Elementary, my dear watcher
Warning: If you haven’t yet watched Sherlock, or don’t know who Sherlock Holmes is, go away. Plenty of spoilers below, and if the latter is true, you really need to read a Holmes novel. To be honest, I don’t care for your readership until you do.
Like many other UK residents, I have just watched the first episode of Sherlock, the new BBC adaptation of the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle character, Sherlock Holmes. One of the best TV scripts I have seen in a long time, for me this rivals the recent Doctor Who series, an appropriate comparison since Stephen Moffat was the show runner and lead writer on that, too.
Sherlock Holmes stories are fundamentally British. A London-based detective, Holmes was an eccentric genius solving only the most bewildering of crimes, addicted to both criminology and opiates. A Victorian gentleman, the literary Holmes first appeared in 1887, in A Study in Scarlet. Holmes went on to appear in 56 stories by Conan Doyle, along with numerous derivations.
The new series is composed of three 90-minute episodes, to be broadcast every Sunday evening, An hour-long pilot was also apparently commissioned, and later scrapped. It shows great promise, with good performances by both Benedict Cummerbatch in the title role, and Martin Freeman as Doctor John Watson. Allusions have been made to other elements of Holmes’ lore, including housekeeper Mrs Hudson, Inspector Le Strange, and arch-enemy Moriarty, at whose feet we can safely presume the mini-series ends.
Those, like me, considering re-reading the Holmes stories can be encouraged by UK Law. As it stands, more than 80% of Holmes literature is now copyright free, and so should be available at much lower price than contemporary fiction. If you are not inclined to read the novels, but would still like to enjoy the original Holmes canon, consider the screen adaptations. Besides Dracula, Holmes is the most portrayed screen character, with the Guinness Book of Records listing him as “the most portrayed movie character”, with 75 actors over at least 211 films. My personal favourites are Basil Rathbone’s performances during the 1940s, though the recent Robert Downey Junior portrayal was far more impressive than expected.
To summarise, Holmes is and always has been an enduring literary character beloved by people from Winston Churchill to Stephen Fry, and echoed in screen characters all the to Gregory House, M.D., in whose diagnostic deductions we can see a perfect parallel.