Arthur Conan Doyle and the many lives of Sherlock Holmes, world’s most famous detective

However, when A Study in Scarlet appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, the response was lukewarm, at best. While a few critics praised the ingenuity of its detective, others found it too impersonal and drab. Its limited initial appeal, along with the poor performance of his second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four (1890), led Doyle to switch to writing short stories featuring the detective — they became more popular — in 1891. Doyle had unwittingly created something the Victorians didn’t yet have a word for: a global franchise. His detective represented the modern mind learning to make sense of the mysteries of a new world that was coming into being at the cusp of a new century.

Nearly a century after his death, a new India-UK co-production titled Elementary, My Dear Holmes wants to turn the magnifying glass on the creator himself. Directed by Srijit Mukherji (he helmed the four episodes of Kay Kay Menon and Ranvir Shorey-starrer Shekhar Home), the film has been announced under the UK-India Co-Production Treaty as a partnership between the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), the British Film Institute (BFI), and the Conan Doyle Estate.

Still in development, it is set to revisit the real-life cases that consumed Doyle’s later years, notably those of George Edalji, a British-Indian solicitor wrongfully convicted of mutilating horses, and Oscar Slater, a Jewish immigrant accused of murder. In both cases Doyle played detective off the page, applying the methods he had gifted to his fictional alter-ego.

Back to the beginning

Let’s look back at the precise moment when Holmes entered literature. Early in A Study in Scarlet, Watson runs into an old acquaintance, Stamford, who mentions another man also looking for someone to share rooms: an eccentric chemist named Sherlock Holmes. Stamford warns Watson that Holmes is a difficult fellow, a man of strange enthusiasms and unpredictable habits. But the prospect of halving rent at a decent address — 221B Baker Street — is too tempting to resist.

When Watson meets him for the first time, Holmes is in a laboratory, exultant over a chemical discovery. “I’ve found it! I’ve found a reagent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else!” he cries, shaking Watson’s hand in triumph before turning back to his test tubes. In a paragraph, Doyle establishes the detective’s character: excitable, scientifically obsessive, and almost childishly delighted by the mechanism of truth.

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Watson, bemused, observes this whirlwind of energy and begins to catalogue Holmes’s quirks. He notes that Holmes knows nothing about literature or philosophy, very little about politics, and — in what must have shocked Victorian readers — doesn’t even know that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Holmes dismisses astronomy as irrelevant: “What the deuce is it to me?” he says. “You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Holmes’s knowledge is ruthlessly functional; he keeps only what he needs, deletes the rest. Doyle invents in him a mind like a database, a metaphor that predates computers by almost a century. By the end of Chapter 1, Watson and Holmes agree to move in together at Baker Street. The doctor has found his lodging, and literature has found its most famous partnership.

A sleuth relevant everywhere

Arthur Conan Doyle trained as a physician at Edinburgh University, and it was there that the idea of “deduction” took root. His professor, Dr Joseph Bell, could read a patient’s background from the way they entered a room. Bell’s diagnostic flair — a synthesis of observation, logic, and intuition — impressed Doyle enough for him to copy it into fiction. Sherlock Holmes, he later admitted, was essentially “Dr Bell with a magnifying glass.” What Doyle didn’t expect was that his method would become synonymous with intelligence itself. Holmes’s reasoning was an early prototype of how the modern world would think about knowledge, be it forensics, analytics or the habits of scrolling through evidence.

A rationalist by training, Doyle was also a believer in séances, fairies, and psychic phenomena. He defended spiritualism in public lectures even while he wrote crime stories steeped in logic. His stories entered cinema almost as soon as cinema itself was invented. The very first Sherlock Holmes film, Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900), was a 30-seconds short that made history as the first known screen detective story. A silent trick film, it was made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company for showing in amusement arcades on Mutoscope machines. The film uses cutting-edge editing techniques of the time to show Holmes baffled by a burglar who uses trick photography to disappear and steal his silver.

