Creating Your Own Memory Palace

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   Decide on a blueprint for your palace. While a memory palace can be a purely imagined place, it is easier to base it upon a place that exists in the real world and that you are familiar with. A basic palace could be your bedroom, for example. Larger memory palaces can be based on your house, a cathedral, a walk to the corner store, or your whole town. The larger or more detailed the real place, the more information you can store in the corresponding mental space.
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   Define a route. If you will need to remember things in a certain order, it is essential that you follow a specific route through your palace, both in the real world and in your mind. Thus, once you’ve decided what your memory palace is, decide how you will travel through it. If you don’t really need to remember things in order, this step is unnecessary, but still useful, as it makes memorizing your palace easier.
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   Identify specific storage locations in your palace or along your route. When you use your memory palace you will put individual things to be remembered (a number, a name, or a part of a speech that you will be giving, for example), in specific locations. Thus, you need to identify as many locations as you think you will need. Walk through your structure or along your route and really observe it. If your palace is actually a route, such as your drive to work, the storage locations can be landmarks along the way: your neighbor’s house, a crossroads, a statue, or a skyscraper, for example. If the palace is a structure, you can put things in the different rooms. Within rooms, you can identify smaller locations, such as paintings, pieces of furniture, and so on. The key is to make sure the locations you choose are distinct from each other so that no location can be mistaken for another.
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   Memorize your memory palace. For your memory palace to be effective, you need to commit it to memory perfectly. The best way to do this is to actually draw out a blueprint (or a map, if the palace is a route) which shows the landmarks or storage locations you have chosen. Try visualizing the palace when you are not there, and then check your mental image against the map to make sure you have remembered every location and put them in the correct order. Picture the landmarks in as much detail as possible: make sure your mental image includes their colors, sizes, smells, and any other defining characteristics.
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   Place things to be remembered in your palace. Once you have constructed your palace and have it firmly implanted in your mind, you are ready to use it. Put a manageable amount of information in each place. For example, if your palace is your house, and you are trying to remember a speech, you might place the first few sentences on your doormat and the next few in the keyhole of your door. Don’t put too much information in any one place, and if certain things must be kept separate from others, put them in different places. Make sure that you place things along your route in the order in which you need to remember them, if applicable.
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   Use symbols. You don’t necessarily need to put a whole string of words or numbers in a given location in order to be able to remember it, and trying to do so can be unwieldy and counterproductive. Generally, all you need to store in each location is something that will jog your memory, something that will lead you to the actual idea you’re trying to remember. Thus, if you are trying to remember a ship, picture an anchor on your couch. If the ship is the U.S.S. Wisconsin, picture the anchor made out of cheese. Symbols are shorthand and make memories more manageable, but they also can be more effective than picturing the actual thing you are trying to remember.
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   Be creative. The images you put in your palace should, obviously, be as memorable as possible. Generally, images will be more memorable if they are absurd (out of the ordinary)[see warnings] , or if they are attached to some strong emotion or personal experience. The number 124 is not particularly memorable, but an image of a spear shaped like the number 1, going through a swan (which looks like the number 2), and splitting the swan into 4 pieces is. Yes, it’s disturbing, but that’s part of what makes it stick in your mind.
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   Stock your palace with other mnemonics. There are many simpler mnemonics that you can use in combination with the memory palace. As an example, suppose you need to remember a great deal about music composition. As you enter your kitchen, you could see a little boy eating a piece of chocolate fudge, which would evoke the first-letter mnemonic “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge," which would in turn allow you to recall the order of notes on the lines in treble clef (EGBDF).
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   Explore your palace. Once you have stocked your palace with evocative images, you need to go through it and look at them. The more you explore your palace, the more easily you will recall its contents on demand. In your mind you want to see James Joyce, for example, sitting on your toilet as if he belonged there and was really an integral part of your bathroom decor.
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    Use your palace. Once you have memorized the contents of your palace you can recall them simply by mentally walking through it or looking around it. If you need to give a speech, just follow your route in order as you do so. If you need to remember that your girlfriend’s birthday is March 16, simply go into your bedroom and see the soldiers “marching" on the bed to the tune of the 80s cult classic “Sixteen Candles." With practice you will be able to start anywhere in your palace or along your route to recall a specific piece of information.
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    Build new palaces. A memory palace can be reused over and over again if you need only commit things to memory for a short time. Just replace the existing contents with new ones, and you’ll soon remember only the new ones. If you need to remember the contents of your palace for a long time, you can keep that palace as it is and create new ones in which to store other information as needed. If your house contains the phone numbers of everyone you know, you can walk to your workplace if you need to remember the order of a deck of cards.

