Sometimes, I feel a bit sad for our friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Tonight, for example, I finished watching a truly wonderful episode of Dr. Who, another product of Mother England, another eccentric man of science and adventure. The Doctor has been entertaining audiences for forty-five years now. He’s been touched by dozens upon dozens of writers, and seems ever-young. Of course, being a time-travelling space alien who can show up any time, any place, and played by any actor does have certain advantages.

But look at another great English hero, Mr. James Bond.  Bond is fifty-five years old, and also started with a small canon of books, just like Holmes. And where some characters are only imitated in movies, James Bond seemed to hit his full stride there. These days, ask anyone about “the true James Bond” and ninety-nine times out of a hundred (or more), they’ll cite a movie. The books were good, but the movies made Bond a legend . . . a legend that is moving through time with us, just like Dr. Who.

And this is why I get sad for poor Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is a genie in a bottle. A turtle in a terrarium. A living legend in a ghostly London long gone (with its ethereal shroud of fog). While he’s been in an incredible amount of movies, no one would ever say Sherlock Holmes was made better by movies. Even the best adaptation of Sherlock Holmes has remained simply that, an adaptation . . . a copy.

While other characters like Bond and Who are very much alive, evolving, growing, taking full advantage of the skills of great modern writers. Why? Well, one might say that it’s because they’re simpler characters. But if that argument were true, take a look at Superman, who’s about as simple as one can get. He can’t get translated into a quality movie to save his life. He’s evolving with the times and successfully continuing on in comics, and yet a hundred factors conspire to keep him out of movie success.

I suspect the same sort of thing is true of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes has never transcended his original sixty stories for a lot of reasons, and as much as we’d like to say that the original stories were just that good, let’s be honest: they’re not better than anything that ever was or ever will be.  Just like those watching Ronald Howard on television in the fifties had no idea of what watching Jeremy Brett would be like, we still have yet to see a writer or production that could make us, even temporarily, forget Conan Doyle.

Is it sacrilege to wish for such a thing? I don’t think so. Surely only the crankiest curmudgeon considers Ian Fleming’s memory sullied by the likes of Daniel Craig’s modern James Bond. So it is likely to be with Sherlock Holmes, when he finally escapes his bottle.

We can but wait, and hope.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver