Tim Cornwell: Holmes – good and bad – gets us reading

Watching Stephen Moffat’s variations on a theme of Sherlock Holmes in his second series for BBC has been a roller-coaster in three rides. What would the Dr Who screenwriter do next to the master detective? How would the Timelord fast-forward Holmes from the 1880s to the 2010s?

The answer has been, with panache and wit – Dr Watson’s blog, Holmes’s awkward deerstalker moments, Irene Adler’s sexy texts – along with spectacular fumbles. The Hound of the Baskervilles was reduced to the level of a bad Dr Who frightfest.

Guy Ritchie’s second film outing, meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, miserably failed to live up to the first. Robert Downey Jnr’s Holmes is better than many; he has a haggard, haunted, unhealthy look to him, and of course they both abused drugs.

But in the words of Anthony Horowitz, who has separately written what is said to be quite a good new Sherlock for the Doyle estate, the film was “entirely devoid of anything resembling a coherent plot”. It is also entirely devoid of subtlety, reducing Holmes’s character to the hero of a smash and grab video game.

Purists wince. At least the shows are selling books. Pity some poor kid in the sticks who rushes to the shop expecting Moffat’s version, particularly with the way he freely switches character names. But the BBC has been dutifully reporting how its marathon of Dickens and Holmes adaptations has got more people reading, or at least buying them.

When the first Holmes series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman aired in 2010, sales of Holmes books jumped by 50 per cent. In the first week of 2012, they ran at about double the weekly average for 2011. The release of two Sherlock Holmes films from director Guy Ritchie, almost in tandem, has helped.

The Dickens adaptations had the same effect. In the run-up to BBC1’s new Great Expectations, weekly sales of Dickens rose from 7,000 to more than 16,800. The Mystery of Edwin Drood sold more than 600 copies after the stunning BBC2 two-parter; in one week last year, it sold just ten. I’ve not yet forgiven Moffat for his part in crimes against Herge in the writing of Steven Spielberg’s dreadful Tintin.

He didn’t have the nerve to properly kill off Holmes, in his take on The Final Problem. Minutes after he pitched off a London tower block, we spotted Holmes at his own grave, with Moffat tweeting that a third series was on its way. He could have stayed in his grave a little longer, surely, though I’m looking forward to seeing how Freeman’s Dr Watson reacts to his reappearance.

Cumberbatch, say Holmesians who know their stuff, has succeeded in delivering a Holmes almost as clever, cold and unpleasant as the original. “Cumberbatch is the most dislikeable Holmes I have ever seen, and deserves a great credit on that account,” says Holmes expert Owen Dudley Edwards.

Holmes and Watson are getting the Shakespeare treatment; we play their variations, transmute them into different periods. Even in Basil Rathbone days, film-makers made hay with Doyle’s plots, sticking him into the Second World War.

Adaptations, good or awful, get us talking and reading Doyle again. Holmes’s creator was raised a Scot, and Holmes’s intellectual homilies echo Doyle’s teachers at Edinburgh University – particularly, of course, Joseph Bell.

Holmes once chides Dr Watson to drop his “pawky humour”, using what is generally reckoned an old Scots word for dry humour. As Watson might have fired back: “Dinna fash yersel’.”