Why is there no trace of forensic action in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes?
Conan Doyle's creation isn't just any old action hero, as portrayed in A Game of Shadows; he invented forensic science
1. Sherlock Holmes has made the Guinness Book of Records as the most frequently portrayed literary character in film history. More than 70 actors have played the role in more than 200 films. Robert Downey Jr and Guy Ritchie reckon theirs is a more authentic take on Conan Doyle's original than the uptight, deerstalkered pipe-smoker of so many other versions. Fair enough.
2. Among the 60 stories, you can find a bromantic action hero if you want to. Holmes carries a gun and fires it on more than one occasion. He's an effective bare-knuckle fighter and swordsman, he's on top of obscure martial arts and he's strong enough to straighten out a bent steel poker. As a master of disguise he successfully impersonates a plumber, a bookseller, a priest, a seaman, a groom, an opium addict and a woman.
3. As for his relationship with Dr Watson, well, the mask slips during The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, when the doctor catches a bullet in his thigh. "The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking," Watson tells us. "My friend's wiry arms were round me." Then, Holmes "ripped up my trousers with his pocket-knife".
4. Nonetheless, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has little time for what's surely the key characteristic of this most celebrated of detectives. This is his passionate, pioneering and ultimately game-changing commitment to forensic science.
5. Today, our routine stereotype for the investigator of crime is the detective looking for clues with his magnifying glass. Yet it wasn't always so. Denunciation and the extraction of confession through torture prevailed partly because alternatives weren't available.
6. The scientific upsurge of the 19th century yielded various discoveries with crime-detection potential. A method of analysing blood stains was established in 1813, one for tracing arsenic in 1836 and one for identifying vegetable toxins in 1851. More than anything else however, it was Conan Doyle's stories, appearing from 1887 onwards, that turned such insights into an investigatory system.
7. Holmes combined a number of different elements to create an original way of working. At its heart is the process of "reasoning backwards" to infer the steps leading up to an outcome. In the stories, this process delivers impressive results, even if they're often a bit far-fetched. For example, from an inanimate object, such as Watson's pocket watch in The Sign of Four or Grant Munro's pipe in The Adventure of the Yellow Face, Holmes is able to deduce quite startling information about its owner. It was a practice Conan Doyle picked up from an Edinburgh surgeon called Joseph Bell, who used it as an aid to diagnosis.
8. Yet the success of the method depends on acute observation and extensive erudition as well as logic. Hence the stories' attention to document examination, shoe impressions, ballistics, bloodstains, cigarette butts and fingerprints. To interpret such evidence, Holmes displays mastery not just of chemistry but of literature in French and Latin as well as English; he has a working grasp of everything from anatomy, psychology and law to cryptanalysis. He insists: "All knowledge comes useful to the detective."
9. It's this combination of analytic induction with close attention to both the collection and interpretation of data that was to become the basis of forensics. As has happened since, sometimes with less benign consequences, police practice came to emulate fiction. In 2002, in recognition of the literary prodigy's contribution, the Royal Society of Chemistry took the unusual step of presenting Sherlock Holmes with a posthumous honorary fellowship.
10. Of course, Holmes didn't just transform police procedure. He also unleashed an avalanche of entertainment. By the 1920s analytic detectives were turning much of pulp literature into an intellectual game. They took to the stage, radio and in due course television, where since the days of Dragnet the likes of Law & Order, Cold Case, New Tricks, Silent Witness, Prime Suspect and CSI have continuously swamped the schedules.
11. It's been a bit different in the movies. The silver screen has welcomed detectives by the shedload, but it's not their forensic practices that seem to excite it.
12. In A Game of Shadows, Sherlock's smartypants deductive ability is treated as a minor joke. He's there to trigger action and jollity, not to display the sharpness of his intellect. Other celluloid detectives have embodied ideals of masculinity, expressed the angst of the lost soul, exposed the underbelly of a sick society and gone rumbustiously on the rampage. What they haven't made so much of is the exercise of their craft.
13. Yet the minute observations of forensic detection are made for the full-size camera's wide-eyed gaze. In The Adventure of the Creeping Man, Holmes advises: "Always look at the hands first, Watson. Then cuffs, trouser-knees and boots." Surely a 2,000-square-foot image is the best available means of facilitating such scrutiny. Other media have cleaned up in this much-loved field with no such advantage. Is cinema missing a trick?
Sherlock Holmes – Close Reading Questions
- Why did Sherlock Holmes make it into the Guinness Book of World Records? Answer in your own words. (2U)
2. Identify the feature used in paragraph 2 to highlight that Holmes is “a master of disguise”. (1A)
3. Comment on its effectiveness. (2A/E)
- Quote a phrase from paragraph 4 which shows that Sherlock Holmes made a difference to forensic science. (1U)
- Identify the element of sentence structure used to demonstrate how observant the narrator of the Holmes stories is in paragraph 8. (1A)
6. “Of course, Holmes didn't just transform police procedure.” Explain fully how this sentence acts as a link between paragraphs 9 and 10. (4A)
- What does the image “He also unleashed an avalanche of entertainment” tell you about the amount of films, radio plays and T.V. shows Holmes inspired? (2A)
- In your own words, describe two portrayals of Holmes that the writer includes in paragraph 11. (2U)
- Why does the writer not like these versions of the detective? (1U)
- How effective do you find the use of a rhetorical question as a conclusion to this essay? (2E)
- How effective do you find the essay’s title? Explain by referring to ideas and style. (2E)