Mark Gatiss Returns to Arthur Conan Doyle for the Holidays

It’s been about seven years since Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat hung up their pens on the modernized Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. The series, which had about as many dedicated, passionate fans as it did detractors by the time it was over, ended in 2017. Though there have been hints of a return, all four of the aforementioned have been so booked and busy that it seems highly unlikely the series will ever be revived. However, at least one would inevitably find their way back to Arthur Conan Doyle’s works in some fashion, and the first to break will be Gatiss, who is adapting one of the writer’s non-Sherlock stories for Christmas.

Deadline reveals that Gatiss, who has been doing a Christmas ghost short story film a year every season for BBC 2 since 2018, after Sherlock ended, selected Conan Doyle’s Lot No 249 as this year's adaptation. Gatiss’ initial BBC Christmas special came in 2013 (the year Sherlock was on hiatus), with M.R. James’ The Tractate Middoth in 2013 (starring a young Sacha Dhawan). Since resuming the tradition in 2018, he’s adapted other M.R. James stories like Martin’s Close (starring Peter Capaldi), The Mezzotint (starring Rory Kinnear), and Count Magnus (starring Jason Watkins) and written The Dead Room (starring Simon Callow).

Lot No. 249 will star two prominent names familiar to American audiences, with Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington playing opposite Slow Horses’ Freddie Fox. “It’s a serious delight for me to delve once again into the brilliant work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this time for the Christmas Ghost story,” said Gatiss in the press release. “Lot No.249 is a personal favorite and is the grand-daddy — or should that be Mummy? — of a kind of end-of-empire chiller: a ripping yarn packed with ghastly scares and who-knows-what lurking in the Victorian closet.”