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SLP 'Telephone' Maps and Graphics Game 3

The first two times we did it, I was right at the beginning and the wait was to see what over people did with my graphic, now I'm at the end and the wait is to get my graphic. I'm no more patient this way around.
 
Okay, I'll start us off then. Real simple:

NL3iIHR.png


Pretty straight-forward concept here: Sherlock Holmes did not come back, 1893 was the last we heard of him. You can see where this leaves us in terms of the canon here, and that's a lot of it shorn right off. Most importantly to the image, that deprives us of "The Bruce-Partington Plans", the story where Mycroft Holmes was established as the big brain behind the British Empire and not just a government auditor, and thus he earns himself a red link and vanishes from entire mountains of future pastiche and fantasy/alternate history. My general intention was to suggest Arthur Conan Doyle simply did not live long enough to bring the character back (indicated by his appearance here without his knighthood), but there's plenty of room for alternative interpretations: I was this close to re-headlining the box 'Professor Challenger Expanded Literary Universe Character' and think you're probably grateful I didn't. Ultimately, Holmes might have thus been a more austere and obscure literary character, 'one of' the great literary detectives instead of 'the.'

And so from there onto @Makemakean !
 
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Yeah, this one was tricky and took me a while. Basically, all I had to go on was “The Final Problem is the last Sherlock Holmes story that Arthur Conan Doyle publishes”.

Okay…?

“What the Hell am I supposed to do with that?” was more or less my initial reaction.

Arthur Conan Doyle never returning to Holmes didn’t strike me as having any clear consequences that would be possible to make into a graphic of any kind. There was certainly no clear way to my mind as to how I could have this mean that, I dunno, Rosebery wins his election against Salisbury, or Britain getting involved in the Russo-Japanese War or anything like that.

So then I started going, “Well, instead of looking at consequences, how about looking at causes?”

And that didn’t really help me much either. After all, there would be an obvious cause to The Final Problem being the last Sherlock Holmes story: Doyle intended it to be the last one, and so, the obvious cause is that he doesn’t bow to public pressure.

Eventually, I just went, “I dunno! Maybe the reason Arthur Conan Doyle never writes more Sherlock Holmes is because he is arrested and executed for being Jack the Ripper by an incompetent Metropolitan Police!”

And that seemed fun enough to work, so I went with that.

1xWtFqu.png

And then I sent it of to @kratostatic...
 
I also struggled with this one, not because what I was given wasn't interesting, but because I didn't know where to take it next. I struggled between an idea that would basically just be a repeat of what I understood @Makemakean to have given me - that Conan Doyle was Jack the Ripper. But I also wanted to try and explore what the consequences of that would be in a more global sense. What I couldn't work out was how to do both at the same time:

But then it came to me:

SLP Telephone game 3.png

I invented a film!

First of all apologies to any German speakers - I did check a couple of machine translations in both directions but in my experience German->English is temperamental so it's entirely possible the other way around has created a howler. What the tagline is meant to say is : The shocking tale of a murderer! ...and his creation!

My logic for this:

Doyle's misdeeds are an international scandal, and London high society and British prestige in general is dealt a heavy blow as the horror comes to light of what one of their number did. As such the European cultural centre of gravity shifts away from London and towards the continent. This accelerates after the First World War, in which the US never intervenes and so the UK is in even worse straights while Germany is relatively better off (although I don't know if the Germany at the point that this film is made is a Kaiserreich or an alt-Weimar republic). This means that there the OTL trend of German cinema being dominant and of British and American actors working in Germany is stronger so even Hitchcock decides to work for that market.

Hence Alfred Hitchcock's Jack the Ripper (released in both German and eventually English language versions). In this film known "Heavy" Rathbone plays well within type as the cruel killer A.C Doyle aka Jack the Ripper (the original source picture I took Rathbone's image on the right from is from him as Dracula), but in a surrealist twist also plays the benevolent detective Sherlock Holmes, the increasingly physical manifestation of Doyle's guilt and conscience. Rounding out the cast are Conrad Veidt as the out of his depth Detective Abberline; Hedy Keisler as Frances Coles, the Ripper's next intended victim; and László Löwenstein (better known OTL as Peter Lorre) as George Chapman, the prime suspect in the ripper case.

