When did Holmes start getting physical?

[rodlox]

this applies to all incarnations and inspired-bys of Sherlock Holmes.

I was watching a commercial ad for the upcoming Elementary, and

Comments

[prochytes]

1. Watson notes among Holmes' characteristics "expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman" in A Study in Scarlet.

2. In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", Holmes unbends an iron poker which the villain has just bent in order to intimidate him.

3. Holmes recalls in "The Adventure of the Empty House" how he tossed Moriarty into the Reichenbach Falls.

4. Also in "The Adventure of the Empty House", he remembers the case of "Mathews, who knocked out my left canine in the waiting-room at Charing Cross".

(Edited for a typo.)

[scarfman]

Watson's descriptions of Holmes' behavior at crime scenes always included actions such as throwing himself on the ground to examine things no one else saw.

[rodlox]

ah, okay; so it is a case of my just not having read all the canon. (the stories I've read, were of clients coming to Holmes, telling him their case, and he solves it before they leave); Scandal in Bohemia being the exception to that, and that was more disguises on both sides)

thank you.

Not the palid dreamer of Baker Street

[tazlet]

Holmes has never been afraid to get physical - this is a man who fights, knows horses, gets his teeth knocked out, tracks with dogs, organizes street urchins and camps on the moors. Speaking of ASIB Watson describes him thus: "...while Holmes, who loathed every from of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature." In the same story he disguises himself successfully as both a red-faced drunken unemployed groom, and a non-conformist minister. The contrast is between action and inaction. No cars in SIB - we would have volumes of essays on the subject.

[rodlox]

*curses my English*

he knows how to fight & can fight, I know. it was the "tasting the floor" that I was skeptical of. (but elsewhere in this thread, i was corrected on that)

>No cars in SIB
poor choice of word on my part; sorry.

[tazlet]

Ah! You meant when did he become Flamboyantly Physical to The Max? - I'd blame it on Guy Ritchie who seems to never have met an allusion he couldn't expand.

[mickawber_fics]

Such as, for example, marrying Madonna. ;-)