Quote Originally Posted by OC Richard View Post
For me, the image of Holmes will never be like those above, but rather will be how he appears in the Sidney Paget illustrations.

I must admit that I have only two such books at hand, Adventures and Memoirs, but in those Holmes only rarely wears the Deerstalker hat (in Boscome Valley Mystery and Silver Blaze). In those, by the way, he does NOT wear an Inverness cape but rather a trenchcoat with hood, or a suit of tweed.
And to be fair, in both the text of BOSC and SILV (and the rest of the stories) it never states he wears a deerstalker.

"Sherlock Holmes was pacing up and down the platform,his tall,gaunt figure made even gaunter and taller by his long gray travelling-cloak and close-fitting cloth cap." BOSC

"And so it happened that an hour or so later I found myself in the corner of a first-class carriage flying along en route for Exeter, while Sherlock Holmes, with his sharp, eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling-cap, dipped rapidly into the bundle of fresh papers which he had procured at Paddington. We had left Reading far behind us before he thrust the last one of them under the seat, and offered me his cigar-case" SILV

A " tweed cloth cap" is mentioned in HOUND too.

According to Martin Fido's "World of Sherlock Homes", Doyle really didn't care for Paget's illustrations. But both Paget's Holmes drawings, and William Gillette early stage productions, had a huge influence on how the great detective looks and is recognised today.

Thankfully because of the longevity and quality of stories, every reader, tv viewer and movie goer, has their own favourite Holmes look/actor. As long as it leads them back to the original stories, I'm ok with them all.

Sara

(As an odd trivial fact, Sidney Paget was not suppose to be the Paget that illustrated the stories for the Strand. It was suppose to be his brother Walter. Sidney intercepted the offer and based his "Holmes" on his brother Walter.)