Sherlock Holmes:

When I was asked to review Sebastian Faulks's James Bond novel, Devil May Care, last year, I found myself in a bit of a cultural bind. I was way too familiar with the superspy's film incarnation to be thrilled by a comparatively sedate literary adventure. The Bond movies are crammed with spectacular incident and flamboyant characters. The book was alright, but ultimately paled by comparison: nothing much really happened.

Is this also why the Sherlock Holmes stories leave me underwhelmed? Holmes is, apparently, the most filmed fictional person ever (the latest version, from Guy Ritchie, opened in the UK on Boxing Day). Has my reading of Arthur Conan Doyle's seminal detective tales been ruined by seeing too many movies, TV adaptations, spoofs, homages, cartoons and imitations down the years?

I'm not sure. I would have first read Holmes as a child, long before I watched Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing or Jeremy Brett pick up the pipe and don the deerstalker. Back then, I've no doubt, my juvenile imagination was fired to white-hot incandescence by these stories of murky deeds, treacherous villains, carriages thundering through cobbled streets, fogbound docks, cries of murder … and, moving serenely through it all, the Zen master himself, pale and supremely composed, and his stoical aide-de-camp Dr Watson.

As an adult rereading Holmes with a more critical, demanding eye, however, I find the stories thin, unexciting, sometimes confusing, and almost always quickly forgotten. The characters are still deathless, the atmosphere nicely judged and subtly stoked, and Conan Doyle's writing isn't half so clumsy or overwrought as many of his peers'. But, as with Faulks's Bond pastiche, not much seems to happen in Sherlock Holmes tales.

The usual storyline runs something like this: someone comes to Baker Street with a problem. Holmes smiles knowingly, then assures the worried soul that all will be well. He excuses himself while refusing to tell Watson what he thinks or what he's up to. That evening he returns, takes a quick snifter of cocaine, gravely informs Watson "it is as I feared", arranges a rendezvous for midnight … and urges Watson to bring his revolver.

Some hours later, Holmes, disguised as a hobo or Chinese coolie, unmasks the dastardly villain, whacks him on the wrist with a walking-cane and hands him over to Inspector Lestrade for the 19th-century equivalent of "processing". Holmes briskly outlines to an open-mouthed Watson the three pieces of evidence that cracked the case. The end.

I think I've read virtually every Holmes story, some of them more than once, and the only one that really blew my deerstalker off was The Hound of the Baskervilles. Even that, I suspect, was more due to the superbly sustained aura of dread and menace than the storyline, which again was flimsy enough.

I feel somewhat conflicted – even disloyal – in admitting all this, because in general I love Victoriana. I love detective stories; I love murky deeds and treacherous villains and carriages thundering through the fog. And I appreciate and respect the seminal nature of the Holmes stories; how Conan Doyle basically invented the police procedural narrative which now dominates crime fiction and much of television.

And then, of course, there's my inner child, nagging at me to quit nitpicking and being such a bloody critic, and just enjoy the ride. But that's the problem, I'm afraid: this ride simply isn't that much of a thrill. It isn't that much of anything.