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How would Sherlock Holmes fare | by hadji | 2007-07-10 18:21:37 |
| Badly; worse. |
by werehatrack |
2007-07-10 19:40:54 |
Doyle's depictions of detectives of the day was, according to one source I've seen, primarily designed to make Holmes look good. His stories always had the fictional advantage that the author knew what was going to happen next, and could direct events to make the character benefit from them. Holmes' "brilliant" analyses of points that others in the tales had overlooked owes everything to construction by the author. Many people have, over the years since, pointed out either directly or indirectly that in nearly every instance, there were one or more additional and equally plausible explanations for a given point that Holmes was depicted as having stated had only one possible interpretation. A Metropolitan detective at the time was alleged to have said that if he or any of his associates had been as continually and reliably lucky as Holmes was written, they'd have been twice as famous in short order.
As for real detectives of the period, they had to deal with reality, which is seldom so conveniently arranged. In the late 19th century, scientific methods of evidence analysis were nearly all in the future. Fingerprints were newly introduced as a means of verifying identity, but collection of latent prints from a crime scene was not yet employed. Most of the detective work of the day was based on familiarity with the locale; questioning the usual suspects and information sources outweighed physical evidence as a source of data.
A real-world Holmes would find reality today no more cooperative than the Metropolitan police did in 1890. And don't confuse CSI or Bones with reality; modern detectives solve a relatively small proportion of the open cases precisely because there are far more incidents than there is manpower, money or technology to investigate them. Yes, an exacting examination of a crime scene at the microscopic level might yield some bit of physical evidence that could tie a particular person to that scene, but the time and manpower to collect the evidence is almost never available. Even if the examination is made, usually that linkage is not going to be established; the evidence may be found, but establishing the link to a person is a much less certain process for most anything short of a fingerprint.
For an example of recent state of the art in evidentiary collection and analysis, one need look no farther than the OJ Simpson trial. Some of the methods employed have since improved, and the technology exists to improve them even more, but the money to make the changes is not forthcoming. As a result, really effective detective work continues to rely, in the main, on knowledge of the locale and the available information sources...and Holmes' fictionally preternatural ability to score a direct hit based on minutia would fare no better today than it would have in the reality of Doyle's time. |
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Good analysis, but to clarify one thing, | by hadji | 2007-07-10 20:08:43 |
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