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Elementary Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes for telly has been the most popular interpretation

This issue of Beeton’s, then sold at a shilling, is now, according to Antique Trader Vintage Magazines Price Guide “the most expensive magazine in the world”.

Sherlock Holmes, since then, has become the world’s most famous and most widely accepted prototype for the mastermind detective and continues to feature in and inspire films, books, television serials, pastiches, parodies, computer games, medical analogies etc.

When scientists at Edinburgh’s Joseph Bell Center for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning developed software that would aid police in the investigation of suspicious deaths, as you would expect, they called it ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

‘Sherlock Holmes’, according to developer Jeroen Keppens, is programmed to look at all available evidence before speculating on what might have happened, thus avoiding the human tendency to try and fit available evidence to appropriate theories.

Kepens’ programme is based on the famous Holmes principle of deduction, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. Such Holmes observations are much favoured in analogies for any kind of detection.

For example, when X, a computer programming instructor explains how to find and debug errors in computer scripts, he directs learners to treat the bug as a ‘criminal’ and to look where Holmes would, for further insights: “... a man’s finger-nails… coat-sleeves… boots... trouser-knees… the callosities of his forefinger and thumb... his expression… his shirt- cuffs...”. Cardiologists Claudio Rapezzi, Roberto Ferrari and Angelo Branzi, in their article “White Coats and Fingerprints: Diagnostic Reasoning in Medicine and Investigative Methods of Fictional Detectives”, classify the investigative methods of fictional detectives according to the dominant features of these methods. They say that Holmes’s method, based on observational ability and a capacity for logical reasoning, is similar to that of Poe’s Auguste Dupin, Agatha Christie’s Hercules Poirot and Miss Marple, Umberto Eco’s William of Baskerville and Ellery Queen.

Though Holmes was not fiction’s first private detective, Edgar Allen Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq having appeared in 1841 and 1866 respectively, he captured the imagination not only of readers, but also of other writers in a mind-boggling way.

Satyajit Ray’s Feluda and Saradindu Bandhopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi’s methods of detection are modelled on the Holmes prototype; Umberto Eco’s friar William of Baskerville and the novice Adso are unmistakably of the Holmes-Watson species - the friar addresses his companion as “My dear Adso” and ratiocinates much like Holmes.

In “The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes”, the disguised Holmes’s “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive” to Hurree Chunder Mookerjee is author Jamyang Norbu’s tribute to the first Holmes story, in which Holmes makes the same observation about Watson.

Traces of Holmes appear in the work of detectives from varied ethnic backgrounds: Shanker Lal and Digambara Swamiyar(Tamil); Precious Ramotswe (Botswana) ; Sadipe Okukenu, one of fiction’s earliest Black detectives; Kay Scarpetta (Italian-American) forensic expert; Alex Cross (African-American) police psychologist; the Gypsy Roman Grey, and the Navjo police sergeant, Jimmy Chee, among others. Holmes has inspired several anime and manga series, including Case Closed and Sherlock Hound. Case Closed’s main character carries the pseudonym Conan Edogawa (for Arthur Conan Doyle and Edogawa Rampo) while Sherlock Hound so captivated animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, that he directed some episodes.

In tribute to the Holmes-Watson duo, clever detectives and their slower-witted narrator sidekicks continue to appear in detective fiction: Nero Wolf-Archie Goodwin; Feluda-Topshe; Byomkesh Bakshi-Ajith Bandhopadhyay; Daffy Duck’s Dorlock Holmes-Porky Pig’s Watkins etc.

Holmes and his violin have inspired authors to give their detectives interesting hobbies: Rex Stuart’s Nero Wolf is a gourmet and grows orchids; Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe does chess problems; Roger L Simon’s Moses Wine plays Clue by himself and Bill Ponzini’s Nameless collects crime and detective pulp magazines.

Perhaps the overwhelming reason why readers find the gentlemanly Holmes so appealing is that his method is based on a notion of the world as a place in which order will always reign supreme (in direct contrast to that of his ‘hard-boiled’ counterpart, whose method so clearly stems from an understanding of the world’s wickedness).

Whatever the reasons, there is no doubting that Sherlock Holmes remains very much the accepted prototype of the clever detective or that his method — made accessible by the filter of Dr. Watson’s lesser intellect continues to enthral readers all over the world.

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