EditTips

• There are many variations of the memory palace, such as the Roman Room and the Journey. They are all based on the Method of Loci, which sprang from the recognition that people are very good at remembering locations, and if you can associate abstract or unfamiliar ideas with a well-known location, you can more easily recall the things you want to.
• Also, keep in mind that the modern age of computers brings many easy ways to build your own virtual palaces or simply choose from many of the other creations already online and take a virtual tour of them whenever you like. The impact is somewhat stronger than a drawing which makes the imprint into your mind quite effortless.
• There are a number of books and memory-enhancement products available to help you learn how to build a memory palace. They can be costly, however, and not all are effective for all people. Practice the steps above, and you may save yourself some money.
• You can use objects that have pronunciation of letters in the beginning that are the same as the word you are trying to memorize. This method will be useful for the words which are new for you. A dictionary can help you in this case.
• At the World Memory Championships, top competitors memorize the order of 20 shuffled decks of cards in an hour and more than 500 random digits in 15 minutes, among other events. Think you have what it takes? Believe it or not, almost everybody has the capability to perform such amazing feats. Competitive people who memorize don’t necessarily have “better memories" than the rest of us; instead, they learn and perfect a variety of mnemonics (memory aids) to improve their ability to quickly learn and recall just about anything.
• You will need to prepare each new memory palace as you did the first, so you may want to develop new ones before you need them.
• Be persistent. The memory palace is a very powerful tool, but it is not necessarily easy to master. If you’re looking for a quick fix to help you keep track of things, get a pen and paper, but if you really want to improve your ability to memorize things, take the time to learn and practice this method.

Great Quotes by Sherlock Holmes

"In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the every-day affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically...Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically."

 Sherlock Holmes Quote

-A Study in Scarlet

-Chapter 7 - Conclusion

Do Not Theorized Before Gathering Data

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-A Study in Scarlet

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.  Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-A Scandal in Bohemia

"Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Adventure of the Cardboard Box

Do Not Reason From Insufficient Data

"Data! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

"I had," he said, "come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Adventure of the Speckled Band

Data 

"There is nothing like first-hand evidence."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-A Study in Scarlet

Notice Trifles 

"You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Bascombe Valley Mystery

"They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-A Study in Scarlet

"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-A Case of Identity

Obvious Facts Can be Deceptive

"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Bascombe Valley Mystery

Don't Just See, Observe!

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Hound of the Baskervilles

Chapter 3: "The Problem

'You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.'

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-A Scandal in Bohemia

Avoid Emotion

"Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Sign of Four

'The emotional qualities are atagonistic to clear reasoning.'

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Sign of Four

Recognize Vital Facts

 "It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Reigate Puzzle

Eliminate the Impossible and What Remains Is Truth

"Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Sign of Four

Chapter 1: "The Science of Deduction"

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Sign of Four

'...when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Blanched Soldier

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'It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Beryl Coronet

Additional Notes

"Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person."

Sherlock Holmes Quote

-Silver Blaze

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"I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather" than a hindrance."

 Sherlock Holmes Quote

-A Study in Scarlet

-Chapter 7 - Conclusion

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'"he more outre' and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it."

Sherlock Holmes

-The Hound of the Baskervilles

Chapter 15 - "A Retrospection"

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"Any truth is better than indefinite doubt."

  Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Yellow Face

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"I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty" 

 Sherlock Holmes Quote

-The Sign of Four 

All quotes on this web site were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle unless otherwise stated.

THE TESTAMENT OF SHERLOCK HOLMES REVIEW

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes is odd. It’s the sixth of Ukrainian developer Frogwares’s adventure games featuring the English Great Detective and his companion. Its formal relatives are point-and-click adventure games, but it also shares something with other Ukrainian developed games likeMetro 2033: apathy (or maybe even antipathy) toward making you ever feel comfortable. But where Metro 2033 and others refuse to ever let you feel physically comfortable, Testament uses Holmes’s arrogance to keep your opinion of your mental prowess in check.

