夏洛克·福尔摩斯经典现代重塑.docVIP

夏洛克·福尔摩斯经典现代重塑 　　 　　As if all of a sudden, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduring hero—Sherlock Holmes—is everywhere. The last few months have brought us not only the smart BBC series, but also the blockbusting Robert Downey Jr. movie, which are the latest two on-screen adaptations of this classic figure vying for viewers’ attention.2 But if you dig a little harder, you will discover that Sherlock Holmes has made the Guinness Book of Records as the most frequently portrayed literary character in film history. And more than 70 actors have played the role in more than 200 films. 　　As the critic Michael Dirda3 remarks in his study of Conan Doyle, published late 2011: “... it is only Holmes who truly makes our hearts beat faster. As the popular Jeremy Brett television series, the steampunk Sherlock Holmes of Robert Downey Jr. and the BBC’s 21st century text-messaging Sherlock have shown, Holmes remains a great marketing commodity and a timeless archetype, adaptable to any era.”4 　　Everyone reads, or sees, or at least hears of something about Sherlock Holmes. Then how would you describe him? Resourceful, dynamic, enigmatic? Most Sherlockian fans know him as the master of deduction, a consulting detective, the only one in the world as he invented the job. He’s brilliant and a proper5 genius. Should you ever meet him, you might picture him as a tall, acerbic British gentleman wearing a cloak and deerstalker cap, habitually smoking a pipe.6 　　But establishing a classic image of British detective is certainly not Holmes’s biggest accomplishment. He was born in a good time for crime detection, of which the scientific upsurge of the 19th century yielded various discoveries.7 A method of analyzing blood stains was established in 1813, one for tracing arsenic in 1836 and one for identifying vegetable toxins in 1851.8 More than anything else however, it was Holmes and Conan Doyle’s stories, appearing from 1887 onwards, that turned such insights into an investigatory system. 　　It’s t