221b (Baker Street)

I am a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and have been since I was very young, probably under the age of ten years old. I remember taking out DVDs of films like The Hound of the Baskervilles and Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror from the local library long before I ever picked up any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books. To me, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson will always be Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as this was my first encounter with the characters. It often interests me how people perceive adaptations of literature - whether they see the film/TV version before reading the source text or the other way around and how that affects their opinion on the adaptation. Basil Rathbone's perfectly clipped and abrupt form of speaking when in character accompanies every line in Conan Doyle's work when I read them now. I don't believe this will ever change.

I have done a lot of research into the various adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories and watched many of them over the years. Though Jeremy Brett is often considered England's favourite Holmes and the most accurate representation of the character on screen, I have to disagree. Is it because Basil Rathbone is a better actor? Not necessarily. Is it because Rathbone's character is less flawed? Not at all.

It's because, for me at least, Rathbone was first. Not the first Sherlock Holmes by any means, but he was the first one I saw and I will always be partial to the pairing of him and Nigel Bruce.

The real point of this post was to include a poem by Vincent Starrett that I have recently rediscovered. Starrett wrote The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and was a big fan of detective novels and crime fiction, writing plenty of it himself. He was one of the most promiment - and really one of the first - "Sherlockians".

221b (1942)

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die.
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo
England is England yet, for all our fears
Only those things the heart believes are true

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street.
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.