Whether it takes you two seconds or two hours to solve a puzzle, Holmes will often say, “It is simplicity itself!” when you finish. It’s identical to the way he treats Watson: indirectly patronizing via self-praise. At times he appears to have little qualms of manipulating Watson, treating him as nothing more than an errand-dog. The game does this as well—almost as if it’s saying, “Do this. Trust me. It’s in your best interests, and I’ll explain why later, when you’re ready to understand.”

So at best, you can hope to be as smart as Watson, who spends most of the game in the dark about what is going on around him. You understand his confusion—even when you’re controlling Holmes, it’s pretty obvious that you don’t know nearly as much about what is going on as the detective does. It situates you in the same position as reading a Holmes story, where you’re sort of solving a mystery but also marveling at the spectacle of Deduction.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories have a metanarrative tying them all together—like a modern police procedural, each mystery is self-contained, with the personal lives of the main characters providing a throughline linking the stories. The books as we know them exist in the Holmes world as chronicles written and published by Watson. Holmes knows that people read about Holmes. There’s a framing story here, too: Three children find a manuscript in the back of a Watson marionette in an attic. We’re playing their reading. Sort of.

Where Sherlock Holmes stories take Watson’s point of view, and film or television adaptations take a third person perspective, this game lets you shift between the two.

It seems like a first person perspective would make us align with a character more —literally seeing things from their point of view. Except the problem with that literalization is that it ignores the empathy needed to understand someone else’s point of view. Plenty of people see the same things (in the way that light bounces off an object and onto their retina), but that doesn’t mean they see them the same way. That’s why so many protagonists are silent: They’re our vehicles, not our friends.

This, obviously, isn’t going to work with Sherlock Holmes, a character who’s been around for a hundred years, mostly in the public domain. His entries in that folktale-in-a-commercial-culture genre, fan fiction, have become an entire industry in and of themselves. Holmes is defined by being smarter than everyone.

To make the avatar disappear isn’t an act of erasure—it’s creating the avatar (and the world around it) in such a way that it completely jives with the player’s worldview. If dislodging identification is a bug, then challenging their bias is not a feature. If you want a world to be so big, so detailed it can blot out another one, then any cracks in the former that allow the latter to show through are going to read as flaws.

The game regularly swaps your control back and forth between Holmes and Watson, though you’re never fully in control of either.

When controlling Holmes, sometimes Watson will respond to a clue you click on, or ask a question that you’ve chosen from the Mass Effect style conversation options. Loading screens tell you that if you’re confused, you talk to Watson. Doing so usually causes him to ask Holmes what to do, allowing the detective to give the player a hint.

Conan Doyle’s stories about Holmes weren’t about the reader solving them—they were about Watson and the reader being wowed by Holmes’s prowess. Watson “writes” the stories after they’ve happened, but their solution often hinges on an esoteric bit of knowledge Holmes possesses or a surprising observation he makes—knowledge and observations that aren’t revealed to us until Watson reaches the point in his story when they’re revealed to him.

So the game doesn’t let us fully become Holmes, or Watson, or the children reading the book. We shift between perspectives—something that fits in with the shifting of thinking that adventure games require of you. They’re worlds where Occam’s razor has been dulled and the most complicated explanation is more likely than the least.

Often, the importance of things is situational. One sequence finds Watson making his way through the London sewers for, to be honest, I don’t know what reason. My notes don’t say, and I’m pretty sure the game didn’t really make a logical case for it (though the events of the story make a very strong thematic case). He pulls on a rope attached to a “heavy object”, dislodging a corpse that had been held under the surface of the water by an anchor. Watson acknowledges the bloated body before announcing, in ultimate adventure game fashion, “If I can get the anchor, I can use it as a grappling hook!” Which you do. And then he never mentions the body again.

The weird adventure game inventory priorities (corpse is less important than grappling hook!) aside, Watson’s descent into the underworld feels disjointed. It’s as if the narrative logic of cause-and-effect has been set aside for the symbolic: another shift in thinking. Videogames often aren’t very good at this. Maybe being part software means their bones are code, rigid rules for generating effects from player-provided cause. It makes them a good fit for Holmes’s worldview, but Watson’s symbolic travels and his premonition-nightmares suggest that there might be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Holmes’s philosophy. Hints that maybe there are other ways of knowing…

Games are also spaces through which you move, and that’s what makes up the main bulk of Testament’s play. Wander around, look at clues (conveniently marked with a magnifying glass icon whose outline changes from blue to green after you’ve gotten all the information from it), interact with objects (marked with a hand icon), talk to people (a speech bubble icon).

