In 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle was a twenty-seven-year old doctor and struggling writer when he decided to craft a novel built around a private detective who solves crimes using scientific observation and deductive reasoning. Sherlock Holmes was born, and in perfect synch with the arrival of cinema. By the time the last stories were published, in 1927, Sherlock Holmes was already a somewhat familiar sight on movie screens throughout Europe and North America.

Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, have proved to be protean figures, moving from short story to novel to the stage to the screen to radio to television, indeed, Holmes is sometimes cited as the fictional character to have appeared in the greatest number of cinematic adaptations. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Holmes adaptations were filmed in France, Denmark and Germany, as well as in England and the U.S. Since the coming of sound, while almost all film adaptations have come from English-speaking countries, there has been no shortage of them. Seen in retrospect, these adaptations are fascinating for the way they update the fictional detective to match their times, from Basil Rathbone’s wartime Holmes in 1940s-1960s whimsy to 1970s pastiche and paranoia. The latest version will be released this fall: Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes, action film hero.

The other work of Conan Doyle’s to live a healthy life onscreen is his 1912 novel The Lost World, which has been adapted several times, inspiring films from King Kong to Jurassic Park (1993). This Harvard Film Archive series samples several cinematic incarnations of Conan Doyle’s talent as a storyteller and reveals the ways that Holmes has continued to live on in the popular imagination, nearly a century after the publication of the author’s last Holmes story.