#black peter

The Black Peters - some short extra strories which didn't become full chapters but are worth telling. Slice-of-life shorts, missing scenes from the series and the previous chapters and matter of life and death - they're all here, in the Black Peter's Finale!

“I didn’t want it to turn out that way, Waru!” Felix blurted out. “I meant well, that’s all. If I had known this would happen, I would never have...”

Case and Themes: Forensics Vs. Deduction

Much is always made of Holmes’ skills at deduction, aka reasoning from details, and how it may or may not have inspired the entire field of forensics. I have yet to see anything like a comparable amount of scholarship regarding his testing of forensics, aka applying the scientific method to those details to see if his theories actually match up.

(Note that forensics as a modern science, admissible in court, has not always actually been put to any rigorous scientific testing. See the fields of blood spatter analysis, bite mark analysis, hair matching. The forensics fields that have are often at the mercy of collection methods that may not be rigorously followed or documented. And we also must evaluate whether an attempt was even made to collect evidence responsibly: the modern police is not immune to handling their duties in an incompetent or ludicrously cavalier fashion. For a modern, famous example, see the alleged Luigi Mangione backpack and how ineptly the NYPD went about any chain of custody or documentation of their findings. I can only imagine how long Holmes would complain about them.)

It is one thing to make reasonable assumptions based on a superfluity of data and a knowledge of the prevailing biases of society, aka who is more likely to be in a vulnerable position and who the police and newspapers will dismiss as untrustworthy or a natural criminal. It is another to check those assumptions, and in Black Peter we see a great showcase of Holmes doing exactly that. It occurs to him that not every man could have successfully harpooned Peter Carney all the way into a wall. So he tested it, taking himself as a benchmark for the slightly above average athlete, and determined that the action needed professional skills. This case hinges on this experiment, but several of his standard methods involve testing to see what suspects will do (will the secret door be opened in the Golden Pince Nez, will the attempted burglar come back to try again in Black Peter, setting off a smoke bomb to see where Adler keeps her vital documents in Scandal) or testing to determine what kinds of physical traces or chemical interactions he can replicate. The attitude towards science is not modern (particularly the “whatever remains, however improbable” line, since more frequently the answer is “do it twenty more times to see if you actually removed the variables you think you did”) but it remains a sight better even than the improvements certain members of the Yard have made in their method, since testing your conclusions is infinitely more flexible than jumping ahead in your excitement to make an arrest.

Today's entry has been submitted by the inimitable @aregularirregular221b! As our favorite mouse detective, classic Holmes actor, AND maritime alias under disguise (BLAC) all rolled up into one, the name "Basil" carries multiple Sherlockian meanings.