Sherlock Holmes : The Man Who Never Lived And Never Dies

I’M IN LONDON FOR YOUNG SHERLOCK AND SHERLOCK IS EVERYWHERE.

At the gift shop beneath the glass-and-steel canopy of the British Museum’s Great Court, his likeness sits alongside replicas of the Vapheio Cups, imitation Lewis Chessman sets and Hoji Frog postcards. A short walk away is HELLO LOVE, a creative space on Southampton Row, where a £28 toy version of the detective (complete with a working magnifying glass) shares shelf space with Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Frida Kahlo, William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth II. A man who never lived has become one of the most recognisable figures in the world, easily travelling across time, built on a handful of enduring symbols that every generation can reinterpret, reshape and claim as its own. That is why, more than a century after his debut in A Study in Scarlet (1887), we are still finding new ways to tell his story, most recently in the eight-episode Prime Video series Young Sherlock, which reimagines him as a 19-year-old at Oxford, before the pipe, before Baker Street, before the legend.

“It is fascinating to track how the idea and image of Sherlock Holmes has captured imaginations for so long, in so many different formats and all over the world,” says Professor Hugo Frey, University of Chichester, who was recently awarded the Collaborative Doctoral Award grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with the Portsmouth Museums and Portsmouth Libraries and Archives to research its leading Conan Doyle collection, which consists of 40,000 archives, 16,000 books and 3,000 objects related to the author.

The scholar of visual and popular culture points out that a simple set of symbols, including a deerstalker hat, a pipe, a violin and Baker Street, has made the character of Holmes instantly recognisable. “A little like superhero comics. Think Batman and his mask. It also means that each generation can reinterpret these core signs,” he says in an email interview with Esquire India.

“Even though he never lived, people still recognise his silhouette instantly—the hat, the pipe, the curiosity— which says a lot about how powerful the character is,” says Jane Hutchison, Founder and Creative Director of HELLO LOVE, who believes Holmes belongs alongside figures like Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth II, given his enduring influence on literature, storytelling and popular culture.

THE BOY BEFORE THE MYTH

Beyond the core signs that make Holmes a global shorthand for the archetypal detective, Young Sherlock, created and showrun by Matthew Parkhill and executive produced by Guy Ritchie, explores who he was before he became the cynical genius we know. This speaks to our growing need to understand what makes people what they are, instead of seeing them as just figures with fixed, binary personalities.

What Hero Fiennes Tiffin, the actor who plays the young Sherlock, found relatable about the fictional luminary is “the fact that when we’re young, we all think we are going to be the one to make the world a better place. And sometimes when the hardships of life hit, people might naturally become a little bit more cynical. That attitude of ‘I’ll be the one to make the world a better place’ is something we often sadly lose as life goes on.”

Mycroft (Sherlock’s elder brother, portrayed by Max Irons) in this series, for instance, reflects that same youthful openness. He can still question his loyalty to the Crown and isn’t yet blinded by duty.

“For Mycroft, it’s an understanding that a lot of people spend time trying to be things they’re not, trying to be what society tells them they should be, what a man should be, what a woman should be, how a child should behave. The truth is—and I think we’re starting to understand this more and more—that we are all different. It’s why we’re a successful species. We’re all different and the sooner that we can be at peace with who we are, the sooner we will find peace in our hearts,” Irons tells Esquire India.

Young Sherlock has clearly struck a chord. It debuted with a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score (now at 84), broke records for the most-watched Prime Video trailer and currently sits at #2 globally on the platform.

Part of its popularity has to do, of course, with our enduring love for crime thrillers. But just as much, it’s about relatability. We’re drawn to characters we see ourselves in, and this version of Holmes, shaped as much by youthful audacity and vulnerability as by intellect, feels closer than ever.

“We see him at an age where he’s at school. I definitely think it’s a lot more relatable than being a detective for hire—not many of us can relate to that,” says Fiennes Tiffin.

“He becomes a bit more cynical later in life and I think when you experience the hardships of life, that youthful positivity and enthusiasm is quite likely to wear off. That’s quite relatable as well. We have made him a little bit different, but I think Conan Doyle has just created such a brilliant character that he can be moulded accordingly.”

THE ARCHITECTURE OF A RIVALRY

Another reason that Holmes continues to endure despite innumerable retellings is because of the richness of the world he inhabits and the multifaceted characters that surround him. Their intricate natures allow for multiple interpretations, thereby securing longevity in the public consciousness over eras, but also giving us scope to see ourselves in them throughout our lives, from the naiveté of youth to the astuteness (and sometimes disenchantment) of old age. The darker the character, the more at home we feel because somewhere, we understand what shapes such a person. Which is why, through all retellings, we are slightly in love with James Moriarty despite him being one of fiction’s greatest villains.

In the world of Young Sherlock, Holmes and Moriarty are not just friends but comrades-in-arms who regularly save each other from bullets, prison and falling prey to their own self-defeating beliefs. The heart of the plot may be the conspiracy surrounding the disappearance of Chinese princess Gulun Shou'an (played to perfection by Zine Tseng), but truly, the soul of the show is “why one man chooses darkness and the other doesn’t and also how easy it is to trip over into the dark part,” as Parkhill tells us.

Is it nature or nurture? Is the darkness inbuilt in Moriarty, or is it a result of the things that have happened to him? That’s a question that has no neat answer; one that everyone has to discover for themselves.

For Dónal Finn, who plays a young Moriarty in the show, the answer to why we are drawn to morally complex characters is simpler—we could all do with a spoonful of that spirit of wildness. “I think we can’t help but be drawn to people who just see the risks and do it anyway—and do it with a sense of ease, which I think comes very easily to Moriarty. He’s not unaware of danger, but I think there is also a blind optimism to choosing chaos and believing that you’re going to come out the other side of it unscratched,” he says with a laugh.

But does evil exist without good? A shadow requires light, after all. That is another subtext that the series has allowed the creators to explore. Parkhill and Finn compare the relationship between Holmes and Moriarty to the collision of particles in a hadron collider—each sparking the other’s essence, birthing a whole new world. “The idea is that if Sherlock hadn’t met Moriarty, he wouldn’t have become Sherlock. I think it’s an action-reaction; the two of them colliding sets them off in different directions. I always think that if Moriarty hadn’t met Sherlock, he’d probably be a junior professor somewhere at Oxford,” says Parkhill.

It is testimony to Doyle’s remarkable world-building and character creation that, after more than a century since Moriarty’s debut in 1893’s The Final Problem (it being one of only two direct appearances he makes in the original works), we are still discovering him, intellectually and philosophically. And perhaps, another reason why Doyle’s hero remains so pivotal in fiction—he is a question to which there is no easy answer.

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