The 15 best Sherlock Holmes pastiches – and five to avoid

Conan Doyle’s beloved detective has inspired countless homages. From Young Sherlock Holmes to Elementary, these are the best of the bunch

Gareth Rubin’s new novel Holmes and Moriarty (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) has a mouth-wateringly ingenious premise: Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, has to form an alliance with his nemesis, the great detective Sherlock Holmes, to thwart a villain planning a sticky end for both of them. It’s the latest in an immeasurably long line of pastiches and continuations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories that stretches back nearly as far as Holmes’s own lifespan. 
Holmes and Watson, having made their debut in Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet in 1887, were famous enough by 1891 for Doyle’s friend JM Barrie to publish the first of several Sherlock skits. The best of them is “The Late Sherlock Holmes” (1893), which reveals that Conan Doyle and Dr Watson, both equally fed up with the “uppish” Holmes, conspired to push him over the Reichenbach falls and blame Moriarty. 
The Rubin novel is the first Sherlock story to have received the endorsement of the Conan Doyle estate since Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk in 2011. This is a rare honour for which there is no shortage of hopeful candidates, as several Sherlock Holmes novels are still published every year. The worldwide appetite for Holmes adventures (some years ago, when I was a gap-year teacher in China, the students were all keen Sherlockians and asked me how I coped with all that fog in London) has to be fed. 
I have seen a copy of the editorial guidelines that one publishing company gives to its battery farm of Sherlock Holmes writers. They must never have Holmes say “elementary, my dear Watson”; Mrs Hudson should not have a Scottish accent (that tradition only started with the Glaswegian actress Mary Gordon in the Basil Rathbone films); references to Holmes’s deerstalker and Inverness cape should be sparing as these were bestowed on him by Sidney Paget, the stories’ original illustrator, and never mentioned in Doyle’s text; and so on. 
Happily, not every new Sherlock story is a slavish, rule-bound imitation that sticks to the letter of Doyle without capturing his spirit. Here is a selection of the best Holmesian reimaginings and updatings – books, films, TV and radio shows: the ones that are true to Doyle’s genius by being themselves full of imagination. 
I’ve excluded anything that doesn’t focus on the characters of Holmes and Watson, which explains such glaring omissions as Enola Holmes, They Might Be Giants or Basil the Great Mouse Detective. So here’s the best – plus a handful to avoid. 
The idea of Holmes investigating the Jack the Ripper murders was hardly original (see the 1966 film A Study in Terror and the Michael Dibdin novel mentioned below) but Bob Clark’s film cooks up an enjoyably bonkers plot that involves Freemasonry and an establishment cover-up, derived from Stephen Knight’s excitable non-fiction bestseller Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976).
Christopher Plummer’s Holmes is a bit colourless and slightly oddly coupled with a Watson 20 years his senior: nevertheless the laconic James Mason makes for one of the all-time great Watsons. Great cameos too from John Gielgud as Prime Minister Lord Salisbury warning Holmes off the case, and Donald Sutherland as a nutty psychic.
One-man crime fiction factory Anthony Horowitz wrote this in between creating Foyle’s War and penning his excellent James Bond pastiche novels. The premise is that this manuscript by Watson has been locked away with his solicitor for 100 years because the case is so scandalous: it turns out to be a chilling mystery involving the murder of one of Holmes’s gang of street-kid spies – the Baker Street Irregulars – and other crimes that take Holmes into darker territory than Doyle ever dared.
You thought Holmes clambering back up the Reichenbach Falls was implausible: this TV movie sees a US private eye called Jane Watson inheriting her forebear John’s home in England and finding Sherlock Holmes cryogenically frozen in the cellar.
Duly unfrozen, Holmes accompanies Jane back to Boston to investigate a murder. Somehow the film works, thanks principally to a superb performance by Michael Pennington, giving gravitas to Holmes even when his lack of familiarity with the late 20th Century causes some of his deductions to go comically awry. 
Guy Ritchie’s sequel to his 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr as an erratic, fist-handy Holmes and Jude Law as a long-suffering Watson, ramps up the action set-pieces and bantersome bickering of the first picture, resulting in a whiplash-inducingly pacy romp. With Stephen Fry as Mycroft (calling his brother “Shirley”) and Holmes disguised at one point in a gown and bonnet, it’s as camp as it is violent: God knows what Doyle would have made of it, but great fun.
Holmes has become a staple of comic books, from the Doyle stories being adapted as Manga to the Holmesian cameos in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Victorian Undead – written by Ian Edginton with art by Davide Fabbri, and originally released in six issues in 2010 – sees Holmes having to save the day when a zombie Moriarty colonises London with an undead army. A macabre delight.
