i
Passive observation
Under wayYour clock, your screen, your machine, your habits of scrolling and wandering off. Recorded in the ledger as they happen.
A consulting detective's method, turned on the visitor
You have been in a distant country, I perceive.
So Holmes greeted Watson in A Study in Scarlet. This page does the same to you, from your clock, your screen and your hands. Then it hands you the lens: read a stranger, submit an object of your own, and test yourself against the monographs.
The Examination
Your browser has been giving evidence since you arrived. Two short trials add what your hands reveal. Then I reason. Nothing here leaves this page.
ii
The typewriter
Not takenType the line below as written. Speed, corrections and fidelity all count as evidence.
Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay.The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
0 wpm0 corrections– exact
iii
The lamp
Not takenPress the lamp to begin. When it flares, press it again at once. Three rounds.
Round 1 · –Round 2 · –Round 3 · –
Deductions
The Stranger
Someone has come up the seventeen steps. You have the details Holmes would see. For each one, choose what it tells you. The truth is revealed when you have answered every clue.
Your Object
Holmes read a man's life from his hat and a stranger's history from a pocket watch. Give me a photograph of something of yours: a desk, a bag's contents, a pair of shoes, a keyring. I will tell you what it says about its owner.
After The Blue Carbuncle (the hat) and The Sign of Four (the watch).
No photograph yet
Or drop one here. Clutter is better than tidiness. Faces are not read.
The Monographs
Holmes mentions his monographs but never lets us read them. Here they are written out: his method in each field, reconstructed from how he reasons in the stories, with a reference plate and the scenes where he uses it. Monographs he names are marked by status. Those his reasoning implies, but which he never wrote, are marked “Reconstructed”.
Plates: the trade and the hand
The monograph Upon the Influence of a Trade upon the Form of the Hand had plates of slaters, sailors, cork-cutters, compositors, weavers and diamond-polishers. Here are twelve more. Name the trade from the hands.
221B Baker Street
Two ways in. The 3D walk lets you roam the first-floor sitting room and Baker Street freely, in any light and weather, with traffic as busy as London's roads are this minute. The photographs are real places, stitched into a tour with notes from the stories.
221B · the sitting room, first floor
Open this room to light the gas.
Drag to look · W A S D or arrows to walk, Shift to hurry · Tap the floor to walk there · Tap an object to examine it
In the sitting room
On Baker Street
Photographs
Loading the photographs…
Drag to look around · Scroll or pinch to zoom · Tap a marker to read it
Delete it for everyone?
The real street, live: Street View outside no. 239 · live traffic map · TfL road status. The 3D room is a reconstruction from the stories; no plan of it was ever published.