Indeed in the same essay Chandler himself dismisses Holmes as “mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue.” And of course there are elements of the solid platinum poniard in even the earliest stories in The Adventure of the Speckled Band the twin murder weapons are a fake bellpull and a fictional viper, and in A Case of Identity the twist turns out to be that a woman’s vanished fiancé is actually her stepfather in disguise. People tend to categorize Holmes (naturally enough) as part of the “English” tradition of detective fiction-the sort that’s all stately homes and improbable coincidences, that revolves around, as Chandler puts it, “how somebody stabbed Mrs Pottington Postlethwaite with the solid platinum poniard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lame in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests”. But early on in his life, one of the most striking features of Holmes’s stories is that they have a surprisingly grounded view of crime, and one that arguably fits better into the hardboiled tradition of Hammett and Chandler than the cozy tradition of Christie. And of course the Napoleon of Crime is an iconic part of the canon, especially the later canon which increasingly referenced the professor, and developed a habit of pitting the great detective against ever vaster and more elaborate conspiracies (culminating in His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Homes where he goes up against an actual German spy ring).
But something that always bugs me about film and television Sherlockiana (especially the more modern, more big-budget adaptations) is how quickly they go from zero to Moriarty. I love me a good Sherlock Holmes adaptation.
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