A Gangster, A Rapper, and Sherlock Holmes Walk Into the Ghettos of Los Angeles - A Review of IQ

IQ by Joe Ide

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sherlock Holmes is a hot-ticket item in the world of popular culture. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s greatest literary creation has pretty much taken a life of his own in the years since he first appeared in The Strand Magazine in the 1800s, and remains popular to this day. Most recently, he has appeared in films (played by Robert Downey Jr.), television shows (played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the United Kingdom and Jonny Lee Miller in the United States), and video games. And of course, there are the many pastiches and derivative works in book format that continue to feed readers’ love affair with the quintessential detective.

However, times are rapidly changing, and while the appeal of certain aspects of Holmes - his unerring logic, his ability to unearth the truth from a series of seemingly-unrelated events and items, and so on - will never really stop being popular, certain aspects of him do need to be updated for changing times, and changing concerns. For instance: Holmes’ Victorian sensibilities have long since been set aside, especially in contemporary adaptations of him such as in the BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’ Elementary. His gender has also changed: for example, in Sherry Thomas’ A Study in Scarlet Women (a clear homage to Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet”), everything is still the same, except “Sherlock” Holmes becomes “Charlotte” Holmes. And then there are the many, many “Holmes-esque” characters that are not directly Sherlock Holmes, but who are nods to him anyway. Those characters can be found in practically single genre of media, and enumerating them all would likely require several years’ worth of research.

( Read more... )