“it is an illusion that transmogrifies recognizable matter into an imagining; reality into a representation, life into a shadow. ”  (Vanacker, pg. 65)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories during the Victorian age when the detective genre, imperialism, and science were coming of age.   These influences are reflective in his stories and characters.  After exploring the three stories,  A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Adventures of the Final Problem (1893), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) through the Gillette, Rathbone, Brett, Cumberbatch and Miller adaptations conclusions can be drawn between signs, authorship and adaptations.  This paper’s conclusions are that authorship and source text has become the foundational guide which adaptations build from to create their own interpretation of the text.  The Sherlock adaptations studied in this paper, each built upon and created their own unique contribution to the visual signature of Sherlock Holmes.  Holmes was transformed from a hawkish lean Victorian man to Paget’s handsome deerstalker wearing detective with Gillette’s addition of the calabash pipe and phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson”.  Rathbone transformed him into a “thinking machine” and Brett into “manic-depressive” between adventures. Cumberbatch transformed Sherlock into the sexy “high-functioning sociopath” and Miller has given Holmes an American edge.  As Vanacker argues, “Holmes is evoked only in the title of the film and in the fact that the unknown actor portraying him is tall and wears a three-quarter length smoking jacket. Yet we are invited to recognize ‘Sherlock Holmes’ as an icon of late nineteenth-century popular culture: a symbol of empiricism and rationality, and a fictive detective who had been able to unravel every forensic detail of the world of his time” (Vanacker 64).   The visual signatures or shadows of Holmes continue to play the great Game that Doyle created with the Sherlock Holmes stories.