Sherlock Holmes on English countryside

I have been watching The Copper Beeches, the Granada Sherlock Holmes TV series episode adaptation of The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. You can read the original story here. Which I have not read yet. But I remember watching the TV episode as a child and it had a lasting impression on me. Not so much the plot, but an observation Sherlock Holmes makes about English countryside. Here it is:

''“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”
“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”''

I usually read and watch crime fiction set in an urban environment. But this reminds me that evil dwells in the most pleasant environment. 

Rediscovering Sherlock Holmes

Hey, I found the old Granada Serlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett on youtube! I don't know if there are all of them there but there are a lot of them.I used to love it when I was watching it back in the 80s, it made me discover the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. Jeremy Brett is magnificent as Holmes, but what I always loved about it is the way they have reproduce Victorian England: you genuinly feel there. It is sober and devoid of the clichés that usually plague period pieces in general and adaptations of Sherlock Holmes in particular. Brett as Holmes seldom wears the deerstalker hat and never does it in London (where it would have been a social faux pas), he does not only smoke pipe but also cigarets and cigars and is a drug user, as he was conceived by Doyle. Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes is free from the false perceptions we usually have of the character and is in many aspects Doyle's character made flesh. Always a pleasure to rediscover the master.

Holmes has an interesting entry in the thrillingdetective website. Was he a private eye, was he hardboiled, or not? They answer no, but I am not so sure about it. I would say that in some of his stories he came quite close, but it is true that he might have been too much of an intellectual.