After eagerly -- and enviously! -- reading people's reactions to Sherlock Holmes' third season now airing on television in both the UK and the USA, I just received word that my long-awaited pre-ordered DVDs of Benedict Cumberbatch's "Sherlock" are on the way! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I think they'll arrive today!

Breathless with anticipation, I breezed through a fun little treatise by James O'Brien, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics [Oxford University Press, 2013; Guardian Bookshop; Amazon UK; Amazon US/kindle US]. This book is an absorbing and scholarly exploration of the history of the science and forensics described in the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were written more than 100 years ago by Scottish physician and writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Written by an avid "Sherlockian" and emeritus chemistry professor from Missouri State University, this book shows that the fictional Sherlock Holmes characters, their stories and their crime-solving methods are all based in reality. In the first two chapters (47 pages), Professor O'Brien discusses the creation of Sherlock Holmes and the other main characters in Conan Doyle's stories and identifies the sources of inspiration for each character. These include Edgar Allan Poe's writings as well as real people in Conan Doyle's life (particularly his mentor, Dr Joseph Bell) and famous crimes and criminals of the times (there are, for example, striking similarities between real-life thief Adam Worth and the fictional master criminal, Professor James Moriarty).

After establishing the origins of the characters, Professor O'Brien devotes the next three chapters (103 pages) to exploring the forensic methods, and the chemistry and other sciences that Holmes used to solve his cases. In these chapters, we learn about footprints, photography, typewriters, handwriting analysis, Bertillonage (classifying people and identifying individuals based on their bone measurements), chemical residues, ashes, mathematical codes and many other forensic techniques that were in vogue a century ago.

I particularly enjoyed the history of using fingerprints to identify individuals, how fingerprint analysis became a science and how this new science inspired and informed the development of searchable databases containing millions of individual fingerprints. According to the author, this database provided investigators with the evidence -- sometimes within seconds -- necessary to resolve cases that had lingered for many years. Professor O'Brien also places fingerprint technology into its historical context, mentioning that fingerprints were recognised as unique identifiers as early as 3000 BC by the ancient Chinese and by the Babylonians in 2000 BC. The author then presents the development of modern fingerprinting methods, which was well underway during Conan Doyle's lifetime. Although Professor O'Brien doesn't explicitly say this, I wonder whether the Sherlock Holmes stories, which certainly popularised fingerprint IDs before their acceptance was widespread, sped up adoption of this methodology by Scotland Yard and the FBI?

Some practical examples are described too. For example, most students of the sciences will enjoy Professor O'Brien's informative walk-through to how long it took Richard Brunton to die from suffocation in The Musgrave Ritual. (Was this a typical problem on exams in his chemistry courses?)

The chapter on chemistry -- Holmes' first love -- was, of course, quite good. Amongst the topics covered, the author examines the reference materials that were available during Holmes's lifetime to specifically address the accusation by chemist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that Holmes was "a blundering chemist". The author concludes that Holmes was neither as bad as Asimov argued, nor as good as originally claimed by Dr Watson, his crime-solving colleague:

Had [Holmes] remained interested in chemistry and had more success with it, his reputation might have warranted the adjective "profound." But his modest record requires that we rank Holmes the chemist somewhere between Watson's "profound" and Asimov's "blundering." "Eccentric" sounds just about right. After all, everything about Sherlock Holmes was eccentric. [p. 120]

Overall, I thought this book was more heavily focused upon exploring the history of science and forensics than clarifying the details of Holmes's scientific methodologies. Indeed, throughout this slim volume, Professor O'Brien describes the historical transitions from past to modern uses of forensic sciences, inorganic and organic poisons and progress from natural to synthetic dyes. There are frequent mentions of criminals, both historic and modern, such as "unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, OJ Simpson, Alger Hiss, Benedict Arnold and others whose criminal activities were solved using the same real-life forensic techniques that the fictional Holmes relied upon to solve his cases. Serious fans of Conan Doyle's celebrated "consulting detective" will be pleased to find that this book includes frequent comments on other published scholarly works (for example, how Holmesian Chronologist Jay Finley Christ identified when the "Gloria Scott" took place is worthy of Holmes himself) and it also includes 6 pages of references and a 9-page index.

Fittingly, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes won the Mystery Writers of America's prestigious Edgar Award for the best Critical/Biographical Mystery Book in 2013. Engaging and enlightening, this book will probably be most appreciated by those who are new to the Sherlock Holmes stories or to the history of forensics, by fans of Cumberbatch's Sherlock who are seeking a deeper understanding of the stories, and also by "Sherlockians" who devoutly read everything ever published about their fictional hero.

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James O'Brien is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Missouri State University. He devotes his time to studying the history of chemistry and of the American Civil War, and to pursuing his lifelong passion for Sherlock Holmes. He's written about Holmes the chemist, delivered more than 120 lectures on this subject and taught a college course on Sherlock Holmes in London.

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GrrlScientist can also be found here: Maniraptora. She's very active on twitter @GrrlScientist and sometimes lurks on social media: facebook, G+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.