I was just listening to an audiobook of The Return of Sherlock Holmes and was struck by the fact that one of his “pupils” – a London detective who admires Holmes and who asks his help – is named Stanley Hopkins. He has the same initials as Holmes. This brought to mind other Holmes imitators who also share his initials – Sheridan Haynes (The Holmes-portraying actor In Julian Symon’s A Three Pipe Problem and The Kentish Manor Murders), Edward Hoch’s detective Sam Hawthorne and Sherman Holmes in the TV movie The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective and Sherlock Hemolck on Sesame Street. Peter Todd (Charles Hamilton) reversed the initials for “Herlock Sholmes”, a name also used in a manga.
Similarly, as the Kingsman movie pointed out, there are several characters who are spies or something similar with James Bond’;s initials – Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne. Beyond that there’s Jacques Bouvoir, the French agent whose ostensible funeral Bond attends in the opening teaser of Thunderball 9I’m sure that was in there just for the shock value of opening with a coffin with “JB” on it), CIA agent Jack Bristow from the TV show Alias, Desmond Skirrow’s British spy John Brock, Jane Marshall’s YA spy Jane Blonde (an obvious James Bond parody name), whose real name is Janey Brown and whose mother, Jean Brown, was also a spy
Most of these seem to be deliberate, or at least were embraced when the coincidence was realized.
In the first season of Babylon 5, the station commander was Jeffrey Sinclair.
The actor had to leave for medical reasons, and the character was replaced by John Sheridan.
In the fourth season the “J.S.” character “died” and was “resurrected”, at which point fans realized that he shared the first initial with a certain rabbi from Galilee.
Fans of Mass Effect have pointed out the same thing about the main character John Shepherd, with the addition of the fact that Jesus could be considered a shepherd of men.
Not quite what the OP wanted, but I thought that fact that the obviously Moriarity inspired character from Cats is named Macavity was neat.
Paul Auster’s City of Glass is a Don Quixote-esque detective novel about an detective novelist named Daniel Quinn. He’s hired to track a man named Peter Stillman, whose initials are the inverse of Sancho Panza’s.
It is. I noticed, when I first saw Cats in the theater, that the description of him is cribbed from Doyle’s description of Moriarty.
T.S. Eliot had a thing for Holmes. In his verse play Murder in the Cathedral he snuck in two lines that he stole from the Sherlock Holmes story The Musgrave Ritual.
Sherlock Holmes had a twin brother called Sheerluck Holmes following the same career path with vastly different methods to reach the same outcome. At least he did in some satirical book of which the title I can’t remember.
In Gene Wilder’s film The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, the titular brother, Sigerson Holmes, also calls Sherlock “Sheer Luck Holmes”.
Sigerson Holmes, of course, is yet another “SH” Holmes analogue. Wilder (who was pretty hip to literary sources – have a close look at his script for Young Frankenstein) clearly got the name “Sigerson” from the alias Holmes said that he had used during his years away from London in The Adventure of the Empty House
Several pastiches don’t use the initial, but rely upon some assonance between the name they use and “Sherlock Holmes”. This August Derleth’s “Solar Pons”, or Poul Anderson’s Martian detective Syaloch in The Martian Crown Jewels.
An early draft of the Holmes stories used Sherringford as the first name - and there are books that use that name as a reference (such as Marvin Kaye’s “The Incredible Umbrella”)
That’s one reason Symons named his hero Sherringford Haynes.
Holmes, in The Adventure of Black Peter, said that he used the alias “Basil” when posing as a sea captain. This, rather than because of Basil Rathbone famously playing the detective, might be the reason that Eve Titus called her detective Basil of Baker Street in her novels (and Disney did when they adapted the stories as The Great Mouse Detective)
Stir Crazy was fun, and one of the few movies with Erland van Lidthe de Jeude (who I went to college with, and was in a couple of plays with). He played Grossberger, and if you look close, you can see he’s wearing his “Brass Rat” class ring. That’s not him singing, though. There was some union rule preventing this. That voice is definitely not his distinctive singing voice. You can hear him singing in his last movie, The Running Man 9where he plays “Dynamo”), but you have to listen around the explosions.
Just the first initial, which happens to be an incredibly common first initial in English names? That’s pretty weak. More significant is that the series’ creator is also “JS”.
