He has been a literary hero,a movie staple, a TV phenome-non, even a board-game character.

The great thing about Sherlock Holmesis that he’s in the public domain, so anywriter can use him without getting sued.

Starting Saturday, the Toronto Refer-ence Library will host the exhibit PopSherlock! using material from the li-brary’s Arthur Conan Doyle collection topay tribute to the many creators whohave used the world’s greatest detectivein ways Doyle never would havedreamed.

For every reasonably faithful version ofthe world’s most famous fictional sleuth— from the Robert Downey Jr. movies toTV series starring Jeremy Brett, BenedictCumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller —there’s one that upends our expectations.The official web page for the exhibitfeatures a music-hall song that begins“I’m Sherlock Holmes, the man ofmystery,” and a Japanese maneki-neko figurine that portrays Holmesas a cute kitten with a pipe.

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As new libraryexhibit pointsout, the mostfamous fictionaldetective getsreimagined withregularity

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It’s a miracle the late night comediansare not dropping from exhaustion. Try-ing to keep up with the plot twists on TheTrump Show is like trying to decipherKafka’s The Metamorphosis by readingsnippets on random pages: somethingstrange is happening, nothing makes

sense and it’s emotionally draining.Luckily, amid the page-flipping chaos,

the comedians have not lost the plot.On Tuesday night, not long after

Trump stunned even his own aides bydrawing a false moral equivalency be-tween the violent white supremacistswho descended on Virginia this weekendand the counterprotesters who flankedout to condemn this jarring spectacle oforganized bigotry, the court jesters wereonce again forced to tear up planned

monologues to ridicule America’s madking.

“President Trump this afternoon gave apress conference that can only be de-scribed as clinically insane,” said SethMeyers, who for months has used hisplatform on NBC’s Late Night to ham-mer the U.S. president.

“You know that list of side effects at theend of a pharmaceutical ad?

Time to stop trying to explain Trump Stephen Colbert is among the late night TVhosts who seeTrump for whathe’s always been:a bumbling andincompetentnarcissist whopossesses themoral compass ofa barracuda,writes VinayMenon.

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VinayMenon

renovations

Hol

mes

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Here are a few other ways Holmeshas been revisited, reimagined andrevised. You can’t do any of this withJames Bond or Harry Potter.Most incompetent version: Mi-chael Caine in Without a Clue, the1988 film that reveals it was actuallyDr. James Watson who did all thecrime solving and hired an actor toplay the detective. Like everyone inthe ’80s, he hired Caine. Best crossover: Neil Gaiman’s 2003short story A Study in Emerald mixesthe characters from the Holmes sto-ries with the supernatural monstermythos from H.P. Lovecraft’s horrortales. There hasn’t been a more pow-erful mystery/horror mash-up sinceScooby-Doo.Most frustrating: The 1980s boardgame Sherlock Holmes ConsultingDetective, reissued with new casesthis year. The only way to win is tosolve cases using fewer clues andleads than Holmes does . . . whichmeans the more you enjoy the game,the more he is likely to beat you.Shortest-lived musical fad: Theearly days of the Benedict Cumber-batch series inspired a number oforiginal online songs, known to fansas “Shrock.” One creator was calledthe 221B Band, while another songexplained: “I wanna live at 221B/Therent is excellent, assassins come fortea.” Best fan theory: In P.G. Wode-house’s short story “From a Detec-tive’s Notebook,” published in 1959, adetective of that era makes a plausi-ble case that the arch-criminal Pro-fessor Moriarty was actually Holmesin disguise. This explains whyHolmes never seemed to care if hegot paid for his detective work. Oldest version: In a 1980s issue ofthe comic book Detective, Batman

meets Holmes, who is still alive dueto what he describes as “a certaindistillation of royal jelly . . . and therarified (sic) atmosphere of Tibet.”Best gender swap: The Geminiaward-winning series The Adven-tures of Shirley Holmes (1997-2000)presented Meredith Henderson as aspunky Canadian mystery-solvingteenager who is actually SherlockHolmes’s descendant. But she’s onlyhis great-grandniece, so they’re notsaying Holmes ever had sex.Most deranged Holmes fan: Thefilm They Might Be Giants(1971) starsGeorge C. Scott as a man who pro-claims himself to be SherlockHolmes and appoints the movie’s fe-male lead, whose name is Watson, to

be his sidekick. And yes, that’s wherethe band name comes from.Worst origin story: In the 2002 TVmovie Sherlock: Case of Evil, JamesD’Arcy plays a sexy Holmes in his 20swho is driven to fight crime becauseMoriarty got his brother Mycrofthooked on drugs. This time, you see,it’s personal.Best Pun: The 1965 Broadway mu-sical Baker Street, which had itsworld premiere in Toronto, ended itsfirst act with Moriarty singing: “Ishall mourn as I have never mournedbefore/When the stately Holmes ofEngland is no more.”