The icons appear when you move near them, but they can be displayed by activating Sherlock’s “Sixth Sense” (a sense that apparently is not unique to him, as this option is available no matter which character you control). Icons will appear on every item that you can see at that moment.

Because your modes of interacting with the environment in the point-and-click are limited to, well, pointing and clicking, many adventure games build the exploration segments on figuring out what you can interact with. Testament’s icons take away a lot of the trial and error of these spot hunts, but it is still possible to get stuck for a while because you can’t find one and you don’t have the camera pointed in the right direction when you trigger the Sixth Sense (There are clothes in a tree. You will probably miss them.)

The aesthetic is uncomfortable as well. Close-up investigation of tortured corpses is a regular event (It’s funny that a game that required me to prove I was over 21 to pick up is framed by children reading a story about its events). But the environment is also oppressive, the way one would expect 19th century London to be. Streets are narrow, spaces cluttered. The third person movement is slow and clunky, making it feel like things are always in your way. Even trips outside the city, to an old mill and to an old fairground, end up feeling claustrophobic and ominous in this game engine (This is a good thing).

The exploring occasionally stops and you’re presented with a puzzle—usually logic-based, although one late-game situation involving pairing clothing with its owner’s occupation requires observation beyond pattern recognition. And if you get stuck on any of these, after a short amount of time you’re given the option to skip it. Holmes will still tell you that it’s “simplicity itself!”, the snide jerk.

A few times the game will have you fill out a “deduction board”, which lists a series of clues that link together. You choose from a list of interpretations of the clues. Interpretations lead to more links that will eventually lead to the solution of the mystery at hand. These segments have no “solve this puzzle” or sixth sense option, but it is possible to make your way through these sections with trial-and-error guessing. These are the only points in the game where Holmes’s observations aren’t hidden from you, but after a successful completion the detective and Watson will discuss what you’ve just put together and explain the situation in great detail. It’s a crucial part of this kind of story: The unknown situation is robbed of its destabilizing power through the privileged narrative of the detective (and its truth is ensured by a very powerful ally: the author).

Holmes has always been a status quo stabilizer: He defends Queen and country against Victorian colonialist anxieties (go ahead and count of how many of the original stories involve either a “threat” from the lower classes or from some colonized group), a masculine ideal of rationality, repression, and Britishness defending against all outsiders.

At a time like now, when the way to make a mainstream Sherlock adaptation involves updating its time period or its tone and acknowledging that Holmes’s Great White British Paternalism is a colonialist attitude (only to turn around and reify it by proving Holmes right and his questioners wrong), the game’s dedication to both its ultracolonialist Victorian source material and its adventure-game roots can seem old-fashioned.

It’s reactionary in other ways: The masses of people you see on the streets that are starving and out of work turn out to be not dissatisfied with an unfair system but the pawns of an individual’s machinations—there’s little Occupy support here. So it goes with Holmes stories, always a battle between two Great Men—or, occasionally, Irene Adler. What’s interesting is the way that it avoids the fan fiction trap of keeping the characters static in order to use them as a kind of shorthand and actually tries to develop their characters, even if it still requires you to be familiar with some parts of the Holmes canon in order to understand just what that development is.

The Art of Deduction

Review written by John H. Watson

About the Book

Most of the books that I chose, or am asked to review, are pastiches or books by authors who have studied the many adventures Holmes and I had together. Recently there have been a few books looking at specific aspects of Holmes’ ability as the first consulting detective.

The most recent of these is entitled “The Art of Deduction” by Taz Rai and is a detailed analysis of Holmes methods against several well-known text books on logic and deduction.

It is a very well-researched book which quotes frequently and accurately from my stories to present the key skills that anyone wishing to emulate the Great Detective will need to master.

Background

Rai tells me that in writing the book he began to realise the possibilities if the average person could acquire even a modicum of the skill possessed by Holmes. In many of our adventures together the most complicated problem turns out in the end to have an absurdly simple solution. Rai suggests that we can all learn from Holmes and that with the application of a little logic, rationality and observation, we can solve problems in our own lives without resorting to help from others.

