Screening Sherlock is the first scholarly history of the many film and television adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Great Detective.

Cultural historian James Chapman maps the screen career of fiction's most celebrated sleuth from the silent era to the contemporary period. He explores the diverse adaptation strategies of the film and television industries in Britain and the United States and shows how screen Holmes has ranged from fidelity to the source texts to postmodern pastiche and parody. All the 'classic' Holmes impersonators are included - from William Gillette and Basil Rathbone to Jeremy Brett and Benedict Cumberbatch - along with many lesser-known adaptations. Screening Sherlock shows how the history of Holmes on film and television has been shaped by changing cultural and ideological contexts - from the Allied propaganda cinema of the Second World War to the 'heritage' dramas of British television and the commercial demands of the modern Hollywood blockbuster.

Based on exhaustive viewing and drawing extensively upon primary sources, including the original stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Chapman argues that to study Holmes on screen is also to study the institutional and cultural histories of film and television.