Stone into Money

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published in the bestselling Strand Magazine in 1891–2, shows Holmes investigating not just his clients’ problems, but the hidden wiring of Victorian Britain. The wires were the social and economic relationships that connected cab drivers to kings, pawnbrokers to bankers, and hotel attendants to countesses. In these stories Holmes detects not only the physical traces of those relationships, such as the bruises on a woman’s wrist or the shiny patch on a man’s cuff, but also the financial traces. Usually overlooked by readers and critics, Holmes’s skill as an economist is fundamental to his detective method, and fundamental to the social function of Conan Doyle’s detective fiction.