After all, everything about Sherlock Holmes was eccentric. Had remained interested in chemistry and had more success with it, his reputation might have warranted the adjective "profound." But his modest record requires that we rank Holmes the chemist somewhere between Watson's "profound" and Asimov's "blundering." "Eccentric" sounds just about right.
The author concludes that Holmes was neither as bad as Asimov argued, nor as good as originally claimed by Dr Watson, his crime-solving colleague: Amongst the topics covered, the author examines the reference materials that were available during Holmes's lifetime to specifically address the accusation by chemist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that Holmes was "a blundering chemist". The chapter on chemistry - Holmes' first love - was, of course, quite good. (Was this a typical problem on exams in his chemistry courses?) For example, most students of the sciences will enjoy Professor O'Brien's informative walk-through to how long it took Richard Brunton to die from suffocation in The Musgrave Ritual. Some practical examples are described too. Although Professor O'Brien doesn't explicitly say this, I wonder whether the Sherlock Holmes stories, which certainly popularised fingerprint IDs before their acceptance was widespread, sped up adoption of this methodology by Scotland Yard and the FBI? The author then presents the development of modern fingerprinting methods, which was well underway during Conan Doyle's lifetime. Professor O'Brien also places fingerprint technology into its historical context, mentioning that fingerprints were recognised as unique identifiers as early as 3000 BC by the ancient Chinese and by the Babylonians in 2000 BC. According to the author, this database provided investigators with the evidence - sometimes within seconds - necessary to resolve cases that had lingered for many years. I particularly enjoyed the history of using fingerprints to identify individuals, how fingerprint analysis became a science and how this new science inspired and informed the development of searchable databases containing millions of individual fingerprints. In these chapters, we learn about footprints, photography, typewriters, handwriting analysis, Bertillonage (classifying people and identifying individuals based on their bone measurements), chemical residues, ashes, mathematical codes and many other forensic techniques that were in vogue a century ago. These include Edgar Allan Poe's writings as well as real people in Conan Doyle's life (particularly his mentor, Dr Joseph Bell) and famous crimes and criminals of the times (there are, for example, striking similarities between real-life thief Adam Worth and the fictional master criminal, Professor James Moriarty).Īfter establishing the origins of the characters, Professor O'Brien devotes the next three chapters (103 pages) to exploring the forensic methods, and the chemistry and other sciences that Holmes used to solve his cases. In the first two chapters (47 pages), Professor O'Brien discusses the creation of Sherlock Holmes and the other main characters in Conan Doyle's stories and identifies the sources of inspiration for each character. Written by an avid "Sherlockian" and emeritus chemistry professor from Missouri State University, this book shows that the fictional Sherlock Holmes characters, their stories and their crime-solving methods are all based in reality.