Consummate showman …

… "Elementary": Sherlock Holmes Is Back in a Big Way | History News Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

He was a special character in many ways. He had a sidekick, Dr. Watson, and both hero and sidekick are beloved in literature, stage and film. He played the violin and snorted cocaine. He dressed in a new and different way, with his deerstalker cap and capes. He smoked a pipe. Best of all, his mesmerizing deductive reasoning carried the reader, or viewer, along with him as he tried to find the killers. The connection between the audience and the detective, later made famous in pulp fiction magazines in America in the 1930s, cemented Holmes’ fame, in conjunction with all the Holmes movies.