In two new Sherlock Holmes movies under production, Borat, alias Sacha Baron Cohen, will play Dr Watson with Will Ferrell as Sherlock; the second version features Robert Downey, fresh from his Ironman success, as the great detective, reinvented as a macho type cop with Jude Law as the good doctor. Such outré Holmes pastiches worry purists. Film adaptations (except the Granada series with Jeremy Brett, which I will return to later) have seldom been faithful to the Conan Doyle stories. Mark Frost, the co-creator of the cult TV series, Twin Peaks, has a series where Arthur Conan Doyle himself is the detective! One of the earliest Hollywood pastiches, if you remember, was Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution — where Holmes is treated for drug addiction by Freud!
Revisionism and refashioning is the order of the day, and the Holmes stories in contemporary fiction have seen plenty of such pastiche making. The fantasy these pastiches fulfill are not just for Sherlockians (who very often scrutinise — more than read them — for mistakes; though the efforts of the newer pastiches should please them because they reflect a deep knowledge of "Holmesiana") but for all of us who yearn for more cases that break the canon by taking the great detective from Victorian London and placing him in the modern world with newer and more baffling problems to solve. Since the time Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Final Problem’ and later resurrected him, contemporary writers (and not just mystery writers) have been paying their own homage to Doyle and Holmes by featuring the great detective in original stories, novels and essays.
These take the form of Holmes pastiches to imaginary versions of Sherlock Holmes' life after retirement to the long lost adventures of the detective. For instance, the latest pastiche, Dust And Shadows: An Account of the Ripper Killingsby Dr. John H. Watson (2009) by Lyndsay Faye, has the Baker Street detective solving the case of Jack the Ripper. Or take The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon, where Holmes is simply referred to as “the old man”, never by his name!
Chabon based his story on something most fans know — that after retirement Holmes moved from London to Sussex, where he spent his days keeping bees. Holmes is now 89, and rooms with a Malayalee family! (Reverend and Mrs Panicker, originally from Kerala.) When a mysterious mute boy visits him with a remarkable parrot that utters numbers in German, the detective is once again compelled to pick up his magnifying glass and go to work.
Laurie King's Mary Russell mystery series imagines a romance for Holmes. Mary meets Holmes in his bee-keeping days, becomes his apprentice, marries him and they travel the world together, embarking on new cases. One of the books — The Game — is even set in India. In Mitch Cullins’ A Slight Trick Of The Mind, Holmes is a frail, forgetful but brilliant 93, reminiscing about a recent trip to Japan! Both Watson and Mycroft are dead, and Holmes spends his time bee-keeping and writing letters. In a short story by Stephen King called The Doctor's Case, Dr Watson solves the case.
Leslie Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and more recently the author of The Life And Times of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, John H. Watson, M.D., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Other Notable Personages speculates that such fervent pastiche making could be because Doyle told us so little about the detective, leaving it to us to fill in the blanks. “There are a lot of blank pages in the biography,” notes Klinger. “The very nature of a Victorian male leaves a great deal to explore, because the standard code of conduct was that you didn’t talk about your personal life.” He points out that we know little about the detective’s family life. He also wonders if we “should take Holmes at his word that he abhors romance?”
I came late to Sherlock Holmes. The whirring whodunit mechanics of Agatha Christie and the flamboyant ingenuity of Hercule Poirot's grey cells acted as effective red herrings early in my mystery-reading life, leading me away from the two usual suspects — Conan Doyle and Holmes. I wanted plot and cleverness and Christie supplied that; Doyle and Holmes provided elegance, style and suspense, but I didn't see that until I discovered Jeremy Brett. Brett's wildly stylish and yet precise interpretation of Sherlock Holmes in the Granada television series (televised in the 1980s by Doordarshan on Sunday mornings and later on cable) was mesmerising, addictive fun. His intense, stylised performance that didn't shy away from the detective's drug dependency — and the meticulous, atmospheric production of the series — made Doyle's originality and intellect come alive. (My favourite Watson was the second one, played by the gentle Edward Hardwicke.)
I will end with three marvelous pastiches closer home. The first and best known work: Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, concerning the detective's long lost adventure in Tibet. And then two overlooked, very desi Holmes tributes: Vithal Rajan’s Holmes Of The Raj (Writer’s Workshop, 2006) and Neelum Saran Gour’s Messers Dickens, Doyle and Wodehouse Pvt. Ltd (Halcyon Books, 2005). In Gour’s Messers, Jeeves has recently joined as butler to Holmes, and several characters of Dickens are his clients. Rajan’s stories are set in colonial India, where Holmes and Watson cross paths with Tagore, Vivekananda, Ramanujan, Annie Besant, Jinnah et al! And watch a cricket match in Bombay!
Personalities 
In two new Sherlock Holmes movies under production, Borat, alias Sacha Baron Cohen, will play Dr Watson with Will Ferrell as Sherlock; the second version features Robert Downey, fresh from his Ironman success, as the great detective, reinvented as a macho type cop with Jude Law as the good doctor. Such outré Holmes pastiches worry purists. Film adaptations (except the Granada series with Jeremy Brett, which I will return to later) have seldom been faithful to the Conan Doyle stories. Mark Frost, the co-creator of the cult TV series, Twin Peaks, has a series where Arthur Conan Doyle himself is the detective! One of the earliest Hollywood pastiches, if you remember, was Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution — where Holmes is treated for drug addiction by Freud! 
Revisionism and refashioning is the order of the day, and the Holmes stories in contemporary fiction have seen plenty of such pastiche making. The fantasy these pastiches fulfill are not just for Sherlockians (who very often scrutinise — more than read them — for mistakes; though the efforts of the newer pastiches should please them because they reflect a deep knowledge of "Holmesiana") but for all of us who yearn for more cases that break the canon by taking the great detective from Victorian London and placing him in the modern world with newer and more baffling problems to solve. Since the time Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Final Problem’ and later resurrected him, contemporary writers (and not just mystery writers) have been paying their own homage to Doyle and Holmes by featuring the great detective in original stories, novels and essays. 
Laurie King's Mary Russell mystery series imagines a romance for Holmes. Mary meets Holmes in his bee-keeping days, becomes his apprentice, marries him and they travel the world together, embarking on new cases. One of the books — The Game — is even set in India. In Mitch Cullins’ A Slight Trick Of The Mind, Holmes is a frail, forgetful but brilliant 93, reminiscing about a recent trip to Japan! Both Watson and Mycroft are dead, and Holmes spends his time bee-keeping and writing letters. In a short story by Stephen King called The Doctor's Case, Dr Watson solves the case. 
I will end with three marvelous pastiches closer home. The first and best known work: Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, concerning the detective's long lost adventure in Tibet. And then two overlooked, very desi Holmes tributes: Vithal Rajan’s Holmes Of The Raj (Writer’s Workshop, 2006) and Neelum Saran Gour’s Messers Dickens, Doyle and Wodehouse Pvt. Ltd (Halcyon Books, 2005). In Gour’s Messers, Jeeves has recently joined as butler to Holmes, and several characters of Dickens are his clients. Rajan’s stories are set in colonial India, where Holmes and Watson cross paths with Tagore, Vivekananda, Ramanujan, Annie Besant, Jinnah et al! And watch a cricket match in Bombay!
