The people’s Sherlock

RETURNING home from the front, a convalescent army doctor is looking for comfortable lodgings in central London. From the flats he has visited the ones he likes are beyond his means and those falling into his price range are at best, well, tawdry. 

He decides the best way out would be to rent a nice place and share the expenses with someone not too noisy. He discusses the problem with a friend named Stramford who expresses his surprise that only the same morning another fellow had evoked the same predicament before him. The two men are quickly introduced to each other by Stramford. 

“Dr John Watson, Mr Sherlock Holmes!” “How are you? You’ve been in Afghanistan, I perceive?” Holmes already has his eye on a flat and takes Watson for a visit. In a couple of days the two men transfer their belongings to 221b Baker Street. But Dr Watson is still puzzled over the Afghanistan remark. Of course he saw action in ‘Candahar’ and Maiwand; wounded, he was treated at the military hospital in Peshawar and was soon after released from the army and allowed to return home. But how did Holmes know about this? Dr Watson’s new friend says it would take him a lot longer to explain than the fraction of a second it took him to reach a logical deduction. A doctor with a military bearing, deeply tanned and nursing a wounded arm, where could he be coming from? The only sunny corner of the earth where the British forces are involved in action at the moment is Afghanistan. Elementary, my dear! Thus began, with A Study in Scarlet (1887) a partnership that would never cease to enthrall generation after generation of readers and moviegoers through a century and a quarter. The talented twosome would go through three more full-length ad ventures, The Sign of Four, The Valley of Fear and The Hound of the Baskervilles and through nearly five dozen short stories.

Arthur Conan Doyle was 27 when the first Sherlock Holmes adventure was published and his father drew the sketches in the book. The detective is described by Watson as a man over six feet tall, thin, with an aquiline nose and a jutting jaw. This figure was perfected by the artist Sidney Paget who also gave Holmes his now indissociable deerstalker hat in the 56 short stories that were published for 24 years by London’s Strand magazine. The meerschaum pipe and the characteristic tweed cloak would come later following a stage production. 

When it was decided to make the first Sherlock Holmes movie, the choice naturally fell on Basil Rathbone, an English actor with a deep voice and an aristocratic bearing who fit to a T Watson’s description. Watson himself was admirably played by Nigel Bruce and the team went through 14 cinematographic adventures between 1939 and 1946. 

Since then there have been more than 200 film and TV versions and accomplished actors like John Barrymore, Stewart Granger and Charlton Heston have played Holmes; but the only respectable successor to Basil Rathbone has been Peter Cushing who was in the first Holmes movie in colour, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1958), followed by 16 BBC television episodes. 

There have been some marvellous derivative film adaptations too of the Holmes-Watson characters not based on Doyle’s writings; foremost among them are Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) in which the detective gets involved in a Loch Ness monster mystery, Herbert Ross’ The Seven Per Cent Solution (1976) that takes a cocaine-devastated Holmes to the couch of Dr Sigmund Freud in Vienna, and Barry Levinson’s The Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) with two adolescent room-mates, Holmes and Watson of course, in an English boarding school putting their resources together to unravel a satanic cult murder plot. 

So much for pleasant memories for those who have loved to read the Sherlock Holmes adventures and always enjoyed the movies. Now the ex-husband of Madonna, a guy named Guy Ritchie, has chosen for his Sherlock Holmes an actor who was considered fit enough to play the lead in Richard Attenborough’s marvellous film Chaplin (1992). 

Robert Downey Jr still looks fairly Chaplinesque in Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes that has just been released and already is a major box-office hit. Gone are the deerstalker and the high forehead of a Rathbone or the deep, intellectual concentration of a Cushing. Our new Holmes sports a Charlie Chaplin hat, unruly hair and a four-day stubble, is often seen stripped to the waist, fists high in the air and ready to knock the daylights out of his adversaries. 

Gone also are the truly Holmesian logical deductions, the ratiocination and the violin playing. Ritchie apparently doesn’t much care about an aristocratic Holmes and has turned him into a street-brawler of the Victorian London. The pop Holmes prefers to strum his violin, guitar fashion, not producing any Mendelssohn melodies that Conan Doyle ascribes to his hero. The movie’s popularity nevertheless is a sign of our times. 

To the British, Sherlock Holmes however remains a real-life character whose statues adorn a square in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthplace, Edinburgh and the Baker Street underground station in London. The rooms that Watson and Holmes are supposed to have occupied at 221b Baker Street are now a museum. 

A group of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts has also dug up evidence of his birth and an early fraction of his retired life. According to them he was born in 1854 of an English father and a French mother who was the daughter of a famous impressionist painter. He went to Oxford, but certainly not to Cambridge! He was awarded both, the British knighthood, which he declined, and the French Légion d’honneur, which he accepted with pride. He retired to Sussex and kept bees. Of his life after 1914, there is no record. 

Though that French touch of the great detective’s character is missing in Guy Ritchie’s film, he has certainly given us a people’s Sherlock Holmes!