Mark Mason

This new Sherlock Holmes exhibition will have Cumberbitches salivating

Have you ever experienced the joys of Jawohl, meine Herr’n? If not I strongly advise an appointment with YouTube. The song features in the 1954 film Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war (‘The Man who was Sherlock Holmes’), and is performed by Hans Albers and Heinz Ruhmann, mainly while soaping themselves in the bath (one each – it’s not that kind of film). Albers and Ruhmann do not, as you might expect, play Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, but rather men pretending to be Holmes and Watson in order to solve a crime. At one point they’re prosecuted for the impersonation, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (an actor, not the real one) appearing in court to claim the characters as his own. All in all it’s the perfect example of just how far a literary creation can travel from his original form, in terms both of geography and lunacy.

A poster for the film features in Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die, an exhibition that’s just opened at the Museum of London. The detective’s many incarnations are brilliantly captured. Cumberbitches will salivate at the coat Benedict wore in the recent TV version, while traditionalists can enjoy the original drawings by Sidney Paget, the first man to illustrate Holmes for The Strand magazine. It was Paget who decorated the famously powerful bonce with a deerstalker, a hat that isn’t mentioned in any of the stories. Conan Doyle was supremely relaxed about his hero being changed and twisted and re-interpreted. As early as 1899 the American dramatist William Gillette wrote to ask if he could provide Holmes with a wife in a play he was writing. ‘You may marry him, murder him, or do what you like to him,’ replied the author.

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