Arthur Conan Doyle was guarded when it came to talking about the personal life of his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes.

The popularity of Holmes, since his first arrival on the London literary scene in 1887 with The Scandal in Bohemia, still stands tall.

Guy Ritchie delves into the early years of Holmes, before he took residence at 221B Baker Street, for the new series Young Sherlock, which dropped on Prime Video on March 4 inspired by the books written by Andrew Lane.

The young Sherlock, a sprightly 19-year-old has a penchant for getting into trouble, despite his mother Cordelia’s warnings. The series opens with Holmes in prison, and is soon transported to Oxford to be employed as a ‘scout’ (a servant), and the adventures quite literally begin.

The young Holmes is yet to pick up his pipe and tobacco, has not yet learnt to play the violin. He is not much of a bare-knuckle fighter either. What he displays from time to time is an agile brain and deduction skills.

In Oxford, he comes across James Moriarty, a soon-to-be disgraced scholar. The two strike a friendship and soon embark on an adventure that involves the entire Holmes family: the mother confined to a mental institute, where she is being recorded; a missing father, a scientist; and a daughter (not Enola, but Beatrice) long dead or believed to be so. His elder brother Mycroft himself is a lowly clerk at the Foreign Office and is yet to take his rooms at the Diogenes Club.

A young and married Lestrade, with plenty of kids and a few goats, is just striving to make his name in the Oxford constabulary while dreaming of making it to Scotland Yard someday.

This is the “origin” of Sherlock Holmes as penned by Lane and re-imagined by Ritchie, who directs the first two episodes and lends his name to the rest of the series.

Like the two Holmes films that Ritchie made with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law, Young Sherlock displays a raw energy, a cocky humour and plenty of action. This is not the calm poise of a Jeremy Brett, displaying intellectual superiority.

The episodes happen primarily between Oxford, London, the country home of the Holmes’s somewhere close to the university town before a taut finale in Paris. There are plenty of murders, and hints of a global conspiracy.

Though Guy only directs two of the episodes, his unmistakable mark is all through the series especially in the soundtrack.

A good watch for admirers of Sherlock Holmes and Guy Ritchie.