Recent imaginings of Sherlock Holmes play the ‘update’ game - and fail

Hearsay has it Sherlock Holmes causes a disease: Holmesiana. It manifests as obsession with the fictional detective to the point of beginning to behave like him, or trying to become a veritable encyclopedia-cum-museum devoted to Conan Doyle’s creation.

Naturally, the popularity of, and fascination for, this eminent student and practitioner of the art of scientific deduction has produced attempts to both vividly capture and make some moolah out of stage and screen versions of his adventures.

The consensus amongst fans, largely, is that no one has managed to portray the tall, slim, angular frame with all the eccentricities better than Jeremy Brett in the 1984 TV series. For many, any other representation is tantamount to blasphemy, or at the very least an endeavour doomed to be a distant second. This belief, it seems, would be confirmed by some of the more recent ‘interpretations’.

Ghastly as it is to purists, Hollywood seemed to think making a franchise out of Sherlock by keeping the geographical and scenic details but ‘updating’ the character would work. Thus we’ve recently had had a big-screen Holmes who seems more like a Pirates of the Caribbean sort of fop. With a bit of martial arts haa-hoo thrown in.

Then came an ‘acclaimed’ TV series. Set in modern-day London, with everyone using mobile phones and the net and whatnot. Suffice to say any series which would have us believe Holmes can take all of an episode to come to the epiphanic conclusion that the London murderer who is always present yet invisible is aBlack Cab driver isn’t worth much.

Perhaps O’Henry, in his pastiche creation of Shamrock Jolnes (who, utterly unlike Holmes’ method, jumps to a conclusion and then proceeds to prove it) was prescient. This modern lot is more Jolnes than Holmes.