For the Love of Sherlock Holmes: Doyle’s Sleuth Reincarnated on the Small Screen (Part 2)

By Lisa Malice

If you’re like me, you learned to love mysteries from your parents. My first exposure came about when my family outgrew our Sunday night viewing of The Wonderful World of Disney and replaced it with The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie (1971-1977). With different sleuths rotated through the weekly series lineup, my family religiously followed Columbo, McCloud, and MacMillan & Wife catch the bad guys, though my favorite was—and still is—The Snoop Sisters, starring the incomparable Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick as two gray-haired mystery-writing busybody sisters who use their sleuthing skills to help their police detective nephew (Bert Convy) solve real-life murders. Sunday nights during the summer were spent driving home from the family cabin listening to The CBS Radio Mystery Theater. The radio plays, broadcast 1974-1982, were engaging, suspenseful, well-acted, capturing our attention and imagination of the scenes, characters, actions, murders, and motives. (You can access these wonderful radio shows via www.CBSRMT.com.)

These shows captivated my young mind, prompting me to start reading mysteries, ones I pulled off my mother's vast shelves of books. She read the masters of British Mystery--Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, and others, and I followed suit. But as my high school studies focused more on science and math, I found myself under the spell of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic deerstalker-capped sleuth fascinated me with his vast wealth of knowledge, mastery of logic, and keen abilities of observation and deduction to identify a murderer, his or her motive, weapon of choice, and how the deed was done. I used my paper route earnings to buy my own copy of The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes: 37 Short Stories and a complete novel from The Strand Magazine” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1976), complete with all 356 original illustrations. With more than 600 pages, the book kept me reading night after night when I was supposed to be asleep. I still have the thick tome in my personal library.

Nowadays, I always have a good crime story on my nightstand, but my days also start out with a daily dose of mystery at the gym, eyes glued to my tablet as I watch an episode of my latest (rarely current) tour of murder while sweating away on the elliptical machine. Just the suspense is often enough to keep my heart-rate elevated. My brain cells get a work-out, too, matching wits with fictional detectives which wield powers of observation and deduction to rival that of Holmes. Apart from obvious portrayals of Doyle’s iconic characters, such Elementary (starring Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock and Lucy Lui as Dr. Joan Watson), TV producers and screenwriters have filled the broadcast spectrum with a variety of Sherlockian adaptations. Each sleuth has a unique backstory, personality quirks, and entourages that round out the series bible.  

Two current shows are keeping me entertained right now. ABC’s Elsbeth, which is now in its fourth season, stars Carrie Preston as a Sherlockian attorney, a court-ordered observer of NYPD Homicide, who draws on her singular point of view to make unique observations the detectives often overlook. Her astute deductive abilities allow Elsbeth to ID the real villain fairly quickly (rather than the suspect that the cops like for the crime). Like the series drew me into mysteries and made Peter Falk a household name, Columbo, Elsbeth, is an inverted detective show—a howtocatch’em vs. a whodunit—and a joy to watch.

I’ve just discovered Best Medicine, which follows the adventures of a Dr. Martin Best, a big city surgeon who signs on as the town doctor for a picturesque lobster-harvesting village in Port Wenn, Maine. Wait! You say. That’s not a crime show. Well, no it’s not, but every week Dr. Martin Best has a medical mystery to solve that invariably requires a good bit of sleuthing to save one or more of the town’s characters from all manner of diseases, illnesses, and strange conditions (one character claimed his blue skin stemmed from all the blueberries he ate).  Doc Best’s keen observational skills, probing questions, and encyclopedic knowledge of medicine put him on par with Sherlock Holmes to close cases. The doc’s gruff bedside manner is often at odds with those of the residents of Port Wenn, a delightful cast of characters. A little romance is also in the air.

Do you have a favorite TV version of Sherlock Holmes? Tell us about the show!