Forensics as a Delay in Stroies of Sherlock Holmes : "Although the Series is More Extendedly Delayed by Forensic Elements, the Difference is Not as Significant as Expected".

Sammanfattning: The relationship between the development of real life forensics and fiction’s use of it is a close one, and it offers excitement and pleasure to follow investigations and unravel mysteries, clearly, both in real life and fiction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes has famously used advanced deductive methods to solve crimes since his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet. The recent explosion of forensic elements within fiction has not passed by unnoticed, raising the question of whether forensic delays are more extendedly used in more recent adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories, due to the modern range of methods and techniques available. In this essay I show in a comparison of Doyle’s original works about the character Sherlock Holmes, to one of today’s television series; BBC’s Sherlock, that the recent adaptation is interrupted more frequently by forensic investigations, including modern forensic techniques and helpful equipment, which keeps the story from moving forward for a longer period of time, making it a delay. Furthermore, the comparison deals with adaptation theory and shows that the format in which the story is presented is decisive for the result. I conclude that forensic delays are used more extendedly in the contemporary television series Sherlock, due to a more generous range of methods available, but that measuring the extent of forensic delays generally favors the text format.   Keywords: Delay, Sherlock Holmes, Forensics, Development, Format