Just think how much of literature could be improved with certain Holmesian additions. Consider these opening lines for instance. Feel free to play along and work out which books these come from and come up with some of your own !


"Please, sir, is this 221b Baker Street?" asked a ragged boy of the man who opened the door at which the omnibus left him.

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Sherlock Holmes, lying on the rug.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a consulting detective in possession of a good fortune must not necessarily be in want of a wife."

"When Doctor Watson went to Baker Street to live with Sherlock Holmes, everybody said he was the most disagreeable-looking doctor ever seen."


"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the gutters of Baker Street."


"Stately, plump Mycroft Holmes came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ----Introibo ad altare Dei."


"Someone must have traduced Doctor Watson, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."


"Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson sat one morning in the window-bay of 221b Baker Street, working and talking."


"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy Baskerville Hall. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit."


"The manager had no business to do it," said Holmes, "no business at all. He promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh,Watson!"


"Holmes knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him."


"My dear wife Mary and I have just been a week in our new home, 64 Queen Anne Street--a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front-breakfast parlour."

"Sherlock Holmes's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down--from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.


He said to his colleague: "Yes,Watson?"


"I was leaning against the bar in a saloon on Oxford Street, waiting for Mary to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to see me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory. "Aren't you Doctor Watson?" she asked."


"When Sherlock Holmes smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun."


"Moriarty was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Holmes signed it. And Holmes's name was good upon `Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

"Old Moriarty was as dead as a door-nail."


"Last night I dreamt I went to Shoscombe Old Place again."