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Two things made me think about Sherlock Holmes yesterday. One was a performance of Sherlock Holmes and the Jersey Lily, which I'll be posting a full review of on Tuesday.
The other was a news story on the BBC about some thieves who certainly appear to have taken a page from the Holmes cannon in their crime: "Thieves who built a 50ft (15m) tunnel to a cash machine in Salford got away with more than £80,000.... The raiders tunnelled [sic] under nearby wasteland overnight and into the shop, where they stole cash boxes. They then escaped back through the tunnel."
The story reminds me strongly of the "Red-Headed League" case, except the fictional thieves gave themselves away with an elaborate plot involving a fake trust fund for red heads and also aimed higher by targeting a bank.
Much as I've enjoyed the new Sherlock series on the BBC, one glaring problem it faces is the same one that all criminal stories do today: everything's about murder. In actual fact, while the more famous Holmes stories might involve death, he also faced many problems like the "Red-Headed League" where theft was the aim, not murder. I'd love to see or read a Holmes pastiche where he comments on the police efforts in that Tesco case, which according to the article involves "looking for 'people acting suspiciously, possibly covered in soil'." Not to mention, in a pastiche, we'd get the satisfaction of an answer.
Ironically, though it was played for comedy and certainly had the threat of death to the protagonists, the theatre production I enjoyed last night involved a simple case of blackmail (as many of the Holmes stories did), and not a single person died by the end of the show.
But more on that Tuesday.