It doesn’t take a sleuth to tell you that Sherlock Holmes is cooler than James Bond. 007 may drink and gamble, but Holmes is the emperor of his own mind palace. Bond may drive an Aston Martin and fight with his fists, but Holmes can captivate a room with nothing more than his words. If you can think at the speed of light, you don’t need a pen that’s also a grenade.

So there should be cause for grave concern that the greatest mind in fiction is currently channelling the secret service agent whose main objective is to kill baddies but try not to get the dinner jacket dirty. Meetings must be held and pitchforks held aloft. This cannot stand.



The detective at 221B Baker Street has always occupied the natural realm. His capabilities, while breathtaking, are just about comprehensible. Holmes uses science and a phenomenal application of logic to make sense of physical evidence. Unlike Bond, he is just about human enough to remind us of people we have met at parties. He is a nerd, not an action figure; a scientist, not a spy. But, as Sherlock’s stakes have risen, and as the guns and assassins have multiplied, it is starting to feel worryingly like we are watching villains be taken to task by a mutation named Sherlock Bond.

Arthur Conan Doyle tells us in his short stories that Holmes has considerable athletic abilities, but chooses to keep these skills – boxing, bartitsu and singlestick – a titillating prospect: a stockinged leg poking out from behind a curtain. Because the most scintillating thing about Holmes is his mind, his displays of physical prowess ought to be rationed. Conan Doyle wanted his protagonist to rise above the cheap thrills of the penny dreadful. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss should be aware that their protagonist is at risk of suffering the fate Conan Doyle swerved.

For a while, there was a clear line between the BBC show and the Guy Ritchie films that took inspiration from the same detective. Ritchie’s films are absurdly, knowingly over-the-top; his Holmes is played by a man who has spent most of his 40s in a red superhero outfit. The only thing anyone remembers about the films is that Robert Downey Jr does some good bare-knuckle boxing – and that at the end of the first film, Holmes doesn’t just fight his adversary, he fights him while wobbling precariously on top of Tower Bridge. Given that they are not based on any of the stories, Ritchie’s films may as well fly free, entirely divorced from the Baker Street detective. They are, as Michael Sragow writes in The New Yorker, camp.

When its budgets and audience were smaller, Sherlock could not have been accused of being camp. It mapped out Holmes’ mental machinations with verve and integrity. It was mischievous but loyal to the source material; and, crucially, it felt plausible.

The problems with the show, once so surprising and so vital, began in series three, when it had become a phenomenon. A single decision shoulders much of the blame. When Moffat, Gatiss or both decided that Mary Watson just had to be a ninja assassin with a murky past, they took ill-advised liberties with Conan Doyle’s stories in what one can only assume was an attempt to make the programme even sexier. It failed. None of the scenes involving Mary ring true. How can the viewer be expected to believe that both John Watson’s best friend and his wife could be waist-deep in such extraordinarily cool activities? The show began to feel implausible, a fate from which it has never recovered.

As the Miss Marple TV series reached the autumn of its years, its writers did not decide that what the character really needed was to pump lead into some bad guys. Poirot would not have been a better show if the moustachioed detective had an assistant who was also a Navy SEAL. There is obviously an audience and an appetite for abseiling assassins, machine-gun shootouts and Benedict Cumberbatch getting sopping wet while kicking ass in an expensive suit – as he does in latest episode The Six Thatchers. But, like the perverse instincts that lurk in the palaces of our minds, this is an appetite that ought to be resisted. Sherlock’s unofficial tagline is “brainy is the new sexy”. It feels like it gave up being brainy a while ago. Soon it may even cease to be sexy. Before you know it, it will have become James Bond.