Hello 👋,

One area where I feel like ACD's Holmes differs from modern interpretations is the degree of Holmes' lack of empathy. He is certainly eccentric, single-minded and arrogant in the books, but he does not come across as uncaring or unkind.

To me it seems that in modern characterisations (including fanfiction), he often comes across as if he doesn't understand other people's emotions, or has no regard for them. But this is not at all true in the books.

Just as an example, in "The Sign of the Four" he asks Watson if he's up for a six-mile track, and even after Watson confirms, Holmes asks again if it might give Watson's injured leg any trouble. There are also other examples where he does display appropriate empathy when speaking to an upset client, and so on. The characterisation is more nuanced here.

Rereading some of the original stories to try and help my current writer's block, and I rediscover this little gem.

Sherlock Holmes saying, "doggy".

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The Greek Interpreter

The thing about every modern Sherlock Holmes story is that it doesn’t understand that “disdain for the existing criminal justice system” is not only a fundamental part of the themes of the ACD stories it’s vital to making the whole concept work.

Holmes, when we first meet him, is on the bleeding edge of forensics for the 1880s, and this continues on into the ‘90s (the planted thumbprint in ‘The Norwood Builder’! the Sherlock Holmes test for hemoglobin in A Study in Scarlet! the use of pigs as substitute cadavers in ‘Black Peter’!) and beyond. He’s flippant about and disrespectful toward the police because he knows how criminology is a science and forensics matter and the cold hard facts are significantly more important than intimidating witnesses to extract coerced confessions, or deciding on a theory and bending the facts to make them fit, or relying on racist stereotypes to explain how people act and who’s most guilty (all things that really happen in the canon, btw). He’s smarter than everyone else because he’s doing things no one else understands yet, he’s made a study of crime and he understands how and why policing is a flawed institution.

This is why he’s not a cop, only occasionally allied with cops, and so often complaining or explaining that a moral injustice and a legal one are two different things. There are multiple antagonists (Sir George in ‘The Beryl Coronet’, Charles Augustus Milverton, Dr. Roylott, the parents in ‘A Case of Identity’) who he can’t catch in the jaws of the law but wishes he could, and at least one criminal he overlooks because he knows prison would only force them deeper into crime.

But. But.

In the 21st century, forensics are not only the backbone of police investigation they’re common knowledge to any average police procedural enjoyer or true crime fan. Holmes’s once-cutting-edge chemistry and geology are passé and ordinary now. If he’s going to be smart, he’s got to be looking ahead.

And what does that look like? It looks like knowing about the flaws in forensic analysis, like knowing about fingerprints maybe not being totally unique, like arguing over DNA evidence being misinterpreted and innocent people being sentenced for crimes they didn’t commit, like calling for the defunding and dissembling of police forces, like siding with the underclasses every. single. time.

Holmes shouldn’t be working with the cops, he should be trying to destroy them, and fighting to prove why they’re obsolete with science and quick thinking and research. Not doing that is spitting in the face of his roots and missing the whole point of what he’s working for.

(Sorry for quality) From ‘Holmes & Watson’, by Lee Shackleford.

Some of these Holmes stories honestly are the fanfic equivalent of when an Algebra textbook goes “solution is trivial and left as an exercise for the reader”

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