u/apeel09

One of my favourite little moments in The Priory School is Holmes examining bicycle tracks and identifying the type of bicycle from the marks left behind.

It’s easy to forget just how new this sort of detective work would have seemed to contemporary readers. Holmes is effectively doing forensic analysis of tyre tracks, long before this became routine police work.
And, naturally, he can tell far more from a bicycle track than most of us could tell from the bicycle itself.

It does make you wonder what Holmes would make of modern forensic science. Probably complain that everyone has made deduction unnecessarily complicated.

Moriarty is the obvious answer when we talk about Holmes’s greatest adversary.

But if we put him to one side for a moment, who do you think is the most underrated opponent in the Canon?

One thing I’ve always liked about the Holmes stories is that Doyle created some wonderfully memorable villains who often get overshadowed simply because they weren’t the “Napoleon of Crime.”

So who’s your choice? Which opponent gave Holmes a tougher challenge than they usually get credit for, and why?

Holmes has a reputation for being almost infallible, but I don’t think that’s quite true.

He certainly changes his mind as new evidence appears, and there are a few stories where his first impression turns out to be mistaken. That’s one of the things I like about the Canon. Holmes isn’t magical. He’s just exceptionally good at correcting his own mistakes.

In a way, that’s what separates him from everyone else. He isn’t never wrong. He’s willing to abandon a theory the moment the facts demand it.

So here’s my question: what do you think is Holmes’s biggest mistake in the Canon? Not a temporary false start, but a moment when he genuinely got it wrong.

I’d be interested to see which story comes up most often.

One thing I’ve noticed rereading the Holmes stories is how often America, Australia and South Africa crop up.

Characters are forever returning from the colonies with fortunes, secrets, grudges or entirely new identities. Some of the biggest events in the Canon only happen because someone left Britain years before and has now come back.

It makes Victorian Britain feel much smaller than we sometimes imagine. Holmes isn’t just solving London mysteries. He’s dealing with the consequences of an increasingly global world.
I’ve often wondered whether this reflects Doyle’s own fascination with the wider Empire. The crimes may begin in Baker Street, but their roots are often thousands of miles away.

Has anyone else noticed just how often the “New World” quietly drives the Holmes stories?

I sometimes think Lestrade doesn’t get enough credit.

Imagine turning up to a crime scene, doing your job perfectly competently, only for Sherlock Holmes to stroll in, glance at the carpet, and casually point out the last three generations of the suspect’s family history.

And yet Lestrade keeps coming back.

He gets teased, corrected, and occasionally patronised, but he also knows something everyone else in Scotland Yard eventually works out: if the case really matters, Holmes is the man you want.
Perhaps that’s why I like Lestrade. He has one of the hardest jobs in Victorian London, spends half his career being outshone by a consulting detective, and somehow never lets his pride get in the way of catching the right person.

In the end, Holmes may be the genius, but Lestrade is the professional. And I suspect Holmes respected him rather more than he ever admitted.

Spare a thought for Mrs Hudson.
Imagine renting out rooms to a gentleman who conducts chemical experiments on the dining table, fires a revolver into the wall, entertains Scotland Yard at all hours, disguises himself as other people for amusement, occasionally stores human remains, and thinks the violin is best practised at two in the morning.
Then imagine the lodger next door is a doctor who keeps writing bestselling accounts of all this, ensuring your address becomes famous across the country.
Mrs Hudson has a reputation for endless patience.
I’m beginning to think she deserved danger money.

One of the reasons Holmes still feels modern is that he arrives at exactly the moment London is becoming a modern city.

The Holmes stories are full of new technology and institutions. Railways, the Underground, telegraphs, newspapers, forensic science and an increasingly professional police force all shape the way Holmes works. He isn’t solving crimes in Dickens’s London. He’s navigating a fast-moving city where information, people and criminals can disappear almost overnight.

Holmes himself seems perfectly suited to that world. He gathers data, tests evidence, builds networks of informants and adapts to change. In many ways, he’s as much a product of modern London as Baker Street itself.

It makes me wonder whether Holmes could have existed fifty years earlier. Strip away the growing city, the communications network and the pace of Victorian London, and would the consulting detective have been possible at all?

I’m curious what others think. Did Doyle create Holmes, or did modern London create the need for someone like Holmes?

Something I don’t see discussed very often is just how important the telegraph system is in the Holmes stories.

Holmes operates in a world where information can move instantly across distances, but only in very specific ways. A telegram can summon help, confirm a suspicion, or warn someone ahead of time, but it is still limited, formal, and dependent on human intermediaries. That creates a very interesting rhythm to the cases.

You often see Holmes using telegrams to control time as much as information. He can send Watson ahead, request police assistance, or quietly coordinate multiple locations without ever leaving Baker Street. At the same time, delays or missing messages can completely change the stakes of a case.

What’s striking is that this technology sits right between old and modern detective work. Holmes is not operating in a world of instant communication as we understand it, but he is also no longer in a world of pure isolation and travel by horse or train alone.

It makes me wonder whether part of Holmes’s “modernity” as a detective actually comes from the telegraph network itself. Without it, many of his cases would unfold very differently.

So I’m curious how others see it. Does the telegraph quietly shape the structure of Holmes’s world more than we usually acknowledge?

