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 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 Wilson Wilson
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.
