The relationship between Holmes and the physical space is symbiotic. He retreats there from the filth of London’s streets; he trashes it when bored; he uses it as a stage for his dramatic reveals. The famous phrase “Come at once if convenient—if inconvenient, come all the same” is an invitation not just to Watson but to the reader. 221B is a sanctuary of rationality. No matter how bizarre the case (the speckled band, the red-headed league, the vampire of Sussex), the hearth of Baker Street promises that a logical explanation exists.
Moriarty is a ghost. We see him only twice in the canon (briefly in Final Problem and The Valley of Fear ), yet his presence looms over the entire latter half of the series. He is Holmes’s dark double—a mathematician of equal intellect who chose to organize crime as a “perfect system.” As Holmes says, “He is the Napoleon of crime.” holmes series
Holmes was a different creature entirely. He was not an aristocrat but a “consulting detective,” the first of his kind. He charged fees, kept irregular hours, and maintained a chemical laboratory in his living room. His method was explicitly, almost ostentatiously, scientific. In the very first scene of A Study in Scarlet , he exclaims, “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”—having just developed a chemical test for hemoglobin stains. The relationship between Holmes and the physical space