Plausible? Eh. But I thought it was fun and opens up a bunch of possibilities to whoever came after me.

Which turned out to be @Caprice .
 
I struggled between an idea that would basically just be a repeat of what I understood @Makemakean to have given me - that Conan Doyle was Jack the Ripper.

Wasn't precisely what I had in mind, though of course, I recognized that it could be interpreted as such, and decided to leave that option open.

I would be surprised if Arthur Conan Doyle hasn't already at some point come up as the favourite suspect on some crackpot's list of who Jack the Ripper was (I mean, Queen Victoria has been fingered out as the suspect by some crackpots, and I don't mean, "She ordered the murders to be carried out", but that Queen Victoria personally donned a disguise, snuck out of Buckingham Palace in the middle of the night, went over to Whitechapel and engaged in a little serial killing on the side), and when I looked at his background--member of the Victorian upper class, trained as a medical doctor (apparently, he was very well-versed in particular when it came to sexually transmitted diseases), wrote detective fiction--it just struck me as, "Oh, you can definitely come up with a crazy theory that he was the one behind the killings!"

So, in my mind, Arthur Conan Doyle is in fact not the Ripper, it's just that the London Metropolitan Police decides to go with that theory, have him arrested, there's a highly publicized trial, in the public's mind, everyone's already convinced that Doyle is the killer, the London Met is very keen to have him convicted because this mystery has already been going on for years, they have been embarrassed and look foolish for not having been able to catch the guy, so they manufacture evidence, call in expert witnesses who perjure themselves, and so, well, poor Arthur Conan Doyle is found guilty, and hanged for the murders (even though he is innocent), and for the next hundred years or so, it is well known that "Doyle was the Ripper", and it is only in recent years that scholars and researchers look back at the investigation and start going "Wait. Hang on!"

I invented a film!

First of all apologies to any German speakers - I did check a couple of machine translations in both directions but in my experience German->English is temperamental so it's entirely possible the other way around has created a howler. What the tagline is meant to say is : The shocking tale of a murderer! ...and his creation!

My logic for this:

Doyle's misdeeds are an international scandal, and London high society and British prestige in general is dealt a heavy blow as the horror comes to light of what one of their number did. As such the European cultural centre of gravity shifts away from London and towards the continent. This accelerates after the First World War, in which the US never intervenes and so the UK is in even worse straights while Germany is relatively better off (although I don't know if the Germany at the point that this film is made is a Kaiserreich or an alt-Weimar republic). This means that there the OTL trend of German cinema being dominant and of British and American actors working in Germany is stronger so even Hitchcock decides to work for that market.

Hence Alfred Hitchcock's Jack the Ripper (released in both German and eventually English language versions). In this film known "Heavy" Rathbone plays well within type as the cruel killer A.C Doyle aka Jack the Ripper (the original source picture I took Rathbone's image on the right from is from him as Dracula), but in a surrealist twist also plays the benevolent detective Sherlock Holmes, the increasingly physical manifestation of Doyle's guilt and conscience. Rounding out the cast are Conrad Veidt as the out of his depth Detective Abberline; Hedy Keisler as Frances Coles, the Ripper's next intended victim; and László Löwenstein (better known OTL as Peter Lorre) as George Chapman, the prime suspect in the ripper case.

Plausible? Eh. But I thought it was fun and opens up a bunch of possibilities to whoever came after me.

This is just inspired! I kind of really want to see this movie!
 
Wasn't precisely what I had in mind, though of course, I recognized that it could be interpreted as such, and decided to leave that option open

I'll admit that it didn't occur to me that this wasn't the case in universe, just because I fully assumed that this was one of the conspiracy theories for the exact same reasons as you did.

Of course even if he was falsely accused this doesn't actually contradict my version either - when the film was made everyone would have believed it was him.

And thanks!
 
In this film known "Heavy" Rathbone

"Oh, God!"

"What?"

"It's Basil Rathbone!"

"So...?"

"You've never met him? You've never spoken with him?"

"No...? Should I be concerned?"

"Hello guys! Let me tell you about why Winston Churchill and the Tories are definitely going to win the first election once this war is over in a massive landslide and why Labour is once again going to be reduced to third party status!"
 
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