The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes by Lycett Andrew;

Author:Lycett, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group UK
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

‘Miss Cushing’, an 1893 illustration by Sidney Paget for ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’.

‘Holmes was working hard over a chemical investigation’, an 1892 illustration by Sidney Paget for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Strangely, nothing much came of the test and it is not mentioned again. No microscope is involved. This instrument only appears in two of his adventures: in ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’, where Holmes uses a ‘low power’ microscope and boasts of having encouraged Scotland Yard to adopt more of them, and also in ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs’ where Nelson Garrideb appears to own a state-of-the-art version.

The Holmes test shows Conan Doyle’s mind conjuring up a notable piece of science fiction. It anticipated by more than a decade the next main breakthroughs in the analysis of blood – the Austrian Karl Landsteiner’s discovery of blood groups and the German bacteriologist Paul Uhlenhuth’s antigen-antibody precipitin test (which enabled scientists to determine the species of a blood sample, confirming if it came from a human or an animal, along the lines Holmes had suggested). It also pointed the way to more sophisticated analysis in criminal cases of blood, urine, tissues, cells and other biospecimens, including DNA profiling or ‘genetic fingerprinting’ in the 1990s.

Having developed this range of expertise, Holmes tended to be grudging about the skills of the other professional detectives he meets. Or rather, he uses them preeningly to establish his pre-eminence as the world’s only ‘consulting detective’. (It’s a similar story to his cursory acknowledgement of working scientists, as noted in the previous chapter.) In all, according to James O’Brien, twenty-one different detectives appear in forty-two of the sixty stories. Holmes deals most often with Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, who appears in thirteen of the stories. Holmes describes him and his colleague Inspector Gregson as ‘the pick of a bad lot’ at the Yard. ‘They are both quick and energetic’ he concedes, but he can’t help adding that they are also ‘conventional – shockingly so.’ His generally dismissive attitude is clear at the start of A Study in Scarlet where Gregson tells him proudly that he has left everything at the murder scene untouched, and Holmes points to the pathway and replies, ‘If a herd of buffaloes had passed along, there could not be a greater mess.’ And, just to emphasize the difference between this publicly appointed crew and an independent operator like himself, he continues, ‘They have their knives into one another, too. They are as jealous as a pair of professional beauties.’

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