After watching a couple of Sherlock Holmes adaptations recently, I decided to check out the original books, because I wanted more of the characters. Turns out the characters in the books are very different to the versions I've seen on TV, and honestly, as much as I enjoyed the TV ones, I kinda prefer the ones from the books, which I really wasn't expecting. Sherlock especially I found really entertaining in this book. On TV they depict him as kind of an asshole sometimes, which I guess is it's own sort of entertaining, but Book Sherlock is super friendly and kinder than I expected. Some of his quirks in the books are surprisingly underrepresented on screen (as far as I've seen, I'm not always paying attention to TV) like how he purposely forgets things, like the existence of the solar system, in order to make more room in his brain for solving mysteries. Or how he plays Watson's favourite songs on the violin for him. Sherlock and Watson's dynamic is a lot more fun to me in the books too, they're super nice to eachother, it kinda reads more like fanfic lmao. Like, on TV, Watson just kinda follows Sherlock around, says something snarky, Sherlock says something more snarky, and like yeah, it's a lot of fun, but I also really enjoyed this book's more sincere, less like ''irony-poisoned'' dynamic, if that means anything.
I had wanted to see what Moriarty was like in the book series after enjoying his character a lot in 'Young Sherlock' , but it sounds like he only ever shows up like twice in the whole book series (4 novels and 52 short stories) and he isn't this like, consistent looming figure that he is on TV. He was only written in to satisfyingly kill off Sherlock Holmes because Arthur Conan Doyle was tired of writing him. But then fans were so outraged that they forced him to keep writing anyway and make it so Holmes wasn't dead, so Moriarty didn't really even matter in the end.
Visuals are not exactly applicable here, as I didn't get a physical copy of this book, I downloaded a PDF from this website here, and the version I downloaded had no pictures or a cover as far as I saw.