Investigating Sherlock Holmes: Using Geographic Profiling to Analyze the Novels of Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle famously popularised science in his series of detective stories by placing its three constitutive elements (scientific knowledge, the collection of evidence, and art of making inferences), in his protagonist Sherlock Holmes. The legacy is present in contemporary crime fiction, but the competencies have been distributed among a group of individuals involved in the investigation. This distribution has affected and changed the position of the detective vis-à-vis scientific expertise. Science, chiefly in the form of different branches of forensics, is as indispensable as the detective, and authors have been working out different ways of making the two work together. As an example of this cooperation, the paper examines Mark Billingham’s 2015 novel Time of Death.

Download Full-text

Sherlock Holmes y el razonamiento abductivo: Una mirada semiótica al discurso científico

Revista Scientific ◽

10.29394/scientific.issn.2542-2987.2019.4.14.20.411-425 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4 (14) ◽

pp. 411-425

Author(s):

Yohan Ramón Godoy Graterol

Keyword(s):

Charles Sanders Peirce ◽

Sherlock Holmes ◽

Arthur Conan Doyle

Este ensayo presenta una mirada semiótica al discurso científico. Para su interpretación se procedió realizar un análisis a la enunciación discursiva de la serie de ficción “El Signo de los Cuatro” de Sherlock Holmes, donde el actor semiótico representa a un detective privado, el cual adopta el método abductivo para esclarecer los diferentes casos. El director cinematográfico impulsa al espectador entrar en un mundo posible con elementos de drama y suspenso, para que mantenga su atención en todo el filme. La investigación encuentra su soporte en los trabajos del filósofo y lógico Charles Sanders Peirce (1893-1914), en su mayoría utilizaron el razonamiento abductivo como método para la búsqueda de la verdad a través de conjeturas bien realizadas. Los resultados obtenidos demuestran que el objeto semiótico empleado para su análisis, desde la noción peirceana, está orientado a establecer una semiosis vinculante entre los casos detectivescos y los diagnósticos de un médico, y que el escritor escocés Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), dejó para la posteridad a un héroe prefigurado en los personajes ficticios de Sherlock Holmes y el Dr. John H. Watson.

Download Full-text

Conclusion

The Case of Sherlock Holmes ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0022 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 229-236

Author(s):

Andrew Glazzard

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

New York ◽

Great Britain ◽

The United States ◽

Sherlock Holmes ◽

The Us ◽

The World ◽

Arthur Conan Doyle

‘You will be amused to hear that I am at work upon a Sherlock Holmes story. So the old dog returns to his vomit.’1 Arthur Conan Doyle to Herbert Greenhough Smith Sherlock Holmes, who died in Switzerland in May 1891, returned to the world on 23 October 1899. The location for his rebirth was, somewhat surprisingly, the Star Theatre in Buffalo, New York. Early the following month, Holmes moved to New York where he could be found in Manhattan’s Garrick Theatre on 236 separate occasions, before making his way across the United States. In September 1901, Holmes went back to Great Britain, arriving (like so many travellers from the US) at Liverpool, before reaching London on 9 September 1901. He was so much in demand that on 1 February 1902 he received an audience with King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. In 1902 he was again in New York, was seen travelling across northern England in 1903, and for the next thirty years popped up repeatedly in various American towns and cities....

Download Full-text

Introduction

The Case of Sherlock Holmes ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 1-8

Author(s):

Andrew Glazzard

Keyword(s):

Sherlock Holmes ◽

Arthur Conan Doyle

‘You know my methods. Apply them, and it will be instructive to compare results.’ Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890) ‘A Case of Identity’ (1891) opens, like so many stories in the Sherlock Holmes saga, in 221B Baker Street, where Holmes and Dr Watson receive a new client who bears a problem that is also a story. Watson is both Holmes’s pupil in the science of detection and, crucially, the story’s narrator. Both roles give him the scope to observe and record the client, Miss Mary Sutherland: his description for the reader of her ‘preposterous hat’, ‘vacuous face’ and ‘general air of being fairly well to do, in a vulgar, comfortable, easy-going way’ (...

Download Full-text

The Fact and Fiction of Darwinism: The Representation of Race, Ethnicity and Imperialism in the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fictions ◽

10.1057/9781137016768_3 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 24-39 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hilary A. Goldsmith

Keyword(s):

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ◽

Sherlock Holmes ◽

Arthur Conan Doyle ◽

Race Ethnicity

Download Full-text

The Adventure of the Stradivarius: Violins in the Work of Arthur Conan Doyle and William Crawford Honeyman

Journal of Victorian Culture ◽

10.1093/jvcult/vcaa024 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Rachael Durkin

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Short Story ◽

Final Section ◽

Sherlock Holmes ◽

Detective Story ◽

Victorian Era ◽

Music Making ◽

Arthur Conan Doyle

Abstract The violin, despite its fleeting appearances in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, has become prominently associated with the character of Sherlock in modern TV and film adaptions. While the violin is never investigated by Holmes in the stories, it is represented in more depth in a precursory detective story by William Crawford Honeyman: a Scottish author-musician, whose work appears to have influenced Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes. Honeyman’s short story ‘The Romance of a Real Cremona’ (1884) follows detective James McGovan as he traces and returns a stolen Stradivari violin and unravels its complex provenance. The importance of the violin’s inclusion in fictional works has been little discussed in scholarship. Here, the texts of Doyle and Honeyman serve as a lens through which to analyse the meaning of the violin during the Victorian era. By analysing the violin from an organological perspective, this article examines the violin’s prominence in nineteenth-century British domestic music-making, both as a fiscally and culturally valuable object. The final section of the article explores the meaning attached to, and created by, the violin in the stories of Doyle and Honeyman.

Download Full-text