked on almost a decade earlier."
221B Baker Street - Visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London
Go to John Sherwood's performance credits.
Since April 1997, we have had this many visitors:
