The Case Study of Sherlock Holmes (2009) - Scholarly Commons ...

While this “common picture” (Doyle & Crowder, 2010, p. 10) cultivates familiarity and
generates a viewer endearment towards Holmes and Watson, this stereotype is merely
the surface of a contradictory individual. According to Watson, in The Musgrave Ritual
(1893/2001e), Holmes, “in his method of thought . . . was the neatest and most
methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress,
he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men” (Doyle, 2001e,
p. 358). Watson often found Holmes intolerable:
His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional
revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific
experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him
made him the very worst tenant in London. (Doyle, 1913/2005i, p. 1341)
This once un-stereotypical and unruly depiction of Holmes has recently, after Ritchie‟s
Sherlock Holmes (2009) and the BBC‟s Sherlock (2010), become his new and eccentric
stereotype. Again, this stereotype is born of the original canon, but it is unbalanced and
misleading, aimed solely at general audience members and early fans.
Original product: Short story cultivated impression of the stereotype
Doyle‟s short stories encouraged my further interest in the portrayal of The Great
Detective. For it appears that Holmes is seldom portrayed, in a popular context, as he
truly was, an uncompromising and passionate detective:
Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would
have failed to recognise him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were
drawn into two hard, black lines. While his eyes shone out from beneath them
with a steely glitter. His face was bent downwards, his shoulders bowed, his lips
compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His
nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind
was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him, that a question or
remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or at the most only provoked a quick,
impatient snarl in reply. (Doyle, 2001d, 84)
This is the Sherlock Holmes seldom seen on screen; in Ritchie‟s adaptation Holmes‟s
mental agility was translated into physical action and the character‟s cerebral prowess
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