The research and investigations we in the industry practice in support of clients in need of information to answer questions, solve problems, and make decisions are represented in these media often in two ways. Either as a noir-tinged spinoff of espionage in which the agile protagonists furtively seek to obtain critical secrets for the benefit of their principal's interests (be it a nation state or corporate parent), or a sibling of law enforcement in which the leads solve mysteries and crimes. 

Few cinematic or televised treatments of investigations and intelligence gathering are complete without the now threadbare trope of the evidence board replete with articles, post-it notes, headshots identifying suspects complemented at times with maps, pins and strings connecting the cast of players like arteries. This is the artifact signal that the dots are there just waiting to be connected, like a puzzle to be solved.

Atop this olympic podium of figures unraveling mysteries and solving crimes surely stands Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes as both icon and archetype of the category (while his arguable counterpart in terms of stature trafficking in the dark arts of espionage is James Bond).

May 22 is Sherlock Holmes day, so we thought it mildly appropriate to pay a bit of modest homage to the figure that broadly defines, for both better and worse, in the public's mind the tenacious and uncompromising investigator by sharing a few interesting details about the author and his most famous character. To that end:

  • Doyle was a physician and reportedly based Holmes' character on one of his professors at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell, to whom the author reportedly attributed "an uncanny gift for drawing large inferences from small observations." During the pendency of his medical studies, Conan Doyle took a six-month sabbatical to participate in a whaling expedition to the Arctic.
  • Conan Doyle's first novel starring Holmes was “A Study in Scarlet,” published in 1887. He would go on to pen a total of four novels and 56 short stories starring the detective over the next 40 years. Conan Doyle's other works include Victorian-era ghost stories, historical fiction and even science fiction. He also wrote non-fiction histories of the Boer War and World War I.
  • Conan Doyle is said to have resented the success of his Sherlock Holmes works for overshadowing his more serious historical writings. In 1893 he killed Holmes off in “The Final Problem” in an effort to move on. Holmes was said to have died in a fight with his arch-enemy Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Due to popular demand, Conan Doyle published another Holmes story, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” in 1902, although it was set prior to Holmes’ apparent death. In 1903 Conan Doyle resurrected Holmes fully with “The Adventure of the Empty House.”
  • In his day Conan Doyle was a leading proponent of Spiritualism, the belief that it was possible to talk to the dead. According to the Conan Doyle Estate’s website, “He once declared that he would gladly sacrifice whatever literary reputation he enjoyed if it would bring about a greater acceptance of his psychic message, and to those who found comfort and meaning in his beliefs, he was ‘the Saint Paul of Spiritualism.’”

What the Holmes stories and their offspring in film and television capture about what investigators find compelling in their métier (we shared some previous thoughts here) can be summed up by a Holmes quip from The Sign of the Four: "I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for?"