Holmes: To conclude...

One other thought about Holmes and science: If Holmes studied footprints so carefully, it is odd that he did not study fingerprints at all. Sir Francis Galton published articles in England on the importance of fingerprints as a means of identification between 1892 and 1895, the years of Holmes greatest popularity. In 1896, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, meeting in Chicago, set up a Bureau of Investigation to study the possible use of fingerprinting as a way to augment or to replace the "Bertillon" method of bodily measurement as a way to identify criminals. But Holmes has no use for fingerprinting. In one case where prints are an issue, "The Norwood Builder," he shows it is a planted false clue. He had no use for Bertillon either, as he says at the end of "The Empty House." It was America's Mark Twain who first used fingerprints in a story to solve a mystery, in "Puddnhead Wilson."

Speaking of cops: While the English police value Holmes' advice, he snootily treats them like bunglers lacking in imagination, as Dupin did. Still, we should remember that Inspector Lestrade found the wedding band and other clues in "Scarlet," not Holmes.

The police begin by distrusting his far-fetched theories but come to value his cooperation. He never identifies a criminal without also supplying enough evidence for conviction. Sometimes he sets things up so that it looks like the police solved the crime and he leaves it up to Watson to set the record straight later in a story. Sometimes he withholds info until he can solve it himself. But he never misleads or hampers the police. And he never stays around for the trial. Earlier detective fiction loved courtroom scenes, but Holmes never testifies in court.

To conclude: Holmes embodied the characteristics of his predecessors and became the ancestor of so many detectives to follow: Father Brown with his intuition, the fussy Belgian Hercule Poirot and his dim sidekick Hastings, Lord Peter Wimsey and his sidekick Bunter, and others. The middle-class police detectives of Dickens and Collins were replaced by private, consulting amateurs of independent means (obviously, middle-class cops make a comeback much later, around the 1950s, with the arrival of the police procedural).

Doyle only flirted with the 'fair play' idea. When Holmes says, "The game's afoot," it is not a game with the reader. That is left to S.S. Van Dine, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers, who begin to write just as Doyle is ending his last series in the mid 1920s and turning his energy and devotion to--of all things--seances, spiritualism, and the defense of the existence of Faeries.