In the first-ever Sherlock Holmes story – 1887’s A Study in Scarlet – the great detective introduces himself to Dr Watson as a “consulting detective”, before adding: “I am the only one in the world”.
More than a century later, Leslie S. Klinger occupies an equally unusual niche. A lawyer and Sherlock Holmes scholar based in California, Klinger is the world’s first “consulting Sherlockian”. From Hollywood studios to television writers’ rooms, producers, directors and authors turn to him to ensure their adaptations remain faithful to the detective’s character – and to the spirit of the sleuth Arthur Conan Doyle first put to the page.
Klinger says his role often sits somewhere between guardian and guide – part fact-checker, part sounding board for writers trying to square modern storytelling with the Victorian canon.
“I’ll typically suggest that certain words from the original stories are used,” he says, “or explain to producers where they’ve misunderstood a section from the original stories. Sometimes, they’ll just do it the way they want to – and cite creative licence – but while half of the advice I give is ignored, the other half they listen to. It’s a joyful experience.”
And Klinger knows his Sherlock. That enthusiasm began during his time at university in the mid-1960s. After a childhood in Chicago, he moved west to study law at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, his then-girlfriend spotted an annotated collection of Sherlock Holmes stories in a local bookshop – and bought it for him as a gift.
“It became my recreational reading,” he says, “and I was soon hooked. Absolutely hooked. And it wasn’t just the stories – it was the footnotes, the wider amateur scholarship on the subject of Holmes.”
For years, Klinger kept that fascination going, slowly building a Holmes-centred collection that would eventually number around 5,000 items. But it wasn’t until three decades later, after his children were grown, that his second wife suggested he try his hand at some scholarly writing of his own.
After establishing himself as a Holmes scholar – publishing numerous books on Holmes, including a landmark annotated edition that has become a standard reference for readers and adaptors alike – Klinger heard from a friend that a new Sherlock Holmes film was in development. It would eventually become Guy Ritchie’s 2009 adaptation, starring Robert Downey Jr.
“That friend introduced me to Lionel Wigram, the producer who had conceived the project, and we had lunch,” says Klinger. “But I don’t think Wigram really wanted to talk to me. I think he thought I was going to be a purist, and that he didn’t need my help. So I never heard from him again.”
Shortly afterwards, one of Klinger’s legal clients – a Hollywood director – told him he was in the running to helm the film. “He knew I was a Sherlock Holmes nut, so we talked at length about the movie, I showed him all the books – and then he didn’t get the gig!”
That was strike two, says Klinger. But then, while he was volunteering at his local food market, Malibu Kitchen, Robert Downey Jr. walked in. “He was speaking to the owner, and the owner asked what he was working on,” says Klinger. “Downey Jr. said, ‘I’m doing Sherlock Holmes.’ And the owner said, fortuitously, ‘That’s funny – our friend Les is the world’s greatest expert on Sherlock Holmes.’”
The two met up and spent hours talking about the film. Downey Jr. even brought Klinger on board as an unofficial technical advisor, checking the script for anachronisms or sections that didn’t quite chime with the established traits of the character. Suddenly, Klinger was the go-to guy for Sherlock questions in film and television and, two years later, his role was made official for the sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
On that film, Klinger recalls ensuring that a deck of tarot cards was historically accurate for the period, and advising the production that the lantern hanging outside Holmes’ Baker Street dwelling should read “221”, not “221B” – “the apartment number would have been on the inside”. They didn’t heed that particular piece of advice, but Klinger was allowed to write Holmes’ epitaph for a funeral scene. “That was one of the wins,” he laughs.
By 2019, when Enola Holmes went into production for Netflix, director Harry Bradbeer called on Klinger to read the scripts. “I was, again, to look for historical inaccuracies, anachronisms, inapt words that were being used from time to time,” says Klinger. “But the writer, Jack Thorne, did a very careful job on the historical material. The second Enola Holmes film, for example, draws on the real-life matchgirls’ strike and concerns over phosphorus poisoning.”
One of Klinger’s most memorable moments working on a Sherlock Holmes project came on the first Enola Holmes film, in which Henry Cavill plays the great detective. Klinger recalls sitting with the director and working through a scene in detail, mapping out how Holmes might have approached it – what clues he would have noticed, and how he would have followed them through. “That was a lot of fun,” he says.
Being a lawyer has also had its perks. The Conan Doyle Estate tried to block the first Enola Holmes film from being made, arguing that Cavill’s Holmes displayed a “warmth and emotion” that appeared only in Conan Doyle’s later Sherlock Holmes stories, which were still under copyright at the time (all Holmes stories entered the public domain in the US in 2023).
The Estate argued that filmmakers could not use aspects of the detective’s personality that emerged in those final stories without a licence. Klinger was consulted on the case, as he had been for the 2015 Ian McKellen–starring Mr. Holmes, which the Estate had also tried to block.
But even that wasn’t the first time Klinger had tangled with the licence-holders. In 2014, when a collection of short stories he had edited was due to be published, he was forced to take the matter to the US courts, arguing for the right to use characters and story elements from the Holmes canon in unlicensed works. He won, and the case – Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd. – is not only now taught in law schools, but also helped shape how later creators have adapted Conan Doyle’s characters.
It’s one of many ways Klinger has influenced how Holmes is interpreted today. When American broadcaster PBS aired the BBC’s Sherlock – starring Benedict Cumberbatch – in 2010, Klinger was given early access to the episodes and asked to tweet titbits and explanations of references as the series went out. “Essentially live footnoting, I called them ‘tweetnotes’,” he says.
Around that time, he also consulted on Elementary, the CBS adaptation starring Jonny Lee Miller. “I was friends with the showrunner and the writers,” says Klinger. “They had some of my books in the writers’ room and would often email me with questions like, ‘What would Holmes do in this situation?’ or ‘Is anything like this mentioned in the stories?’”
This collaboration advanced when Elementary producer Craig Sweeny went on to create Watson – a medical mystery drama that reimagined Dr Watson as a House-style diagnostic specialist. Klinger was brought in to review every single script. “Because it was a contemporary story, it wasn’t so much about historical inaccuracies this time, but more about what Easter eggs we could bring in,” he explains. “Could we use names of characters, especially doctors, or bring in dialogue from the original stories?”
His favourite task was deciding what objects should sit on the shelves in Watson’s office. “He believes Holmes to have died at the start of the series, so I was looking for things that would remind him of his friend. There are the obvious ones, such as a magnifying glass and a pipe, but also less obvious ones, like a coin Irene Adler gave Holmes, or a cigarette case mentioned in the stories. And then things that are only vaguely referenced in the original stories – globes, statues, pictures.”
And this is the fun, Klinger says, of having so many stories – 60, by Conan Doyle – to draw on and reference. There’s plenty of material to help keep the spirit of Sherlock intact, whether for a feature film, a network television series or a manga comic series in Japan. And Klinger enjoys seeing the sleuth reinterpreted across different time periods and settings, so long as he remains true to the character.
“I think of Holmes as an ‘attainable superhero’,” says Klinger. “You don’t need to be bitten by a radioactive spider or exposed to a red sun to be him. If you work hard enough, you could learn to be like Sherlock Holmes. That idea has a real appeal – someone you can actually aspire to emulate. He’s not law enforcement; he stands for justice. And he wants to see that justice is done. That’s timeless.”
Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes – The Complete Short Stories volume 1 and volume 2, and The Novels are available now.
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