Quotes about Investigation

WATSON: Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.      HOLMES: if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct, and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.

You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist out of stories.

Mr. Sherlock Holmes...was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night.

Yes, the setting (Dartmoor) is a worthy one. If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men. Sherlock Holmes

A slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage, paused immediately outside the door. Then there was a loud and authoritative tap.

How long is this to last? asked the inspector finally. And what is it we are watching for? I have no more notion than you how long it is to last, Holmes answered with some asperity. If criminals would always schedule their movements like railway trains, it would certainly be more convenient for all of us.

There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended upon their prompt recognition.

On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.

I believe you are a wizard, Mr. Holmes.

His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes by which he had arrived at them they might well consider him as a necromancer.

You then went to the vicarage, waited outside it for some time, and finally returned to your cottage." "How do you know that?" "I followed you." "I saw no one." "That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.

The conduct of the criminal investigation has been left in the experienced hands of Inspector Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, who is following up the clues with his accustomed energy and sagacity.