“You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae,” I remarked.
“I appreciate their importance. Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses. Here, too, is a curious little work upon the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand, with lithotypes of the hands of slaters, sailors, cork-cutters, compositors, weavers, and diamond-polishers. That is a matter of great practical interest to the scientific detective – especially in cases of unclaimed bodies, or in discovering the antecedents of criminals".
"To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird’s-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato".
"[Le Villard] is now translating my small works into French.”
“Your works?”
“Oh, didn’t you know?” [Holmes] cried, laughing. “Yes, I have been guilty of several monographs. They are all upon technical subjects. Here, for example, is one ‘Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos.’ In it I enumerate a hundred and forty forms of cigar, cigarette, and pipe tobacco, with coloured plates illustrating the difference in the ash".
[Holmes] tossed over, as he spoke, a crumpled sheet of foreign notepaper. I glanced my eyes down it, catching a profusion of notes of admiration, with stray magnifiques, coup-de-maîtres and tours-de-force, all testifying to the ardent admiration of the Frenchman.
“He speaks as a pupil to his master,” said I.
“Oh, [le Villard] rates my assistance too highly,” said Sherlock Holmes lightly. “He has considerable gifts himself. He possesses two out of the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the power of observation and that of deduction. He is only wanting in knowledge, and that may come in time".
“My practice has extended recently to the Continent,” said Holmes after a while, filling up his old brier-root pipe. “I was consulted last week by Francois le Villard, who, as you probably know, has come rather to the front lately in the French detective service. He has all the Celtic power of quick intuition, but he is deficient in the wide range of exact knowledge which is essential to the higher developments of his art. The case was concerned with a will and possessed some features of interest. I was able to refer him to two parallel cases, the one at Riga in 1857, and the other at St. Louis in 1871, which have suggested to him the true solution".
More than once during the years that I had lived with [Sherlock Holmes] in Baker Street I had observed that a small vanity underlay my companion’s quiet and didactic manner.
"I [...] embodied [our first case] in a small brochure, with the somewhat fantastic title of ‘A Study in Scarlet.’”
[Holmes] shook his head sadly.
“I glanced over it,” said he. “Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”
“But the romance was there,” I remonstrated. “I could not tamper with the facts.”
“Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it”.
"When Gregson, or Lestrade, or Athelney Jones are out of their depths – which, by the way, is their normal state – the matter is laid before me. I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist’s opinion. I claim no credit in such cases. My name figures in no newspaper. The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward".
“My mind,” [Holmes] said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
“The only unofficial detective?” I said, raising my eyebrows.
“The only unofficial consulting detective,” he answered. “I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection".
Hallo dear! Thank you for your kind message, and sorry for the delay in answering.
I must say that, even if my holmesian obsession is HUGE, and even if I’ve tried and try to watch as much adaptations as possible, I can’t claim I’ve watched them all, and some I watched so much time ago that I can’t say I remember them well.
Anyway, on the whole, I guess that almost ALL the serial adaptations have, in greater or smaller measure, represented Holmes’ ability with disguises.
Certainly it was displayed often enough in Basil Rathbone’s movies:
But the mariner’s diguise (a pretty canonical reference) occurred also in Ronald Howard’s Sherlock Holmes:
Not to mention the adaptation starring Arthur Wontner:
And how could we forget our beloved Basil of Baker Street?
Curiously, the Chinese disguise makes another appearance in the second of Guy Ritchie’s movies, Sherlock Holmes - Game of Shadows, where also the other very popular canonical reference (the old lady disguise) is portraied (well, more or less…):
This latter disguise even appears in Myiazaki’s anime Sherlock Hound:
And of course there are PLENTY of Holmes’ disguises in Granada’s Sherlock Holmes, Jeremy Brett being one of the most wonderful interpreters of canonical, Victorian Holmes with all his peculiarities:
But, of course, even the first Russian Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson series - the one starring Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin - does justice to Holmes’ acting abilities since the very first episode:
And they tell me that the new (2013) Russian series is not devoid of holmesian disguises, too:
But, of course, there are more, much more examples, both in series I cannot presently recall (for instance, I seem to remember that even Geoffrey Whitehead, in the 1979 Polish-American series, appeared one or two times in one of Holmes’ most ‘classical’ disguises…), and in single movies or TV-movies.
For instance, I can remember a Christopher Plummer’s Holmes in disguise in Murder by Decree:
But I’m sure there are many, many more!
So, everybody, please add your contribution to this little list!
