A new television drama about Sherlock Holmes starring some of Scotland's top acting talent will suggest the fictional detective was based on author Arthur Conan Doyle's alcoholic father.
The similarities between Holmes and Charles Doyle were never acknowledged by the author, who enjoyed fame and fortune while his father was secretly shut away in a mental institution.
The drama's producer, Richard Downes, believes Charles Doyle's death in 1893 may have caused Conan Doyle to suffer a nervous breakdown and kill off his father's literary alter ego - only to resurrect him eight years later after sorting out his own personal demons.
Downes links the detective's darker side - he suffered sudden mood swings and indulged a taste for cocaine - with some of Charles Doyle's personality traits.
The film, The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes And Arthur Conan Doyle, was originally intended as a documentary. Filming will start in Scotland in the new year.
Brian Cox, the Dundonian who has become one of Hollywood's top character actors since his performances in Troy, The Ring and the Bourne thrillers, is foregoing his usual fee to play Conan Doyle's mentor, the surgeon Joseph Bell.
Emily Blunt, who made her film debut in the acclaimed My Summer of Love, will play Jean Leckie, the younger woman who became Conan Doyle's second wife, though he was having some form of relationship with her long before the death of his first wife.
Conan Doyle will be played by Douglas Henshall, the director is Emmy award-winner Cilla Ware, and the writer, David Pirie, previously created the Murder Rooms novels and television dramas, which fictionalised the relationship between Conan Doyle and Bell, turning them into a Victorian Starsky And Hutch.
Conan Doyle studied medicine with Bell who, from careful observation, could work out not only patients' illnesses, but also their habits, occupations, where they lived and even their nationality. Conan Doyle admitted he drew on Bell's methods for Holmes. "Joseph Bell gave us half of Sherlock Holmes, but there's a lot more," said Downes.
The drama takes as its starting point the deaths, in quick succession, of Charles Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, when the detective appeared to perish at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. "Our story is asking, why does he kill Sherlock Holmes and why does he bring him back?" Downes told the Sunday Herald.
"It's really looking at how Sherlock Holmes came to be. Our story is Doyle revisiting different moments in his past to put that jigsaw together. It's looking back to his childhood and his father, and the role of his mother and a lodger, Bryan Charles Waller."
Charles Doyle was a minor civil servant, though he also had an artistic side. He was emotionally unstable, lost his job, drank heavily and progressed from nursing home to asylum. In his memoirs Conan Doyle hardly mentions his father. Downes said his institutionalisation was the "family secret" and believes there may have been murky motives involved.
"You can't get away from the fact that Mary Doyle went to live with Bryan Charles Waller on his estate in Yorkshire for 15 years, albeit not in the same house, but he basically prevented the Doyles going into the workhouse," said Downes.
"Waller effectively took over the household and introduced Arthur Conan Doyle to medicine, and it was really through him that he met Joseph Bell.
"They buried the father - he was hardly ever visited by the family and was effectively left to rot With a bit of TLC he didn't need to end up in the asylum. Really he became the 'lunatic' because he was neglected by the family."
As well as coping with a dying father, Conan Doyle had a wife who had tuberculosis and an awkward relationship with Jean Leckie. "This is a moment of turmoil in his life," said Downes. "Our story is really Arthur Conan Doyle investigating his own nervous breakdown." He also delves deeper into Conan Doyle's creation of Holmes.
"Sherlock Holmes is a mixture of the detective we are familiar with, the man who could go into a room and observe and deduce various things about a situation or a character, but then there's the other side of Holmes, which really has not been gone into, which is very much the father."
Charles Doyle painted; Holmes played violin. Doyle was alcoholic; Holmes was a coke fiend.
In 1900 Conan Doyle turned his back on London society to go off to the Boer war. The following year he resurrected Holmes for his greatest adventure, The Hound Of The Baskervilles. "What we are saying is he brought Sherlock Holmes back because he had come to terms with the creation," said Downes.
Catherine Cooke, a Sherlock Holmes scholar and prominent member of the Conan Doyle Society, described the idea that Conan Doyle drew inspiration from his father as "very interesting", but dismissed a nervous breakdown as "fiction" and defended the family's treatment of Charles Doyle as consistent with the times.
Grace Riley, curator of the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Baker Street, London, also accepted Charles Doyle may have been an inspiration. She saw no sign in Conan Doyle's memoirs that he felt any guilt over his father but she added: " He should have done".
The Sunday Herald Nov 28, 2004 by Brian Pendreigh