Arthur Conan Doyle created his famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, in 1887. Six years later, in 1893, Doyle was tired of him, felt that the detective stories were interfering with more serious work, and decided to kill off the character. In the process, he almost killed Strand Magazine, the periodical that published the story.

When “The Final Problem” appeared in the Strand, it was met with such dismay — outrage, even — that there were mass cancellations. Subscriptions sank to such a low that the magazine almost didn’t survive.

In the story, readers don’t actually see Holmes killed. Holmes and Professor Moriarty fight at the top of Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Doctor Watson, who had been lured away before the confrontation, returns to the spot, see signs that there has been a struggle, and surmises that both Holmes and Moriarty have fallen to their deaths.

And that was supposed to be that. However, Doyle found himself in need of cash and decided to write a stage play about Sherlock Holmes, set earlier in the detective’s career.

He wrote the play, but Charles Frohman, a theater manager and producer, said it needed a lot of work. He suggested that an actor and playwright named William Gillette be offered the task of rewriting it. Doyle agreed.

Gillette read the entire canon of Holmes novels and stories, then, with Doyle’s blessing, pieced together plot details from a number of them and adapted Doyle’s manuscript into a four-act play.

All that work, however, was lost when a hotel fire burned up Doyle’s original manuscript and Gillette’s rewrite. Doyle was devastated, but Gillette, using notes, managed to recreate the adaptation in a month.

When the work was produced, Gillette, himself, played the part of the sleuth.

Today, William Gillette is not well known, but much of how Holmes is imagined is thanks to Gillette’s stage portrayal of him.

It was Gillette who, on stage, wore a dear-stalker cap. It was Gillette who smoked, not a straight-stemmed pipe, but a curve-stemmed one. And it was Gillette, not Doyle, who penned the line, “Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow,” which in films was changed to “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

Stage plays were ephemeral. Once a play closed, all that was left is what critics wrote about it.

These days, there are screen adaptations of plays, so if you don’t see one performed live, you can see a film version. Too bad this technology didn’t exist in Gillette’s day so we could watch him on stage as Holmes.

But, wait. It did. And we can.

In 1916, Gillette made a silent movie based on the play. For almost a hundred years, the film was thought to be lost. But in October of 2014, a perfectly preserved copy was discovered at the Cinematheque Francaise, a film archive in Paris.

The complete film can be watched at archive.org. You may not have the endurance to sit through all one hour and fifty-six minutes of it, but it’s worth taking a look to see Gillette as Holmes.