Rai wondered as he read my reminiscences if it was possible to deduce and learn to think the way Holmes does. This triggered the idea of writing The Art of Deduction. He read all my stories again plus several books on logic and philosophy. He also conducted a survey to see what Holmes fans wanted and the result is the four parts that comprise his book.

He suggests that although everyone has a vague notion of logic, by reading my stories about Holmes cases, you can begin to understand what its benefits are. He believes it is important to read and understand logic and how Holmes uses logic in his work. If Holmes is thought of as a superhero then his superpower is logic, Rai suggests. He also believes that because we can relate to Holmes as being human also it is  possible for us to attain some measure of his amazing gift. Many exercise in the gym to build muscles, lose weight, etc. and he suggests that the same approach can be applied with logic and deduction in the mind. Holmes is an example of what one can acquire, but to get there is not necessarily understood.

The book is in four parts.

Part One – A Study in Sherlock

The many facets of the personality of Holmes are analysed including the rationality of his approach to a case eschewing emotion, superstition, irrationality, and fallacies. His use of evidence, the scientific method and the acquisition of useful knowledge is discussed. We then look at his methods of abstraction and distraction, his immersion in lengthy chemical experiments, and then his intense concentration. Finally his vices.

The section draws on A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Abbey Grange, The Copper Beeches, The Norwood Builder, Silver Blaze, The Valley of Fear, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Mazarin Stone, The Man with the Twisted Lip and The Yellow Face.

Part Two – A Case in Logic

This looks at the science of logic and Rai suggests that if you read these pages you will be able to infer the possibility of a Niagara or an Atlantic from the knowledge of a single drop of water (as Holmes suggests in A Study in Scarlet). The heading of the one of the sections in Part One – Five Pillows and an Ounce of Shag – would be an appropriate setting for reading this section.

Again Rai draws heavily on the Canon to illustrate the application of logic including A Study in Scarlet, A Scandal in Bohemia, The Copper Beeches, The Yellow Face, The Sign of Four, Silver Blaze, The Norwood Builder, The Boscombe Valley Mystery and His Last Bow.

If you have ever wondered what the difference is between deduction and induction, what categorical propositions, categorical syllogisms, disjunctive syllogisms and the inductive force are then this section should make it all clear!

Part Three – The Observation Ritual

You see but you do not observe must be Holmes most common admonition, of me at least. This section deals with the need for acute and meticulous observation of detail. This is about turning the familiar saying about not being able to see the wood for the trees on its head and carefully observing the trees, branches and leaves before jumping to conclusions about the wood.

In this section he draws on The Norwood Builder, The Blue Carbuncle, The Stockbroker’s Clerk, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Reigate Squire, The Sign of Four, The Golden Pince-Nez, The Dancing Men, The Resident Patient, The Valley of Fear, The Speckled Band, The Yellow Face, and of course, A Study in Scarlet, with the unforgettable “You have been in Afganistan, I perceive”.

Part Four – The Sign of Holmesian Deduction

This section takes two of our cases – The Beryl Coronet and The Musgrave Ritual – and looks at how Holmes brings all his skills to bear on a particular problem.

As with most of our adventures, they follow a common pattern. The client arrives at states the nature of the case. Then there is the initial analysis of the problem from the facts known at that point. This indicates the need for further investigation before the denouement.

Epilogue – Real World Application

The final section gives us a real world example and takes us through the same stages as in Part Four.

In Summary

Even after many years working alongside Holmes on innumerable cases, I still struggle to apply his methods and get the results he can so easily obtain. Perhaps this is a question of innate ability coupled with intense practice. He has dedicated his whole life to it and perhaps that is what gives him the edge.

Nevertheless, this book is a very thorough analysis and maybe, just maybe, the application of the principles as Rai has laid them out may make it possible to emulate Holmes. I would be interested to hear from anyone who gives it a go and achieved some measure of success.

Finally, as you can see from the cases that are listed above (and I may have missed some), the book draws on many of our cases and it may be instructive to pick out those that Rai calls on more than others and read those ones alongside Rai’s book.

About the Author

Taz Rai is a young Business Graduate living in Australia who has given up his day job to focus on his love of writing and on someone he clearly admires. He first read about Holmes when growing up as a child and Holmes’ logical approach appealed to him. He says he doesn’t have a favourite story (his book is full of examples from all over the Canon) as he says each story showcased something new about the character of Holmes.