A slightly heretical thought: is Moriarty’s reputation bigger than his actual role in the Canon?

When people think of Sherlock Holmes, they often think of Moriarty as his great nemesis. Yet he appears surprisingly little. Most of what we know about him comes from Holmes himself, and much of his reputation rests on a handful of scenes in The Final Problem.

Compare that with villains like Milverton or Stapleton, who occupy much more space on the page and whose schemes we actually get to see unfold.

And yet Moriarty has endured in a way almost no other Holmes character has. Every adaptation seems determined to bring him back, even when the Canon barely uses him.

I wonder if the reason is that Moriarty is less a character than an idea. He gives Holmes what every great hero eventually needs: an equal and opposite number. The “Napoleon of Crime” is memorable not because Doyle developed him in detail, but because the concept is so powerful.

In a sense, later writers and filmmakers may have created the Moriarty we think we know. Doyle merely sketched him.

So I’m curious what others think. Is Moriarty genuinely Holmes’s greatest adversary, or has more than a century of adaptations inflated a relatively minor Canon character into something much larger?

I’ve often wondered about this. Not which detective is the greatest, but which one Sherlock Holmes himself would most respect.

My instinct is that Holmes would have little patience for imitators. What impressed him was originality. He respected people who could see what others missed, even if their methods were completely different from his own.

That rules out quite a few famous detectives. Holmes might admire scientific rigour, psychological insight, or even pure imagination, but he’d probably have no interest in someone who was simply “Holmes-like.”

So who would earn his respect? Dupin? Father Brown? Poirot? Someone else entirely?

More interestingly, who would Holmes regard as an equal rather than merely a competent detective?

That’s a question I’d be curious to hear opinions on.

Just finished Hive and it’s the first 40k book I’ve not put down this year. When Dan Abnett hits it out of the park he really knocks it a long way.

Having always wondered what a Hive was like I was instantly drawn to the book’s premise. It was refreshing to read a 40k novel where the protagonists weren’t Space Marines, Militarum or the Inquisition.

One of the most interesting things about Sherlock Holmes is how often he relies on disguises. Holmes appears as clergymen, sailors, booksellers, and even opium addicts — sometimes fooling Watson completely.

But the disguises aren’t just entertaining plot devices. They reflect a deeper Victorian anxiety about identity itself. In Doyle’s London, people could disappear into crowds, reinvent themselves, and hide behind respectability. The Holmes stories are full of characters leading double lives or concealing their true nature.

What makes Holmes fascinating is that he fights deception through deception. He uses masks to uncover truth. And in many ways, he understands something modern readers still recognise: most people perform versions of themselves for the world.

That may be why these stories still feel contemporary. Beneath the fog, disguises, and gaslight, Doyle was writing about a society where appearances could no longer be trusted completely which feels surprisingly familiar today.

A thought occurred to me watching the Basil Rathbone films again. I wonder if, for a lot of the public, that version of Holmes became more real than Doyle’s.

The deerstalker, the pipe, the rapid deductions, the almost military certainty, Nigel Bruce’s loyal but baffled Watson. Even people who have never read the Canon often picture Holmes that way.

What’s interesting is that the films take huge liberties with the stories, especially the later wartime ones. And yet somehow they still feel like Sherlock Holmes.

Maybe accuracy is not really the point. Maybe Rathbone captured something essential about Holmes that audiences immediately recognised, even when the plots had very little to do with Doyle.

Curious what others think. Did the Rathbone films preserve Holmes for modern audiences, or did they permanently replace the Canon version with a different character altogether?

Holmes presents his retirement to Sussex as a personal choice. Bees, quiet countryside, no more London crime. But I sometimes wonder whether the Canon hints at something slightly different.

By the later stories Holmes seems more tired, more withdrawn, and occasionally less sharp than the figure we see in the great adventures of the 1890s. Watson himself comments more than once on Holmes ageing. Cases increasingly come to Holmes rather than Holmes actively pursuing them.

There is also the question of what Holmes actually lives for. Solving problems is not just a profession for him. It is the thing that gives structure to his mind. So the idea that he simply walks away from it all and becomes contented country gentleman and beekeeper has always felt a little too neat to me.

I’m not suggesting Holmes was incapable by any means, but I do wonder whether retirement was less a triumphant decision and more an acknowledgement that he could no longer operate quite as he once did.

Or perhaps Holmes finally solved the one case he never could in London: how to live an ordinary life.

Is The Devil’s Foot Holmes’s most dangerous case?

People usually think of Moriarty or The Final Problem when talking about Holmes in real danger, but I’ve always thought The Devil’s Foot deserves a mention.

This is one of the few stories where Holmes is not just threatened by a criminal, but by the case itself. The poison in The Devil’s Foot is so horrifying that Holmes and Watson nearly die simply by testing it. Holmes knowingly risks both their lives just to understand what happened, which is a level of recklessness even Watson finds alarming.

There’s also something unusually dark about the story. It feels less like a puzzle and more like Holmes stepping into something genuinely sinister and almost supernatural, even though the explanation is ultimately rational.

Unlike Moriarty, this is not a battle of minds. It is immediate physical danger, and Holmes comes frighteningly close to paying for his curiosity.

So I’m curious what others think. Was The Devil’s Foot actually Holmes’s most dangerous case, or would you give that title to another story?