Bill Condon’s affecting, autumnal film sees a nonagenarian Holmes gaining a belated emotional education as he forms a friendship with his housekeeper’s little boy and starts to reflect on a lifetime spent too detached from the rest of the human race. Ian McKellen’s superb performance makes the film more convincing than the source novel, Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind (2005). As with some other Holmes pastiches, the film prompted a copyright wrangle with the Conan Doyle estate. 
Adrian Conan Doyle, the author’s youngest son, has been described by Doyle’s biographer Andrew Lycett as a “spendthrift playboy [who] used the Conan Doyle estate as a milch-cow”, but nevertheless he produced some very good pastiches of his father’s work in collaboration with the great crime writer John Dickson Carr. 
The 12 stories in this volume are all inspired by Watson’s tantalising mentions in the original canon of cases he hasn’t written up, such as the affair of “Mr James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world”. Whether it’s Adrian’s genes or Dickson Carr’s skill, these tales do often read like genuine Doyle. 
Scripted by Chris Columbus and directed by Barry Levinson, this sprightly film retcons the Holmes-Watson back story to have them meeting at school as teenagers. The pair are soon tangling with members of an Osiris-worshipping Egyptian cult, who plan to sacrifice the girl (Sophie Ward) that Holmes (Nicholas Rowe) has the hots for. Full of memorable touches, such as Alan Cox’s Bunter-esque Watson being poisoned with hallucinogens and imagining himself being attacked by vengeful cream cakes. To be honest, having worn out the video by the time I was 12 I haven’t dared revisit this old favourite for fear of disappointment, but fellow Sherlockians assure me it still stands up. 
Had it not ended up disappearing up its own fundament I would have given a higher ranking to this present-day update of the Holmes saga, as its fresh approach blew most Sherlockians’ socks off when it began. Co-begetters Mark Gattis (who played Mycroft) and Steven Moffat were moved by a slew of turgid TV Doyle adaptations – “too reverential and too slow” – to come up with this teasing homage, and brave enough to make their mind-palace-mining Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) a rebarbative sociopath. 
Andrew Scott’s manic Moriarty makes an effective change from the usual understated velvet-voiced portrayals, and Martin Freeman’s traumatised Afghanistan vet is a perfect Watson. And the show’s evocation of contemporary London is as vivid as Doyle’s crepuscular Victorian version. 
Doyle’s late story His Last Bow (1917) reveals that Watson planned to return to active service on the eve of the First World War. Robert Ryan takes up the hint in this novel, which sees Watson applying Holmesian methods to the case of a serial killer at work in the trenches. 
Three more novels follow in Ryan’s series, with plots including Watson becoming a PoW in Germany and Holmes’s old enemy von Bork offering to take Holmes in exchange so that he can exact revenge on him. These novels serve to remind us that the ineffably decent John Watson was in his own way as inspired a creation as Holmes. 
Basil Rathbone had already played Holmes in reasonably faithful period adaptations of Doyle’s stories, such as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), but this was the first of several pictures that saw him beamed into the present day to fight the Nazis. Showing Holmes symbolically leaving his deerstalker on the hatstand and adopting a fedora, John Rawlins’s film is basically Holmes vs Lord Haw-Haw. 
Nigel Bruce’s clumsy, thick-as-mince Watson, once you’ve accepted him as a travesty of Doyle’s character, is actually rather endearing, and the steely presence that had previously made Rathbone a great movie villain now makes him a comforting figure to have on the side of the good guys. I can imagine that in those dark days, having the film end with Rathbone’s stirring recitation of the Great War-era speech from Doyle’s His Last Bow – “a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared” – would have provided genuine comfort. 
Overshadowed by the BBC’s Sherlock, this CBS series may have lacked its rival’s lapel-grabbing intellectual pyrotechnics, but it’s the more consistently enjoyable of the two, and although it also includes sly references to Doyle’s stories, it doesn’t work on the principle of why have one in-joke where you can fit in seven. Jonny Lee Miller is Holmes as a failed-in-London-try-New-York recovering drug addict; Lucy Liu plays Joan Watson, the medic hired by Holmes’s father to keep him clean who eventually becomes his sleuthing sidekick. 
As antisocial oddballs go, Miller is easier to warm to than Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, and the superb supporting cast includes Rhys Ifans as Mycroft, Natalie Dormer as Irene Adler and Vinnie Jones as Sebastian Moran. The show was such a success that it ran to 154 episodes, making Miller the most prolific TV or film Holmes ever. 