His favourite Holmes and Watson portrayals are,  predictably in these modern times , Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Their portrayals, particularly Cumberbatch’s thinking or maybe I should say deducing machine, must serve to illustrate how difficult in practice, even with the aid of this book, it would be to emulate Holmes.

The top 10 portrayals of Sherlock Holmes

Many actors have attempted to fill the shoes of Sherlock Holmes, but who pulled off the best portrayal of the Baker Street detective? Here’s Alex’s top 10 list...

It was 125 years ago that a young Scottish physician called Arthur Conan Doyle wrote some stories about a master detective, mainly to amuse himself between appointments at his surgery.

His creation, Sherlock Holmes, loosely based on his mentor, forensic surgeon Joseph Bell, first appeared in the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual, in a story called A Study In Scarlet. The maverick detective has since appeared numerous times in films and on television, portrayed by a cornucopia of eccentric actors from around the world, though chiefly from Britain and America.

The iconic image of deerstalker, pipe and tweed overcoat was a gift to comedians, and consequently, Holmes has been embodied by (amongst many others), Buster Keaton, Peter Cook and John Cleese. More recently, David Mitchell and Robert Webb played both Holmes and Watson in a confusing sketch where the two continually swapped roles. Avengers star Patrick Macnee is also among a handful of actors to have played both Holmes and Watson.

This top ten concentrates on actors who’ve played Sherlock Holmes in drama. There are so many great performances out there, that just bubbling under is Rupert Everett, who appeared with Ian Hart in 2004’s BBC movie, The Case Of The Silk Stocking.

It was no easy task to identify a top ten. I’d welcome your own lists and thoughts. This, then, is my personal choice, so here goes…

10. Ellie Norwood

Norwood played Holmes in 47 silent films, modelling himself on the classic illustration of the detective by Sidney Paget. A true method actor, Norwood studied the role with enormous diligence and brought a wonderful intensity to his portrayal both in film, opposite Hubert Willis as Watson, and on the stage. Although not especially well-known today, Norwood should be remembered as one of the first to establish and embody Sherlock Holmes beyond the pages of Strand magazine.

9. Nicholas Rowe

Nicholas Rowe was the star of the 1985 Steven Spielberg movie Young Sherlock Holmes. The film followed Sherlock’s early life and his first meeting with John Watson as the two were caught up in the first of many exciting mysteries. Rowe was engaging enough and the film has much to recommend it, but the idea of depicting the character’s formative years wasn’t entirely new. Some three years earlier, Guy Henry played a juvenile Holmes in ITV’s Young Sherlock made by Granada television.

8. Tom Baker

A year after leaving Doctor Who, Baker was invited to play Holmes by his former producer Barry Letts. The 1982 BBC television production of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, shown in the Sunday afternoon classic serial slot, was well received. Terence Rigby played Watson in a bluff style, akin to Nigel Bruce. The cast dubbed the production ”the Tom and Terry show”.

Later though, Baker admitted he felt he had “failed” in the role, pointing out his “dry run” for the part, in Doctor Who, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, was far more successful. While not a role he’s immediately associated with, Tom Baker was a memorable Holmes, and the part was a gift for his natural eccentricity and boundless charisma.

7. Arthur Wontner

Arthur Wontner won the role of Holmes having played Sexton Blake, a character seen as a flattering imitation of the Baker Street detective. Wontner earned appreciation from staunch Holmes experts, including Conan Doyle’s wife, for his approach to the role in the film The Sleeping Cardinal, which fused two separate stories: The Empty House and The Final Problem.

He appeared in five films in total between 1931 and 1937. All Wontner’s pictures had alternative titles to the original Conan Doyle. Silver Blaze, for instance, was later retitled Murder At The Baskervilles in an attempt to draw attention away from the successful Basil Rathbone movies. In point of fact, it can be seen as a sequel to that most famous of all Holmes stories.

6. Douglas Wilmer

Douglas Wilmer became the first television Sherlock Holmes when the BBC produced The Speckled Band in 1964 for anthology series, Detective (what took them so long?). He made a further twelve Conan Doyle stories in 1965. Basing his portrayal very much on Basil Rathbone, he played the role with just the right measure of forensic analysis and detached composure. Nigel Stock appeared as Watson, a role he continued to play when Douglas Wilmer handed over the deerstalker to Peter Cushing in 1968.

