Sherlock Holmes genre

Arthur Conan Doyle began his mystery series of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1891. The first short story he published is called, “A Scandal in Bohemia”. Nearly 100 years later the story was adapted into a television episode that was a part of a larger series of stories; 30 years later, in 2012, another television series was created. The modern television version of the original Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia, “A Scandal in Belgravia”, deviates from the traditional mystery genre, by adding its own concepts to the mystery, including: connected deception and an unpredictable resolution with the ultimate purpose of leading the audience astray.

All of the Sherlock Holmes stories are a part of the mystery genre. There is a laundry list of expectations of a mystery, but a typical mystery starts out with a crime or a form of a puzzle that needs to be solved. To solve the mystery the story has to include a suspect and evidence. The evidence is usually obviously connected to a suspect, which will eventually lead to a resolution. Though the story starts out as a mystery, as the story carries on, the resolution becomes more and more predictable. Then there are smaller but influential parts of the story that make up a mystery, which are times of inference, suspense, and foreshadowing. Foreshadowing often helps in predicting the resolution. Though each aspect of a mystery are very individualized, they ultimately work together to assemble a well developed mystery.

Undoubtedly in order for this episode, “A Scandal in Belgravia”, to be considered a mystery it must maintain some of the characteristics mentioned above. In this episode there is a problem being solved by Sherlock and Watson; they are summoned by the royals fami...

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... ultimate purpose of these two aspects of the mystery are to make the Sherlock Holmes stories unpredictable compared to other mysteries. It was also vital that this episode didn’t strictly copy the original story or the 1980’s television version of the story. This episode took the challenge of this genre to express that there are mysteries that go by the book to make it a mystery, but it is also possible for it to be out of the box. This episode does this by incorporating the connected deceptions and with an unpredictable resolution.

This modern version, “A Scandal in Belgravia”, creates its own attack at what it thinks a mystery is. The story takes a turn and utilises a connected deception to trick the audience into predicting a false ending; ending the mystery with an unpredictable resolution. Its goal being to articulate a distinct form of the common mystery.