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A Study in Scarlet (1914) was a British silent film adaptation, directed by George Pearson and starring James Bragington as Holmes. It is considered a lost film, but details about its plot, which adapts the 1887 novel, and production have been documented. By the 1930s and 40s, Holmes had become a Hollywood property. Actor Basil Rathbone’s sharply profiled Holmes and Nigel Bruce’s amiably confused Watson starred in a series of films that redefined the detective as a wartime hero. When television arrived, it brought Holmes home, quite literally.

The 1984-1994 Granada TV series starring Jeremy Brett is still considered the most faithful adaptation, shot in painstaking period detail. But by then, Holmes had already become the world’s most adapted character. Japan produced Miss Sherlock (2018), a gender-flipped version set in Tokyo; Soviet filmmakers made a beloved series in the 1980s; India borrowed the structure for local detectives like Byomkesh Bakshi (1993) and Thupparivaalan (Detective, 2017), a Tamil film loosely inspired from the story of Holmes and Watson. The genius of Doyle’s design is that it works anywhere.

The digital rebirth

In the 21st century, Holmes became a codebase for reinvention. Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) treats the detective not as a thinker locked away in study rooms but as a restless man caught up in the rhythm of his own ideas, someone who thinks while he moves and fights while he reasons, as if his mind and body are tuned to the same speed. Released at the same cultural moment as Iron Man and The Dark Knight, it had the aesthetics of both.

The film moves quickly and never dwells on the mystery itself; it is more interested in showing what it feels like to think fast. Robert Downey Jr. is brilliant as Holmes, a man who can read a room as easily as he can read a bruise, and Jude Law’s Watson is a steady, perceptive presence who matches him rather than trailing behind. The duo make the old idea of deduction look physical and alive again. Ritchie’s version of London is all smoke, iron and noise, a city that seems to be running on the same nervous energy as its detective.

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The BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017), starring Benedict Cumberbatch, catapulted Holmes into the smartphone age of texting, Googling, and mentally mapping London like a data scientist. The American series Elementary (2012-2019) flipped genders and continents, with Lucy Liu as Joan Watson and Jonny Lee Miller as a rehabbed Holmes in New York. Each version keeps Doyle’s structure but substantially changes the context and the setting. In that sense, Holmes has evolved exactly as Doyle might have hoped: a sleuth who updates himself to stay relevant in every era.

Doyle beyond Holmes

Although Holmes dominates Doyle’s oeuvre, it’s criminal not to think of the author beyond 221B. The Lost World (1912), featuring the brash Professor Challenger and his prehistoric creatures, launched the modern adventure genre and inspired everything from King Kong and Jurassic Park to every tale about human beings trespassing into forbidden ecosystems.

The Lost World is the story of a young reporter, Edward Malone, who joins the explosive Professor Challenger and a small team of explorers on an expedition to South America, following rumours of living prehistoric creatures. What they find, after climbing an isolated plateau in the Amazon, is a self-contained world that time forgot, full of dinosaurs and ape-men.

Doyle writes it as if it were a real world: full of maps, notes and field observations, and lit by the wonder of discovery. Challenger represents the arrogance of knowledge, Malone its curiosity, and the jungle everything that remains far from the realm of explanation. Similarly, Doyle’s historical novels, from Micah Clarke to The White Company, were once bestsellers. Even his pamphlet The Crime of the Congo (1909) — a critique of Belgian colonial brutality in Africa — was an early example of activist writing.

Between the author and his character, it’s the latter who continues to have numerous iterations; as the adaptations prove, his afterlife has clearly dwarfed that of his author. Doyle himself recognised the irony. “I have had many serious things to say in my life,” he once wrote, “but the only one people wish to hear about is a gentleman with a pipe and a magnifying glass.”

That brings the story back to Elementary, My Dear Holmes, which seeks to reverse the gaze. Instead of revisiting Holmes, it follows Doyle as he investigates real injustices in Edwardian Britain. Both the Edalji case and the Slater case — it was anti-semitic prejudice that skewed a murder trial in the latter — exposed the blind spots of an empire built on rational law but irrational hierarchy. In examining these events, the film has a chance to explore Doyle beyond the creator of a detective. For an Indian filmmaker to tell that story today adds another layer: history seen from the other side of the ledger.