221B Baker Street

As you would have already guessed from the title, this is going to be about Sherlock Holmes and his friend, assistant and chronicler Dr. John Watson. It would not be presumptuous to call them the most popular duo of sleuths in literature and their adventures have appeared in the form of magazine articles, individual novels, story collections and of course movies. As a matter of fact, the stimulus for this article (or series of articles if my phenomenal laziness permits) was a series of discussions I had with friends in the aftermath of the Guy Ritchie movie Sherlock Holmes (2009). To explain what I am trying to do in these articles, I will first have to touch upon my acquaintance with Holmes and my impressions regarding the movie.

I first came upon Holmes in the summer vacation after 6th or 7th std. I was packing for my vacation at my grandparents’ which involved trying to fit the maximum number of books in the available luggage space. I remember staring at the bookshelf trying to make my choice when two big brown volumes which I had never observed before caught my eye. At that point, my reading was comprised of children’s books with glossy covers in many interesting colours; sober colours and binding were automatically classified as ‘big’ books. But I took down these books nevertheless and on consulting my mother, was told that they contained detective stories. That sealed the matter because I was then a connoisseur of The Famous Five, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and loved a good ‘mystery’. So the two brown books made it into the reading list and over the space of two weeks, Holmes and Watson became my favourite detectives.

When I sat down to watch the movie, I had no expectations. This was because, I have found that good books when turned into movies generally become lacklustre or downright horrible. There are also exceptionally good movies based on books and sometimes even better movies than the original books. I was expecting a touched up version of one of the more dramatic cases and was therefore pleasantly surprised when the plot turned out to be completely new. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, from the starting imagery of the cobbled London streets and the captivating soundtrack right down to the sketches of the main scenes shown with the credits (There is also a nice interactive game on the movie website which was launched as a sort of promo). I was particularly pleased with the way Watson was portrayed. The only other Holmes movie I have seen is The Hound of The Baskervilles (1939) which had Nigel Bruce playing Watson. I was extremely annoyed at the way Watson was made out to be a

bumbling idiot and the fact that Jude Law’s Watson is actually a helpmeet to Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes endeared the movie to me.  On the other hand, I was not very pleased with Holmes being portrayed as frolicsome (for want of a better word). Even the Holmes-Adler romance element and the suggestion of a shared history, though

inauthentic and not in keeping with my picture of Holmes, was excusable as the inevitable spice that has to be added to make a successful movie. But, Holmes actually picking fights and making funny/innuendos comments or a Holmes excessively possessive of Watson to the degree of interfering with his engagement was not acceptable

Going on a brief tangent here, I’d like to compare Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes and Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House in the Fox series House M.D. House is a medical drama series in which the protagonist, a brilliant diagnostician Dr. House, is based on Sherlock Holmes. House’s vicodin addiction is a parallel to Holmes’s cocaine abuse. But the series’ Watson equivalent, Dr. James Wilson, is totally different from the Conan Doyle character. In this series House is a curmudgeon who is at times downright obnoxious and gets tolerated only because of his brilliance. Wilson is the ultimate nice guy who is House’s only friend and buffer between him and the rest of the world. House meddles in the affairs of everyone around him, particularly Wilson, to the extent of monitoring their personal relationships. House is also dependant on Wilson, though he never admits it, and is suggested to be directly or indirectly responsible for Wilson’s numerous divorces. Now that has too many parallels with the movie viz Holmes’ resistance to Watson’s engagement, Watson saying he felt manipulated, Holmes’ behaviour disgusting the others (licking the bits of stone from the grave) etc to pick a few. Is it knowingly or unknowingly a copy of a copy or just a tangential thought on my part thrown up as a result of obsessively following the series, I really could not say.   

From the books, my impression of Holmes physically, was that of a tall thin man with piercing eyes. I had imagined that he cultivated a high degree of aloofness so that his objectivity was never jeopardized. I had the view that he was physically strong because the poker bending scene in The Speckled Band was always a favourite, but I had pictured him to be the sort of person who would use his fists as the absolute last resort. When I had this argument with a friend who said he hated the movie, I realized how little I remembered from actually reading the stories. I recently read an article or re-reading which you can find here. Going by that, my reading of Sherlock Holmes would have concentrated mainly on the plotline and very little attention given to the characterization. I was also at an age where one reads for the stories only and has not thought about appreciation as a word relating to literature. So, project 221B is going to be a sort of journal of my re-reading of the complete Sherlock Holmes, split into small groups of stories, and the impressions I draw about the characters and persons and their evolution as I progress through the volumes.