Marina

Now, Richard, as a man who makes a considerable amount of money from writing books, you'll enjoy this element of the story.

Of course it is.

I realise that.

But there must be a tiny part of you that enjoys the royalties.

Anyway...

Conan Doyle listens to this story and he says, oh, that's brilliant.

And he writes to the Strand magazine, which had always published Sherlock Holmes.

And he says to the Strand magazine, look, I'd like to write this story about a black dog on a moor.

I can do it for X amount of money and it's a lot of money.

He says, or I could charge you double, but I could put Sherlock Holmes in it.

That's good.

They had to go and ask the directors of the magazine for permission to basically break their, you know, break their budgetary guidelines or whatever to give Conan Doyle all this cash.

And then he sold it to America.

And of course they said, yeah, brilliant.

If you've got Sherlock Holmes in, we'll pay you loads.

Exactly, because the beauty of having Dr. Watson tell the stories retrospectively is that if Conan Doyle wanted, he could put in loads of old stories about Sherlock Holmes, couldn't he?

So that's the way it works.

He does this.

It's a tremendous success.

And then Conan Doyle thinks, maybe I could bring Sherlock Holmes back.