The Influence of Forensic Science and Law Enforcement on the Sherlock Holmes Stories

Sammanfattning: Sherlock Holmes is one of the most famous protagonists in the literary genre of crime, but how he came to be is not often discussed. The stories about Holmes were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Arthur Conan Doyle during a period when British society was developing in matters of human rights, law, and science. When Doyle wrote about Holmes, he employed methods of forensic science that were new to society at that time. This essay aims to show a correlation between those methods and the stories about Holmes and argue that Doyle’s narratives were influenced by contemporary scientific and social developments. To identify any forensic science being applied by Doyle, four novels and a few select short stories have been read for this research. The forensic methods have then been traced in literature regarding forensic science or law enforcement in order to show the correlation between those methods and the Holmes narrative.