5. Robert Downey Jr

Over the course of two Guy Ritchie films, Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows (2011), the magnetic personality of Robert Downey Jr has allowed his rather crass, cynical, yet likeable portrayal of the master detective to be enjoyed by cinema-goers across the world.

Supported by Jude Law as a rather dignified Watson, Downey Jr has made the part his own and delights a new generation of fans with his unkempt eccentricity and Tigger-like enthusiasm. It’s fair to say Downey Jr can empathise with Holmes’ mood swings having had something of a rollercoaster career to date. Another film will probably seal his reputation one way or the other, but it would be interesting to see him working for a different director too.

4. Peter Cushing

Although Peter Cushing first portrayed Holmes in the 1959 Hammer version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, he is perhaps better remembered for the 16-episode, 1968 BBC series, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, when he replaced Douglas Wilmer as the Baker Street sleuth. Even as late as 1984, Cushing appeared as Holmes in the TV movie The Masks Of Death.

With his distinctive, rather bony features, Cushing certainly looked the part, and never gave anything less than a watchable and engrossing performance. Cushing played many iconic characters in his long career, but his take on the great detective is one of his best.

3. Basil Rathbone

Arguably the actor most commonly identified with Sherlock Holmes on film, Sir Basil Rathbone made 14 Sherlock Holmes movies between 1939 and 1946, creating the deerstalker and cape look in the process. Nigel Bruce played Watson in a blustering and bewildered style, which more recently has fallen by the wayside. Rathbone’s performance in the 1939 version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles was a cinematic benchmark for all the actors who followed.

Rathbone played Sherlock over 200 times on radio, and he was the distinctive Holmes during the Second World War, a time when cinema truly was king. His impact is enduring, not least on those who grew up loving the films, whether at the cinema or on television (a special season was transmitted on BBC2 in 1978, which introduced me to the character, and aired again to celebrate the centenary in 1987). Rathbone’s silhouette is iconic, and he is often spoken of as “the doyen of the detective melodrama”.

2. Benedict Cumberbatch

Star of the current BBC series Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch is Holmes for the 21st century.Doctor Who supremo Steven Moffat and  writer and actor Mark Gatiss created a series of stories loosely based on Conan Doyle’s work, but with a distinct modern day slant. As Moffat declared during the 2010 launch of the series, “Holmes is about detection… if that means to hell with the crinolines, then so be it! Other detectives have cases, Holmes has adventures…”

Benedict Cumberbatch is a fast-talking, perceptive, high cheek-boned Holmes, aloof yet prone to incredible social faux pas. Cumberbatch eschews the deerstalker image for a long coat and scarf (though his brief affection for deerstalkers was an occasional joke in series two), and nicotine patches replace the pipe. He is accompanied by the ever-perplexed Martin Freeman as an equally modern, technology-savvy Doctor Watson, who’s often seen blogging his diaries.

The BBC has a major hit with this superb and (at times) controversial 21st century retelling of the adventures of the world’s most famous consulting detective. Even purists are reconsidering things after this series, awash with GPS, texting and on-screen graphics as an integral part of the storytelling. It proves that Conan Doyle can be as relevant in 2012 as he was in the 1890s.

1. Jeremy Brett

The sorely-missed Jeremy Brett was a genuine one-off – an actor of immense skill and intense personality. In 1984 Granada television, fresh from the success of The Jewel In The Crown,produced an equally superb television adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. Supported first by David Burke and then Edward Hardwicke, both intelligent and thoughtful as Watson, Jeremy Brett made Sherlock Holmes so much his own that any fresh television adaptation would have to approach Conan Doyle’s work from a very different direction.

Brett was bipolar, which heightened his mannered performance as Holmes, making his sudden flashes of manic thought, wit and melancholic malaise truly convincing. Brett filmed 41 of the Conan Doyle stories over a period of ten years. Like Ellie Norwood, Brett became obsessed with character, often taking method acting to the extreme to fully embody the spirit of Holmes. In part, this dedication to intricate character detail contributed to his untimely death in 1995.

Nearly 30 years since he first portrayed the master detective from Baker Street, Jeremy Brett is seen by many as the definitive Sherlock Holmes