From Arthur Conan Doyle to Benedict Cumberbatch, What’s the Essence of Sherlock Holmes?

January 1 saw the return of the world’s most popular drama, Sherlock, to screens everywhere. The happy return is appropriate, for 2017 is the 130th anniversary of the first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet.” Why are we still watching and reading about this world? More to the point, why do I care about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson—two gentlemen who are as real to me as Congress, but less involved in crime? Why do I love them enough to write a feature about them? Not just the show, but the characters themselves?

And here the trouble begins. I re-read that opening sentence, and it sounds as if it could be in any generic feature about Doyle’s fictional detective.

The problem with writing about Holmes is the same with writing about the sea, or the moon, or the appeal of a lover: You have so much to say, and there are so many ways of saying it, that it’s hard to concentrate on one thread of argument. Every sentence, every turn of phrase, brings up some part of the Sherlockian canon. The writer is forced to fight a constant battle against his or her own predilection to give into the quoting fever and go on a drunk citation binge.

Holmes has been scribbled about so often, by so many different people, in so many different ways, that the problem isn’t finding something to say—it’s finding a new jewel in a diamond mine ten acres deep. How does one avoid the constant threat of hackneyed puns about hackney cabs, or reusing the word “Elementary” in the title and the body of the article? “Crime is common, logic is rare,” Holmes once said, but Holmes is omnipresent. One of the most popular podcasts about Sherlock and his infinite variety is plainly called “I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.” That phrase, in turn, is lifted from “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” and is spoken by Brother Mycroft to Dr. Watson: “I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler.”

There have been countless adaptations of the Great Detective. When I use the word “countless,” I’m not just using the word glibly (unlike all of the other times). I mean, literally, nobody has counted them. The published, cataloged pastiches range in the thousands. The unpublished and forgotten may be many times that.

Even within Sherlock Holmes fandom, there are levels of maniacal obsession; I am pleased to be among the first rank of the congenitally rabid. Like any immortal story, the outline is bare enough that a politician could sing it to his mistress while fumbling for a key. A simple seed: damaged goods from the Afghan War seeks acceptable lodging with eccentric student. Here are two people. This one writes, this one thinks. Both fight.

But also, like all great legends, from a bare outline there comes a great harvest: Watson and Holmes, co-drawn into one another’s orbit, giant moons in a tidal pull of mutual gravity.
Much of what makes the original Holmes stories work lies in Doyle’s prose, which is consistently underrated: The man’s writing has a strong, singular elemental effect behind it, a union of sure-footed heroism joined to a kind of wonderful intellectual engagement, and this result is doubled when it plays out in the half-urban, half-Gothic, all-wonderful demimonde of the original stories.

Doyle’s art was of a diligent man writing a character he was not reverent of, and he placed him where he liked, whereas even our best writers today take Holmes and his world seriously. The Great Detective is a consulting ratiocinator—not an office of the law, no matter how much the Metropolitan Police may treat him as an appendix, or vice versa. Behind the intellectual fireworks are deep-engraved statements of life, the street, and logic which are so pitch-perfect I hesitate to use the word “pulp.” Holmes is not the cozy mysteries of Marple, or the locked room or ghostly house of the early 20th century. Doyle’s shadowy London inspired the hardboiled arias of Chandler, Spillane, and Hammett. Doyle was no slouch when it came to portraying the odds and ends of what he called the “cesspool of the Empire.” Sir Arthur’s depictions of fin-de-siècle London are more striking and more outré than many other recorders of that time, who wrote with more frankness but less wisdom.

And of course, clue after clue, well-balanced by the secret heart of the Holmes world, the same interest that returns us time and again to 221B Baker Street: the relationship, the brotherhood between Holmes and Watson, and the compelling, memorable world circling around them: Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, the Irregulars, and the specter of Imperial London itself, rising misty and marvelous from every street corner.

But why? There have been so many adaptations. To put it another way: How far out does Sherlockiana go? Will anyone in a deerstalker do?

In other words, I want to know what is essential to Holmes. To reverse-engineer a complicated machine, you take away parts until you find the bare minimum. To understand how a car works, the engineer would remove all extraneous goods until she came to the engine and wheels. You take away the parts until the device stops working, and then you learn what the essence is.