Both Holmes and Poirot evoke very strong visualizations in readers, and actors who mess with what we imagine get themselves in trouble immediately.

1) I’ve tried to read Poirot but Christie’s writing is so British that it’s almost impossible for me to make more than three or four pages before falling asleep. Sorry.

2) I have a dog and three cats. I never arguer which is smarter. The better question is, which one is stupider? The competition can be quite fierce.

3) You see, you and I can agree on at least one thing. Jeremy Brett was the best Holmes ever!

3b) David Suchet was a better Poirot than Peter Ustinov, too.

BTW, you’ve gotta give the Poirot novels a fair reading. He probably runs falsification tests (‘test driven detection’, TDD??) more often than Holmes does.

Re: the House connection, it is quite deliberate and explicit. House == Ho(l)mes, and at one point Wilson gifts House a copy of a classic medical text by Bell.

That said, I’ve actually argued that deeper down, House is more like Poirot in being a doctrine-driven detective.

I was ambivalent about the Robert Downey Jr. movie. I don’t believe Jeremy Brett’s Holmes can be topped, so in a way the movie was wise not to even aim for fidelity to the books. The movie succeeded in a) being entertaining in its own right b) offering curiously compelling hypotheses about how the original Holmes could have learned such random skills as jujitsu, acquired his extensive network of low-life friends and so forth. The idea of his having a whole other life where he was the opposite of a gentleman is fun.