No other character has been the subject of so many screen appearances as Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock Holmes stories are like a pack of cigarettes--they carry a warning label, but many people use the product anyway. Doyle flashes this warning at the beginning of A Study in Scarlet when Stamford cautions Watson (and the reader) that "Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes--it approaches to cold-bloodedness". Clearly we are to be wary of this queer fellow, this "walking calendar of crime," for he may be hazardous to our humanistic and literary health. Why, then, do readers, like Watson's "loungers and idlers of the Empire," stubbornly dive head first into the Victorian cesspool again and again and transform the unclubbable sage of Baker Street into the most beloved literary detective of all time? Doyle himself provided the best answer in 1921 when he explained with characteristic modesty: "If my little creation of Sherlock Holmes has survived longer perhaps than it deserved, I consider that it is very largely due to those gentlemen who have, apart from myself, associated themselves with him" .
These "gentlemen," are, of course, the illustrators, and, more important, the hundreds of actors during and since Doyle's time who have portrayed the sleuth on stage and screen; and it is their literal "fleshing out" of Doyle's creation that will concern us here. Die-hard Sherlockians may carp about certain actors' performances as not being quite what Doyle intended--sometimes they flesh out the character too much, as in the recent case of the portly Edward Woodward in Hands of a Murderer--but the fact remains that because there's so little real detail in the original stories, the Holmes of stage and screen is often an improvement. And this is so because of one difference: humour. Despite Christopher Isherwood's claims to the contrary, Holmes in print is a very flat, somewhat deadpan character, a sometime "blood brother to the Sphinx," as eminent Sherlockian Vincent Starrett calls him.
