Rafe Spall's amnesiac Sherlock Holmes fills a three-year gap that took Conan Doyle ten years to close

Rafe Spall is playing a Sherlock Holmes who does not know he is Sherlock Holmes. In The Death of Sherlock Holmes, a Sky series he promoted at MIPCOM in Cannes this week, the detective is found barely alive in an icy mountain stream after Reichenbach, with no memory of who he is.

The series is set in the gap between Holmes's apparent death in 1891 and his return in "The Adventure of the Empty House". Spall told Deadline that Conan Doyle brought him back "three years later". In the stories, that is right. For the readers, it took ten.

Three years in the story, ten on the newsstand

Spall's account in the interview: Conan Doyle "got sick of writing Sherlock Holmes", killed him off with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, "then, I think, he missed the money, so three years later he brought him back."

The dates, according to Wikipedia:

• Set in 1891: "The Final Problem". The memorial plaque at the falls dates Holmes's victory over Moriarty to 4 May 1891.
• Published December 1893: the same story, in The Strand Magazine in Britain and McClure's in the US.
• Set three years after the fall: Holmes's return in "The Empty House".
• Published September and October 1903: "The Empty House", first in Collier's in the US on 26 September 1903, then in The Strand in October.

Readers spent almost a decade believing Holmes was dead. Wikipedia credits public pressure, not money, with bringing him back. The Strand "barely survived" the rush of subscription cancellations after his death, and there were stories of young men in London wearing black mourning crepe for a month, though those may have been exaggerated by Conan Doyle's son.

The first attempt, according to Spall

Spall also called the series "the first attempt I can think of to fill in the gap of what happened". It is not the first.

In 1999, the Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu published The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, released in the US as Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years. It follows Holmes in India and Tibet during exactly that period, where he poses as a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson.

What the new series does differently is take the memory away. Spall's Holmes does not spend the missing years travelling the world in disguise. He spends them in a Swiss village, not knowing his own name.

A clean slate

That, Spall says, is what freed him from the long line of Holmes actors before him: Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, Robert Downey Jr. "What makes it original is the fact that he's someone who has no idea who he is," he said. "He gets these flashes of brilliant deduction that lead him toward understanding what kind of person he is, and eventually perhaps figuring out that he's the most famous detective in the world."

He said he would have been much more frightened if the series had adapted one of the Conan Doyle novels, "which is what Steven Moffat adapted". Moffat co-created the BBC's Sherlock with Mark Gatiss, the version with Cumberbatch. He is also the writer of Spall's other new drama, Channel 4's Number 10, in which Spall plays a fictional prime minister. Spall says Moffat writes ten-page scenes, and that every comma must be observed.

The story and the production

• The plot: the stranger is found by a local woman, Alma (Deleila Piasko), and her young son, Franz. When the village doctor is murdered, the villagers turn on the boy, and the amnesiac Englishman, with flashbacks to a former life in England, becomes his only hope.
• Alma: Piasko describes her as a single mother treated with contempt in a small village. "What's very special is that this Englishman doesn't judge her," she said.
• Locations: the Swiss Alps, the Italian Alps and Regensburg in Bavaria.
• Co-producers: Sky, Switzerland's SRF, Germany's ARD Degeto and Bell Media-owned Sphere Abacus, with support from FFF Bayern and Italy's IDM Film Commission.
• Broadcast: Sky in the UK and Ireland, and Sky in Switzerland and Germany. IMDb lists the series as a 2027 title.

The other famous Holmes return

The BBC's Sherlock dealt with the same story in its own way. Its second series ended with "The Reichenbach Fall", inspired by "The Final Problem", and the resolution of Sherlock's faked suicide from the roof of St Bartholomew's Hospital became the subject of speculation in newspapers and on social media. That show ran thirteen episodes from 2010 to 2017.

The new series is set entirely inside that kind of gap: after the fall, before anyone knows the detective survived, including the detective.

A Weasley, with a family history

Spall is also playing Arthur Weasley in HBO's Harry Potter series. He pointed out the family coincidence himself. "It's funny that my dad played Ron's rat and now I'm playing Arthur Weasley," he said, referring to his father, Timothy Spall, in the films. He saw the rat on set and took a photograph next to it, and would have posted it, he said, if he were on social media.

What is still unknown

• A premiere date on Sky.
• Distribution outside Sky's territories, including Australia.
• The episode count.
• A second season. "If people like it, we'll do more of it," Spall said. "There are more stories to tell."

Conan Doyle needed three years of story time to bring Holmes back and ten years of real time to write it. The new series has an amnesiac Holmes spend those years in a single village, working out who he is.