Pop Sherlock! is in the TD Gallery ofthe Toronto Reference Library, 789Yonge St., Aug. 19 to Oct. 22.

SHERLOCK from E1

Robert Downey Jr. starred as the title character in 2009’s Sherlock Holmes,with Jude Law playing his faithful sidekick, Dr. James Watson.

ALEX BAILEY/WARNER BROS.

MeredithHendersonstarred inCanadian TV series The Adventuresof ShirleyHolmes, whichaired from1997 to 2000.

CREDO ENTERTAINMENT GROUP

SameSherlock,differentstory

“He apparently has all of them. Hesaid among other things that, ‘Therewere very fine people on both sides’of the events in Charlottesville.”

This repulsive notion — that atorch-bearing mob of heavily armedNazis marching, chanting and at-tacking counterprotesters, includingmurdering one and injuring 19 oth-ers, might include some good apples— animated the ripe punch lines.

“What the hell are you talkingabout?” asked Stephen Colbert onCBS, lurching into his Trump voiceimpersonation: “You know, one sidehates minorities. The other sidehates people who hate minorities.OK, two sides. It’s just like D-Day.Remember D-Day, two sides, Alliesand the Nazis? There was a lot ofviolence on both sides. Ruined abeautiful beach. And it could havebeen a golf course.”

Or as ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel ob-served: “If you’re with a group ofpeople and they’re chanting thingslike, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ andyou don’t immediately leave thatgroup, you are not a ‘very fine’ per-son.

“It was supposed to be a pressconference about infrastructure andit ended with our president makingan angry and passionate defence ofwhite supremacists . . . I feel like Ican say this with reasonable certain-ty: the president is completely un-hinged.”

The contrasting reaction on latenight and cable news was fascinat-ing.

The comedians, perhaps moreattuned to Trump’s profound char-acter failings from his days as areality TV charlatan, long ago dis-pensed with any benefit of doubt.They see Trump for what he’s al-ways been: a bumbling and incom-petent narcissist who possesses themoral compass of a barracuda. IfTrump could make a quick buckharvesting your grandmother’sorgans, she’d now be playing Bingowith one kidney. Once you acceptthat Trump is not just a failure aspresident, but that he’s a failure as ahuman being, it becomes easy forthe comedians to say his news con-ference unfolded in “the 7th circle of

hell” (Colbert) or that he is “fully outof his mind” (Meyers). Because: a) itdid and, b) he is.

But on cable news, where anchorsand pundits still cling to the fantasyTrump may yet change and startbehaving presidential — or that theoffice warrants a traditional defer-ence regardless of the occupant —moments of acute lunacy still pro-duce disbelief instead of what isbadly needed, which is disrespect.

On CNN after the news confer-ence, Wolf Blitzer said he’d neverseen anything like that in all hisyears of covering Washington. Thiswas a popular sentiment across thedial as anchors shook their headsand gazed into the cameras withtraumatized eyes.

“What I just saw gave me thewrong kind of chills,” said MSNBC’sChuck Todd. “Honestly, I’m a bitshaken by what I just heard.”

The search for motivation, for adeeper meaning, was on. Citinginside sources, NBC reported thatTrump “went rogue.” But this expla-nation gets really old really fastwhen it’s trotted out once a week.Here, I’m reminded of an old ChrisRock bit after that tiger attackedduring a Siegfried & Roy show andpeople wondered about the animal’sstate of mind.

As Rock joked: “That tiger ain’t gocrazy! That tiger went tiger!”

And on Tuesday, Trump wentTrump.

At this point, cable news shouldlearn from late night comedy andnot expect better. Every anchorshould realize this broader narrativeis about one wackadoodle with toomuch power and too little decency.

It’s about the impact this conmancan have on social norms and oddlyvulnerable democratic institutionswhen, as Kimmel noted, he is “com-pletely unhinged.”

This should be the starting pointfor every news story. Trump is notscrewing up. He’s just revealing whohe is. Tuesday was not an anomaly.That was just Trump being Trump.Day after day, night after night, noamount of analytic light can pene-trate this heart of darkness.

You can turn to any page and thisstory will not change. vmenon@thestar.ca

MENON from E1

Trump just ‘went Trump’