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Sherlock Holmes was due a cinematic makeover. Conan Doyle's stories reign supreme but their screen versions have been struggling to throw off a bourgeois tweediness that harks back to Basil Rathbone's portrayal of the detective in the late 1930s.
So there is room for Guy Ritchie's energetic new rendition, which opens on Boxing Day. With an eye to a Hollywood franchise, it is more generic action film than detective story. But, with its rock 'n' roll Victoriana aesthetic, it should win new enthusiasts.
The point about Holmes is that he allows for different interpretations. If you are exercised by Robert Downey Jr in the title role wearing a bowler hat, consider that the accepted Sherlockian accroutrements — the deerstalker, cape and even curved Meerschaum pipe — are not in Conan Doyle's original tales, the first two being the inventions of the illustrator, Sidney Paget, and the last of William Gillette, the American actor who did so much to popularise Sherlock Holmes in the early days.
Changes can still be rung because Holmes is such a strong character — ambivalent, Protean even, yet also immutable.
He is both a mythic figure committed to righting universal wrongs and a credible late Victorian living and working in the real world. At the same time, he is a figure of authority, made human by a flawed and contradictory personality, with his moodiness, foibles and penchant for cocaine.
His friend Dr Watson describes him as a “calculating machine”. But in A Study in Scarlet, he is introduced as an “expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman” — the focus of Ritchie's attentions.
Holmes really does appear to straddle two worlds. I once heard a boy in the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Baker Street asking his father, “Dad, when did Sherlock Holmes die?” It reminds me of the old story that when, in late 1893, Conan Doyle tried to kill off his creation, clerks in the city of London wore black armbands in mourning. I don't believe it. No one has ever found a contemporary account, let alone a photograph. But it is one of those fictions that tells a greater truth. He is genuinely fantastic — seemingly alive, but not actually so.
Something of his accessibility comes from his tales being rooted in turn-of-the-century London, from Hampstead Heath to opium dens “in the farthest east of the city” via clubland, Whitehall and of course Baker Street.
A seasonal example is The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, a Christmas tale of a stolen gem hidden in a goose. When the thief is apprehended — after a typical canter through the London A‑Z — Holmes, in festive spirit, decides not to hand him over to the police. “Send him to jail now,” he says, with the zeal of a Howard League reformer, “and you make him a jailbird for life.
Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward.”
There you have it. Holmes often acts like a true superhero, putting himself above man-made law as he distributes his own brand of natural justice. He also leads readers through the intricacies of more mundane problem-solving. It remains a winning formula — the essence of the British detective story.
Andrew Lycett's Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes is published by Phoenix.
Reader views (1)
There's been an upsurge of interest in the Conan Doyle Sherlock Homes stories in the past year. Book re-prints in so many countries, audios, computer games...the list is endless. All generated by Guy Ritchie's film. Like there are numerous Gilbert and Sullivan operatic societies all across Britain and America, so there are worldwide Holmes societies. With interest in the film, even before release, comes a whole new generation discovering the world of Holmes and Doyle's stories. Fair exchange for any poetic licence the film may take with the Holmes and Watson characters and whizz-bang pacey action.
- Cory Temple, London, 23/12/2009 15:53
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