Nicholas Meyer is a film-maker probably best-known for directing Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but it was during a Hollywood writers’ strike that he occupied himself by writing one of the classic Holmes pastiches. The premise is that the innocent Professor Moriarty is threatening legal action against the cocaine-addled Holmes for claiming he is a criminal: Watson takes Holmes to Vienna to be cured of his cocaine addiction by Sigmund Freud, who ends up joining the duo in a mission to avert a European war. 
Meyer wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the film version in 1976, with Nicol Williamson as Holmes, Robert Duvall as Watson, Alan Arkin as Freud, and Laurence Olivier as Moriarty. The book is even better, though, with its mischievous solutions to some of the inconsistencies in the Doyle canon. Meyer has intermittently written sequels over the ensuing half-century: a sixth instalment, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, has just been published. 
To radio listeners, Clive Merrison was the voice of Sherlock Holmes as indisputably as James Alexander Gordon was the voice of the football results. He played the role in adaptations of all 60 of Doyle’s Holmes stories between 1988 and 1998. Then, after a break caused by the death of his Watson, Michael Williams, he starred in this series of “further adventures”, written by Bert Coules (with Andrew Sachs taking over as Watson). 
As with The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (see above), each episode is inspired by the passing mention of another case in Doyle’s original stories. In the first episode, “The Madness of Colonel Warburton”, Coules draws on Doyle’s passionate interest in spiritualism for a plot that sees the widowed Warburton (Timothy West) being swindled by a fake medium. In brilliantly chilling scenes, Watson goes undercover at the seances and is horrified when the medium passes on seemingly genuine messages from his own beloved late wife Mary. 
Coules captures everything unique and enjoyable about the Doyle canon while expanding its emotional range. The guest stars in the series attest to the quality of the scripts: Hugh Bonneville, Lindsay Duncan, Tom Baker, Mark Gattis, Jane Asher, Toyah Willcox. 
This notorious box office disaster was a nail in the coffin of Billy Wilder’s career. It’s an eccentric, episodic movie, with several more self-contained storylines removed from the final cut, and was beset by problems in filming; Wilder allegedly bullied the film’s star, Robert Stephens, into a suicide attempt; the enormous prop ocean liner Wilder had built was too big for the studio pool and actually had to be put to sea, at ruinous expense; a model Loch Ness monster sank, and was not retrieved from the bottom of the loch until 2016.
It also happens to be a masterpiece, its sensibility cited by Mark Gattis as the key influence on Sherlock. Its barrage of jokes and burlesque plotlines are suffused with a melancholy stemming from Holmes’s loneliness and the subtext (which Wilder wished in later years he had made clearer) that he is gay. Colin Blakely’s bluff Watson gels perfectly with Robert Stephens’s brittle Holmes; Christopher Lee was never better as Mycroft; Mollie Maureen is the funniest Queen Victoria there’s been on screen; Alexandre Trauner’s Baker Street set is perfect. Here is a film that manages both to add to our understanding of the most famous character in modern literature and to make him seem more thrillingly enigmatic than ever. 
Roger Moore is not really up to conveying Holmes’s cerebrations convincingly and Patrick Macnee is a hopelessly dopey Watson, although John Huston as Moriarty and Charlotte Rampling as Irene Adler are compensations. 
This lame spoof sees Peter Cook at his least funny as Holmes and the multi-untalented Dudley Moore playing Watson plus several other characters; he also composed the irritating score. Worse is the waste of such great performers as Denholm Elliott, Terry-Thomas and Joan Greenwood. If you’re looking for a decent parody from this era, try John Cleese as Holmes in NF Simpson’s absurdist Elementary, My Dear Watson. 
“I rather hope this is indeed the last Sherlock Holmes story,” sighed Kingsley Amis when he reviewed Michael Dibdin’s debut novel. It’s Holmes vs Jack the Ripper again, but with more pretension and less narrative drive than the films, and a bit of sneering at Doyle’s prose style. Happily Dibdin went on to better things with the Aurelio Zen novels.
Rupert Everett’s enjoyably waspish Holmes deserved a better vehicle than this lumbering serial killer yarn, from the humdrum period that preceded the game-changing Sherlocks of Downey Jr, Cumberbatch and Miller. 
Will Ferrell and – it pains me to type this – the great John C Reilly are the eponymous duo tasked with preventing the assassination of Queen Victoria (Pam Ferris) on board the Titanic. Most of the jokes centre on poo, wee, vomit and male lactation. “So painfully unfunny we’re not sure it can legally be called a comedy,” was Rolling Stone’s verdict. 
4/5
4/5
5/5
3/5