...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

I took to the Bodleian Library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms, to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head.

I slept in the bedroom used by Sabine Baring-Goulds wife when I was researching The Moor, and later the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.

In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points.