My first encounter with the venerable Sherlock Holmes was not the Conan Doyle stories, but in fact the rather dodgy series of B movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce which occasionally turned up on the Saturday arvo matinee program. Some people wish to argue that Rathbone’s rendering of Holmes was the best ever—I don’t agree but he was certainly very good and way classier than the movies he inhabited. And Nigel Bruce doing Watson as a bumbling dolt was right over the top, but none-the-less fun.
    The series of twelve movies began with a pretty good go at The Hound of the Baskervilles, and then a shot at melding the Adventures into a single narrative, but after that they pretty much abandoned Doyle altogether. Thence the series spun increasingly out of control in much the same manner that the James Bond movies would three decades later. They moved him to contemporary times (1942) and had him chasing Nazis and making patriotic speeches, with titles like The Voice of Terror, The Secret Weapon, Sherlock Holmes Goes to Washington (as if he would), and my personal favourite Spider Woman. They got sillier as they proceeded, and only just outlasted the war.