Does every age get the Sherlock Holmes it deserves? Apparently so, and circa 2010 he doesn’t wear a deerstalker or travel by hansom cab, but he does have a blog, and a cellphone that proves quite useful when villainy’s afoot. Instead of a meerschaum pipe, Holmes relies, during particularly intense bouts of concentration, on three nicotine patches. More important, the Victorian melancholia, which once had him reaching for his cocaine syringe, has been replaced with a psychological malaise better suited to a time when everyone is plugged in but no one is connected.
“This character of the night, this sociopathic, slightly autistic, slightly anarchic, maverick, odd antihero,” is how Benedict Cumberbatch, the latest actor to play Holmes, describes him to The Times of London. (And yes, “Benedict Cumberbatch” does sound like someone who should be running a workhouse in a novel by Charles Dickens, but I swear that’s his name.)
Benedict Cumberbatch, left, and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson in the BBC series Sherlock, coming to Canada this fall on Showcase. — Colin Hutton/Hartswood Films
Cumberbatch is the pale, floppy-haired star of a popular new BBC series, Sherlock, which has taken the world’s most familiar detective and given him a bit of a freshening in two clever ways. (The show will be broadcast in Canada on Showcase beginning Sept. 10): First, they’ve plunked the detective and Watson in the middle of modern-day London; second, they’ve made him wonderfully unlikable.
He literally rubs his hands with glee at the prospect of a serial killer. A serial killer? What fun! “Damn the bodies,” you can almost hear him thinking, “at least now I can take my brain out for a run.”
The Guinness Book of World Records will tell you that Holmes is the fictional character most often portrayed in film and television, with more than 70 actors taking on the role since the detective’s first screen outing in 1903. Everyone has a favourite Holmes, in the same way everyone has a favourite Dr. Who, whether it’s the elegant Basil Rathbone of the 1930s and 40s or the supercilious Jeremy Brett of the 1980s TV incarnation.
The longevity of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation is usually attributed to the fact that he seems, for a Victorian gentleman, to be incredibly modern: Fascinated by forensics and chemistry, Holmes could have been a character on CSI: Baker Street. But even more than that, the character’s psychological mysteries (why does he take to his couch and not speak to anyone, even Watson, for days?) mean he can be moulded fresh for every generation.
In Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, released in 1970 when gay liberation was coming out of the closet, there are more than a few hints that our hero may not be straight. Six years later, the idea of therapy still a bohemian thrill, Holmes goes for psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in the film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Christopher Plummer’s Holmes, oozing new-man, late-seventies empathy, weeps over the death of a prostitute in 1979’s Murder by Decree.
Almost a century after Conan Doyle’s run of 56 short stories and four novels ended, Holmes refuses to die. (Okay, there was the incident with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, but he sprang back from that abyss, didn’t he?)
He was born again in the form of the bitter and brilliant Dr. Gregory House, whose creator, David Shore, said he was not just punning on Holmes’s name but also playing on the detective’s disdain for social niceties. “He was never solving the cases because he cared about his clients,” Shore has said when talking about how the detective proved an inspiration. “He was always rude to his clients.”
It’s a brave man who chooses the prickly path. Guy Ritchie took the easier (and less satisfying) route of milking the audience’s sympathies with his Holmes, played last year as a wisecracking, spaniel-eyed fist-fighter by Robert Downey Jr. His less abrasive Holmes proved hugely popular at the box office, and a sequel is under way, which will no doubt allow Ritchie to continue exploring his fixations with masculinity, male bonding and buff, heaving torsos. (On second thought, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.)
Male bonding is the central focus of the BBC’s new show, and ooh, matron – it provides a few snickers. Holmes and Watson’s new landlady suggests gently that it’s all right with her if they’re playing hide the pipe, which causes Watson (wonderfully played by Martin Freeman) to huff indignantly. Mrs. Hudson responds, soothingly: “It’s all right, love. It takes all sorts. Mrs. Turner next door’s got a couple of married ones.”
Only by going back to Conan Doyle’s original stories do you realize just how perfect they are for a modern setting: The 19th-century Watson, for example, is an army doctor fresh from a failed British war in Afghanistan, who laments that his “nerves are shaken.” In the Victorian stories, he heals himself by writing bestselling accounts of Holmes’s adventures; in the new television series, he struggles to write a blog, at his therapist’s suggestion.
At the beginning of the second novel, The Sign of Four, Holmes deduces from the scratches on Watson’s pocket watch that his brother was an alcoholic whose hand slipped while winding it; in the modern series, the watch becomes a mobile phone, and the scratches are caused by a shaky hand trying to slip in the charging cable.
Of course, Holmes makes Watson feel like an idiot while he explains this simple bit of reasoning.
“Don’t trust him,” a police officer warns Watson. “He’s a psychopath.” Perhaps he is, although as Holmes floats around modern London without partner or family, with only work to sustain him, making all his connections electronically, he doesn’t seem all that weird. He’s just a 21st-century man.
