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  • Sherlock Holmes’s Scientific Solutions
  • William J. Scheick
James O’Brien. The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xvii + 175 pp. $29.95

IN THE SCIENTIFIC SHERLOCK HOLMES James O’Brien concedes that Arthur Conan Doyle’s increasing fascination with spiritualism and the occult led to Holmes’s decreasing reliance on science and scientific methods. This shift, which O’Brien situates at about midway through the Holmes series, resulted in stories that are “generally viewed as inferior” when compared to the earlier works featuring the famous detective. Even Conan Doyle possibly thought there was a noticeable change. He was known to amuse audiences whenever he mentioned one reader’s complaint that Holmes survived his fall over a cliff but not without injury: “He’s never been the same since!”

In the first and better half of the series, O’Brien observes, Conan Doyle’s substantial knowledge of science added a level of authenticity and complexity that made his Holmes narratives appealingly thought-provoking. From the outset, Conan Doyle had intended for Holmes’s deductive approach to crime solving to revise earlier fictional representations of detectives, especially Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin.

Conan Doyle was one of the first writers to include the newest technique for fingerprint identification. He was also well informed on ciphers, handwriting analysis, footprint identification (before mass-produced shoes) and the use of dogs in detection. In short, O’Brien contends, “When it came to forensic science, Arthur Conan Doyle was an innovative thinker.”

Holmes benefits from other scientific fields, too, especially chemistry. His knowledge of chemistry, which is less impressive than his forensic skills, includes information about coal tar, dyes, poisons, acetones and gemstones. O’Brien suggests “that we rank Holmes the chemist somewhere between [Dr. John] Watson’s ‘profound’ and [Isaac] Asimov’s ‘blundering.’ ‘Eccentric’ sounds just about right.”

As a pleasant bonus in this book, there is a fascinating appendix on the subject of scientific scams attributed to Conan Doyle, particularly [End Page 134] his alleged role in the Piltdown Man fraud. O’Brien’s deftly made and highly readable deductive case in The Scientific Sherlock Holmes is informed, unequivocal and to the point—possibly a pastiche of Holmes’s own straightforward and succinct manner.

William J. Scheick
University of Texas at Austin
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