Sherlock Holmes Research Paper

Sherlock Holmes: Changing the World of Crime Solving

The world of forensics was merely a thought before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the widely famous character known as Sherlock Holmes. The number of methods that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used to solve his fictional crime scenarios are countless. Even though the books are not based on real crimes, Sherlock Holmes changed the world of Forensics and revolutionized the thought process behind solving crimes. Many consider Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to be the “father of forensics” because of his precise and genius methods used to solve countless murders and crimes.

A very common misconception about The Sherlock Holmes series is that it is completely fictional and that none of the situations that arrive in

stories are applicable to the real world. In fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was often one of, if not the first people to use many techniques that we use every day now. He was very innovative in his writing, often using techniques and sciences that seemed almost made up to someone who wasn’t very knowledgeable in the area of Forensics. Sir Arthur “Conan Doyle was one of the first writers to include the newest technique for fingerprint identification.” (Scheick) There were a plethora of other fields of Forensics where Sir Arthur was a master. Such as “ciphers, handwriting analysis, footprint identification (before mass-produced shoes) and the use of dogs in detection.” (Scheick)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle implemented many forms of forensics and ways to solve crimes into Sherlock Holmes.

He was one of, if not the first, people to use the idea of fingerprints and footprints to trace a person back to a specific place, area, or thing. (O’Brien, Britannica) “In Conan Doyle’s series, Sherlock Holmes is the author of a monograph called The Typewriter and its Relation to crime.” (O’Brien, Oxford) In his book A Case of Identity which was written in 1891, Sherlock Holmes figures out that all the letters that an anonymous criminal sent were written on a typewritten. The odd thing about it was that even the person’s alias was typewritten. At the time most letters that were typed were still signed by the person with their signature. He used this clue to go around checking letters that people had written to others and find the suspect. When he got to Hosmer Angel’s letters he realized that Angle didn’t sign his letters and that he made many of the same grammatical mistakes as the anonymous criminal that he had been trying to track down. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started a Document Section soon after its crime lab opened in 1932. Holmes’s work preceded this by forty years.” (O’Brien,

Oxford)
Another idea of crime solving that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle often used in his work was the idea of using dogs. In his installment of the Sherlock Holmes series Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes notices that a dog would growl at everyone except its owner’s Mistress. He used this as a way to prove that she was the person who had committed the crime that they were investigating. Then whenever she had been caught and arrested, the dog started barking at her again. Sherlock Holmes discovered through other forms of identification that the person they had in captivity was not actually the mistress, but a look alike that they used to let her get away. Without the use of the dog and its sense of smell, they never would have known that she was not the real mistress and she would have gotten away with the crime without ever being caught. (O’Brien, Oxford)
Without the World of Forensics that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle carefully crafted through his years of writing, the world would be filled with a lot more criminals who run free, and the jails would be full of innocent people who just made one or two powerful people upset. The chain of discoveries and ideas that his series sparked is endless. Many of his techniques and ideas for solving crimes haven’t even been used until recently, despite him using them almost a century ago. Fingerprints, for example, aren’t credited with being developed until somewhere in the mid to early 1980’s. (Britannica) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle however, first used them in his second ever book featuring Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four. This book was published all the way back in 1890, almost a full Ninety years before they were first used in real life scenarios! (O’Brien, Oxford)
There are an infinite number of reasons putting evidence behind the statement that Sherlock Holmes and its Author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, have changed the world in so many way and has definitely made it much easier to solve crimes and track down the people who commit them. B. So after my lengthy explanation justifying the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I hope you have come to realize that Sherlock Holmes has changed the world of Forensics, Completely changed the thought process people use to solve all kinds of crimes, and has made Sir Arthur the “father of forensics.”