Sherlock Holmes pastiches old man,' solving the case of the missing parrot belonging to a nine-year-old Jewish refugee boy from Germany. While readily solving the mystery, 'the old man,' as well as the rest of the characters in the novella, fail to see what the parrot's incessant muttering of random German numbers really means. Caleb Carr was approached to pen a tale for the anthology "Ghosts of Baker Street". Carr's short story grew to become a full length novel which became 2005's "The Italian Secretary". An example of Sherlock Holmes pastiche is found in "The Curse of the Nibelung: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery"
Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes The great majority of them are however pastiches. The only known adaptation of a canonical story is "Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles", which follows a different plot involving clearly supernatural elements. Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes The stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were very popular as adaptations for the stage, and later film, and still later television. The four-volumes of the "Universal Sherlock Holmes" (1995) compiled by Ronald B. De Waal lists over 25,000 Holmes-related productions and products. They include the original writings, "together with the translations of these tales into sixty-three languages, plus