We’ve started watching the new Sherlock series, a British modernizing of various Sherlock Holmes stories. I enjoyed the first, which treated “A Study in Scarlet,†but haven’t enjoyed so well the next two, which mix and match elements from several stories. Part of the pleasure of a show like this is tracing how closely the writers manage to mimic the original without spoiling the story, so we flipped through my volume of Doyle for a refresher on just how the originals went. In the process, something odd struck me.
Much of Holmes’s success as a literary figure lay in his exotic methods, his success by means, especially scientific means, the police were too unimaginative to use. But his exotic methods are no longer so. Determining a suspect’s height from his stride, identifying cigarettes by their ash, distinguishing typewriters by the “fingerprint†of their type—all basic forensics now, and not just in stories imitating the great fictional detective.
Holmes can (and does) still make fantastic leaps of “logic†on sketchy evidence, and of course he looks brilliant by virtue of an author who can ensure he’s always right. He can also spot instantly what a more pedestrian (or realistic) forensic scientist might take hours or even days to demonstrate in a fashion suitable for court evidence. He’s also privileged not to be confused by white noise in his evidence—an innocent wearing a shoe to match the killer’s, for example, or a discarded condom unrelated to the crime. But the evidence itself, and the chain of reasoning derived therefrom, is no longer fantastical; it’s just everyday policing.
Post a Comment