Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated British writer and creator of the iconic detective Sherlock Holmes, will be the central character of a new India-UK co-production feature film, titled ‘Elementary My Dear Holmes’.

The film, which was announced at a special event at the historic Guildhall in London on Monday (Oct. 27), will be directed by National Award-winning filmmaker Srijit Mukherji and produced by Shahnaab Alam, a PTI report from London stated yesterday.

Mukherji, known for acclaimed Bengali titles such as ‘Autograph’, ‘Jaatishwar’ and ‘Gumnaami’, said the film will explore the life and legacy of Conan Doyle, delving into the intersections between his reality and the fictional world he created.

The plot will centre on Doyle’s struggles in personal and public life and also focus on his process of creating his iconic detective, Sherlock Holmes. The story will be set in London of 1906, a time when Doyle was fighting woes on several fronts. On one hand, his wife was on the deathbed, and keen that he marry again. Doyle was, meanwhile, involved with several cases — notably George Edalji, a man of Indian descent who had been wrongfully sentenced.

Meanwhile, a report in Variety added that the joint production is being produced under the UK-India Co-Production Treaty, jointly administered by the British Film Institute (BFI) and India’s National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).

It marks a collaboration between London-based Invisible Thread Media, led by producer Shahnaab Alam, and Mukherji’s Matchcut Productions in India. The Conan Doyle Estate has also joined the project as an associate producer, lending official backing to the story.

“I first met Sherlock Holmes as a boy — not in Baker Street, but in the quiet between pages,” Variety quoted Mukherji as saying, “‘Elementary, My Dear Holmes’ imagines Doyle stepping into his own fiction — a man haunted by the clarity he created, forced to apply it to a world far messier than the one on paper.”

(The Conan Doyle sketch is courtesy X account of The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre)