In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes. The world-famous detective confronted his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, at Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls. The two men plunged into the abyss, and neither emerged alive. At the end of the story, Dr Watson, Holmes’s faithful friend and chronicler, said goodbye to him.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle simply wanted to bring the detective’s adventures to an end so that he could concentrate on other stories. But Sherlock Holmes had already become far too popular for readers to simply accept losing him. The public protested, and publishers continued to want new Holmes stories.

Doyle eventually gave in. Ten years later, in 1903, he brought the detective back in The Adventure of the Empty House and explained how Holmes had survived what had seemed to be his fatal encounter.

This is already a story running on two levels – one in reality and one in fiction – with an unusually close connection between the two. But think for a moment about what actually happened. A writer invented a detective whose stories became so beloved that even his own creator could no longer get rid of him. Sherlock Holmes stepped beyond the boundaries of the individual stories and began to live a life of his own in the public imagination, becoming a phenomenon in his own right – though at this point not yet independent of his author.

And the phenomenon is still doing just fine. New adaptations keep appearing, new stories are being written, and Holmes’s world and circle of acquaintances continue to expand. There is already a series about a young Sherlock, while his younger sister, Enola Holmes, has films of her own.

And since we started with his death: in May 2026, Sky announced that the six-part series The Death of Sherlock Holmes, starring Rafe Spall, will arrive in 2027. The story begins when a Swiss woman and her young son discover a barely alive Englishman suffering from amnesia in an icy mountain stream. When a murder takes place in their village, the stranger’s unusual powers of deduction draw him into another investigation. While trying to uncover the truth about someone else’s fate, he gradually finds himself confronting the mystery of his own past.

The series explores one of the blank spaces in Conan Doyle’s stories. According to their internal chronology, Holmes disappeared in 1891 and returned in 1894. We know very little about the three years in between.

Incidentally, even in the original story, nobody actually sees Holmes die. Watson concludes from the traces left at the scene that his friend and Moriarty fell into the waterfall together. Doyle later used precisely this detail to explain the detective’s return.

So the upcoming series is not simply another adaptation of an old story. It turns a literary mystery more than 130 years old into another investigation.

But how did Sherlock Holmes become so popular in the first place? What was so special about him that readers refused to let him go, and that his stories are still generating new stories today?

To answer that, we first need to return to the world in which the detective was born.

The World of Real Detectives

There is a story behind how a detective became the hero of popular fiction in the first place.

The nineteenth century brought enormous changes to the world. Of course, the world had changed before and has continued changing ever since, but during this period the scale of change seems to have shifted.

(We have already written about some of these larger transformations, including the development of transport infrastructure into a global network and the global coordination of timekeeping.)

Among many other things, cities expanded dramatically during this century, modern police institutions developed significantly, and – largely thanks to the press – public interest in crime began to grow. Together, these changes helped transform the role of the detective.

Enforcing the law, catching criminals and bringing them to justice remained important to society, but increasing importance was also placed on having trained and capable professionals who could establish exactly what had happened, who had been involved, and what evidence supported the available hypotheses.

One particularly unusual figure in this story was Eugène-François Vidocq. His life contained enough material for several adventure novels: he fought duels and brawls, joined the army but proved to be far from an exemplary soldier, deserted to escape a court-martial and still came close to ending up under the guillotine. He worked as a highwayman, smuggler and forger, went to prison several times, escaped several times… and so on. He even tried piracy.

But after his criminal career, he entered the service of French law enforcement.

He certainly had the practical experience for it. Vidocq founded and headed the Brigade de Sûreté, a plainclothes investigative unit. He made use of his knowledge of the criminal underworld, networks of informants and undercover investigation. Among the many innovations associated with him were the use of undercover agents, systematic personal files, ballistic examination and plaster casts of footprints – techniques still familiar from CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. (For example: CSI S06E04.)

Oh, and he also worked as a private investigator.

His memoirs, published in 1828–1829 with literary assistance, became highly successful. Vidocq’s life story and detective persona influenced several later literary characters. He was a personal friend of Balzac and became one of the models for Vautrin in La Comédie humaine, as well as for Émile Gaboriau’s detective Lecoq. The influence of Vidocq’s memoirs can also be detected in Poe’s stories. Films were later made about him as well; one of the best known, Vidocq (2001), was directed by Pitof and starred Gérard Depardieu in the title role.

The methods and stories of real detectives were thus entering literature. But writers did not simply document police work. They selected elements from it that could be used to build stories of their own.

In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe placed the process of reasoning itself at the centre of his short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Its protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, solves a mystery that has defeated the police. Poe’s story became one of the foundational works of modern detective fiction.

Over the following decades, other writers continued developing the genre, and then, in 1887, Sherlock Holmes appeared.

Conan Doyle did not draw only on earlier detective fiction. Holmes’s methods of observation and deduction were partly inspired by Doyle’s former medical teacher Joseph Bell, who attempted to infer people’s occupations, lifestyles and other characteristics from tiny external details. In literature, the experience of real investigators, contemporary scientific thinking and the writer’s imagination came together.

And a particularly interesting form of storytelling was born. After a crime, only scattered pieces of information remain. The detective tries to reconstruct what happened from these fragments. At first, the details seem unrelated, but through observation and reasoning, a story slowly begins to emerge from them. The reader can watch not only what happens to the characters, but how they move from the information available to them towards a solution.

This cultural transformation would eventually influence real investigation as well.

When a Fictional Detective Gives the Real Police Ideas

In 1910, French forensic scientist Edmond Locard established a forensic laboratory for the Lyon police. Locard was one of the pioneers of examining tiny traces of material left at crime scenes, but contemporary science was not his only source of inspiration.

In his 1924 book Policiers de roman et policiers de laboratoire, he compared the methods of real and fictional detectives. He had particularly high regard for Sherlock Holmes, who combined knowledge from different scientific fields to solve crimes. Locard himself acknowledged that the work on dust analysis in his Lyon laboratory had been inspired not only by the forensic writings of Hans Gross, but also by Conan Doyle’s stories.

In other words, investigative methods developed in reality entered literature, where a writer’s imagination combined them in new ways. Ideas appearing in literature then flowed back into the thinking of real professionals. Stories about Holmes were able to offer new perspectives even to people actually working in law enforcement.

That alone is already an interesting process of information flow. But while science and literature were influencing one another, investigation was undergoing another transformation as well: it was becoming popular entertainment.

Investigation Becomes Mass Entertainment

Why investigation? Why did this particular profession give rise to such a popular literary genre? Teachers, mining engineers and expedition leaders could all have been equally exciting. Or telegraph operators. Doctors saved lives, engineers built astonishing things, journalists searched for facts and delivered them to readers…

Part of the answer probably lies in the nature of investigation itself. A mysterious event whose causes we do not know. Pieces of information that seem unrelated at first. Connections that gradually reveal themselves. Finally, an explanation that gives meaning to what happened. That structure alone is capable of holding our attention. Crime raises the stakes even further: we are not only curious about what happened, but whether the person responsible can be found.

Still, more was needed for investigation to become this popular. During the nineteenth century, the development of modern policing, urbanisation, the mass press and book publishing jointly transformed the social role of law enforcement.

Historian Haia Shpayer-Makov, studying how British detectives were portrayed in the press, showed how public perceptions changed between the mid-nineteenth century and the First World War. Alongside initial distrust of police officers who worked secretly, a new image gradually emerged: the detective as a well-known, almost heroic figure. The press played a central role in this transformation.

Reports of real crimes and fictional detective stories reinforced one another, increasing public interest in investigation. Meanwhile, the growing press market created new opportunities for distributing stories. Recurring detective characters became regularly consumable cultural products: every new crime offered a new story, while audiences already knew – and looked forward to seeing – the protagonist.

The self-contained Sherlock Holmes stories appearing in The Strand Magazine from 1891 onwards show this model particularly clearly. The commercial success of the detective’s adventures encouraged both the writer and the publisher to keep producing more.

From here, it becomes easier to understand what happened at the beginning of our story. Conan Doyle did not simply kill off – or try to dispose of – the protagonist of a novel. He tried to end the story of a cultural figure who already had an audience of his own, and whose future adventures were now linked to economic interests as well.

The interacting processes of audience demand, publishing and storytelling had made Holmes so popular that the stories were no longer developing exclusively according to the writer’s original plans.

And soon, the detective stepped out of the pages of books altogether.

The Detective Conquers the Screen

Moving images offered new possibilities for depicting investigation. Audiences could now do more than read about clues and deductions: they could observe the locations themselves, watch the characters’ behaviour and testimony, and examine the different pieces of evidence.

Sherlock Holmes has appeared in countless film and television adaptations, allowing the character to remain popular with successive generations. Roger Moore has played him. So have Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee.

According to one audience poll, viewers consider Jeremy Brett the best of them. He portrayed the legendary detective in adaptations of 42 Holmes stories.

Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr., moved the detective story closer to the world of action films. The BBC series Sherlock, which began in 2010 and starred Benedict Cumberbatch, placed Holmes in modern London, where digital technology itself became part of the investigative process.

But the history of investigation on screen is naturally much larger than the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Film and television have produced countless famous detectives, with original ideas and twists alongside new variations on proven old formulas.

Columbo, for example, introduced an unusual reversal into the classic detective story. In many episodes, we learn who committed the murder right at the beginning. The mystery is therefore not who did it, but how the detective will expose them. The viewer knows more than the protagonist and watches as Columbo gradually reaches the same knowledge.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which began in 2000, approached investigation from another direction. The series placed the tools of forensic science at the centre of the process: tiny material traces, DNA and laboratory tests could transform apparently insignificant details into important information.

This forms a rather elegant chain. Vidocq’s experiences found their way into literature, Poe continued reshaping the detective story, and in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes the earlier literary tradition met the scientific thinking of the period. Holmes’s methods later influenced Locard’s approach to forensic science.

Modern forensics, of course, developed from countless other sources as well. But within this particular flow of information, a path really can be traced from Vidocq’s world all the way to the forensic laboratories we see on CSI.

Meanwhile, elements of investigation also appeared in other genres. Indiana Jones, for example, is not a detective, but in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade he uses historical documents and physical clues in his search for the Holy Grail. Here, investigation is not about solving a crime, but uncovering a mystery from the past.

Dr Gregory House tries to establish diagnoses from signs, symptoms, contradictions and deductions. And David Shore consciously drew on Sherlock Holmes when creating House.

(This creates a particularly elegant little circuit: Conan Doyle partly modelled Holmes on the observational methods of the physician Joseph Bell, and a century later David Shore, creator of House, M.D., deliberately drew on Holmes when developing another doctor.)

So storytelling built around obtaining and connecting information has spread far beyond the traditional boundaries of crime fiction.

And over time, the investigations we saw on screen began to form new connections with reality as well.

Following the popularity of CSI, for example, researchers began asking whether viewers might start expecting the same kind of scientific evidence in real court cases that they encounter on television. Anyone who knows the series knows the phenomenon.

Determining a car’s licence plate from a reflection in the sunglasses of a pedestrian reflected in the windscreen of a passing car caught by an ATM security camera is not really possible in real life. Even the best-trained AI cannot invent a real licence plate if the camera was technically incapable of recording that information in the first place.

American researchers have also studied the so-called “CSI effect”. A 2006 study involving 1,027 people summoned for jury duty found strong expectations for scientific evidence, but did not establish a clear relationship between those expectations and watching specific crime television programmes. The authors suggested that broader changes in the technological and cultural environment might also help explain the phenomenon.

So once again we encounter the same question: how do methods developed in reality and the cultural works depicting them influence one another?

Meanwhile, however, another important change had taken place. Audiences began to want to become detectives themselves. Not necessarily for real, but definitely as a game.

When the Story Becomes a Game

Classic detective fiction already had a playful quality. The writer placed the clues, and the reader could try to solve the mystery alongside the detective – or even before them. In puzzle-like detective fiction during the first half of the twentieth century, one principle became particularly important: the reader should also have access to the information necessary to solve the case. At the end of the story, we could therefore discover not only what happened, but whether our own reasoning had been correct.

From there, it was only a small step towards letting the reader take over part of the investigation.

In 1936, Dennis Wheatley and J. G. Links published an unusual work called Murder Off Miami. The book contained the case file of a fictional murder investigation: witness statements, photographs, letters, and even strands of hair and other pieces of physical evidence. The reader’s task was to solve the case independently from the available information. The solution was placed inside a sealed section that was supposed to be opened only after the investigation had been completed.

More than 80,000 copies were sold in Britain, and the format has survived ever since.

A few years later, in 1949, Cluedo brought investigation into the world of board games.

Anthony Pratt, the game’s inventor, had previously worked as a musician at social events where guests took part in staged murder mysteries. He transformed that experience into a board game in which players have to determine who committed the murder, where it happened, and which weapon was used.

From the complex activity of investigation, Cluedo primarily retained two things: acquiring information and eliminating possibilities. But the players are not simply solving a worksheet. The information is distributed among them, and they must interact with one another to obtain the knowledge required to reach the solution.

Later game designers turned other elements of detective work into game mechanics. In Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, first released in the early 1980s, players can search an entire city for clues. We use a map, newspapers and a directory, visit witnesses, and decide for ourselves where to continue the investigation. Here, information no longer simply has to be interpreted. It also has to be actively found.

Video games expanded the possibilities even further.

Return of the Obra Dinn (2018), for example, asks the player to reconstruct the history of a ship that has reappeared without its crew. Rather than finding a single guilty person, we have to determine the fate of its passengers and crew from the information available to us.

Outer Wilds (2019), meanwhile, is a science-fiction adventure game in which we investigate the mysteries of a solar system caught in a time loop. The player’s most important form of progress is not gaining a new weapon or piece of equipment, but the knowledge carried forward from previous discoveries.

Today, investigation appears in countless forms of play: puzzle magazines, board games, video games, escape rooms and live-action roleplaying games. These games offer very different experiences, but they share something important: they create information systems in which the players themselves have to recognise the connections.

Which brings us to a particularly interesting question. What happens to us when we do not merely observe an investigation, but take part in one ourselves?

What Do We Learn from Games?

In his 2025 paper A Nagy Játék – avagy a társasjátékok társadalmi meghatározottságáról, game designer and developer Robin Hegedűs examines the relationship between games and the societies that create them. According to the paper, patterns of thought associated with different historical periods and cultures can also appear in games. Game designers draw on the environments around them, while the games they create can place particular values, behaviours and social relationships at the centre of play.

Hegedűs argues that the rules and operation of games are not independent of the societies in which they become popular. Chess and go may convey different ideas about the world and the individual; during the Cold War, chess became a symbolic arena for competition between political systems; poker can be seen as reflecting the logic of the risk-taking capitalist entrepreneur watching their competitors; and the rise of modern cooperative games can potentially be considered alongside the increasing social importance placed on teamwork.

Even the rapid growth of solo board gaming can be interpreted as one reflection of social atomisation.

Investigation games also show how differently the same activity can be transformed into rules. In Cluedo, players compete against one another to find the solution. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, by contrast, can be played cooperatively: participants can share their observations and deductions. Different forms of gameplay demand different kinds of behaviour and thinking.

In one game, we need to pay attention to what information we can obtain from the others. In another, we must also think about how to share our own knowledge and how to connect the ideas of different players.

Here, however, it is useful to distinguish between a game’s theme and its underlying mechanics. Both can affect players, but in different ways. The theme can provide information and teach us something: while playing an investigation game set in a historical period, for example, we might learn a great deal about an era, a city or contemporary law enforcement.

Game mechanics, by contrast, provide practice in certain forms of behaviour and thinking, prompting players to use particular skills and abilities. What the game requires us to do in order to achieve its goals is what its mechanics make us practise. If we need to organise information, draw conclusions and weigh different possibilities, we repeatedly practise those operations during play. If cooperation leads to success in the game, the competencies required for cooperation may improve.

In principle, skills developed through games may also be applicable to other areas of life… but things are not quite that simple. We may become better problem-solvers in real life by learning to investigate effectively in a board game, but the transfer is not automatic. Research into the educational and cognitive effects of board games has found positive results in several areas, but the effects depend on the type of game, the skill being measured and the participants themselves.

What games certainly do offer is an opportunity to experience the consequences of our own decisions, how easy it is to misinterpret information, and how much difference it can make when other people add their own observations to a shared process of thinking. While playing, we recreate investigation, and from the interacting decisions of the participants a story can emerge that is no longer controlled exclusively by the writer or game designer.

The players themselves become part of the flow of information.

And What Happens When We Stop Playing?

Investigation does not end when we close the book, switch off the television or put the board game back into its box. In the modern world, we constantly encounter information whose full background we do not know: a video whose location is unclear; a news story whose different sources make contradictory claims; a photograph of unknown origin used by someone as evidence to support a story.

In such situations, we may begin investigating ourselves. We try to locate the original sources, compare the available information, check individual details, and use them to reconstruct what may actually have happened.

Similar methods are used in open-source investigations based on publicly available information. The independent investigative collective Bellingcat, for example, uses publicly accessible digital material – such as photographs, videos, satellite images and databases – to reconstruct events and verify claims, while also making its methods public.

A 2014 Bellingcat guide explains in detail how the location of an online video can be identified from buildings, roads and other visible landmarks. Similar powers of observation and deduction also form the basis of GeoGuessr, a game in which players identify locations from tiny details in Street View imagery. The 2026 GeoGuessr World Championship in Berlin was won by Hungarian player Szabolcs Attila Debre.

Of course, these methods did not originate only in detective novels or board games. Gathering information, interpreting it, and drawing conclusions from it are much older and more general human activities.

Perhaps this stems from the simple fact that we are not born with an instruction manual explaining how the world – or we ourselves – work. We therefore have little choice but to try to understand what we are and what surrounds us through our own observations, the observations of others, experimentation, communication and reasoning. That fundamental need is probably far older than investigation as either a profession or a cultural genre.

What makes the cultural history of investigation particularly interesting is what happened around it. A real-world activity gave rise to novels, films and games. These made the figure of the detective widely familiar and presented this particular way of understanding the world in ever newer forms.

Investigation therefore remained more than a profession. It became a cultural role that anyone can step into through a story or a game.

And that has an important consequence. When we play an investigation game, we usually know that the mystery has a solution. The game designer knows the truth and constructs the rules and available information so that we have some possibility of reaching it.

(Although a truly good Twin Peaks game could perhaps break that convention. It might contain a mystery with no single clear solution…)

Reality, unfortunately, does not work that way. Important information may be missing and may even be lost forever. It can be transformed until it becomes unrecognisable or inaccessible. A witness may be mistaken, evidence may be misleading, or several different explanations may all be compatible with the data available to us. And sometimes we simply cannot determine what happened.

This difference is particularly important to remember in a world where we have access to more and more information, and where it is increasingly easy to assemble that information into different stories.

Investigation is not merely about connecting the details. It is also about checking whether the connections we think we see between them actually exist.

The Story That Never Ends

In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle tried to end the story of Sherlock Holmes. He failed. The detective remained alive in the imagination of his readers and returned as a character in new novels, films, television series and games. Meanwhile, a much older human activity – investigation itself – continued taking on new forms.

Real investigative methods gave rise to stories. Those stories flowed back into reality, while developments in the press, science, technology and entertainment allowed them to reach ever larger audiences.

Investigation became a game in which people could not merely follow the process of drawing conclusions from clues, but try it themselves.

As different cultural and technological currents met and influenced one another, investigation became familiar as far more than a police activity. It became a pattern of thinking and storytelling that can be recognised in fields ranging from journalism and scientific research to film, games and everyday fact-checking.

Perhaps investigation has become so deeply embedded in our culture precisely because it makes visible and tangible something all of us are doing all the time: trying to understand the world from the information available to us. And when the details finally come together into a story, one small part of the world suddenly becomes easier to understand.

Of course, not every story we can construct from information is true…

…but that is exactly why we must keep investigating.

Sources and Further Reading

Sky Group: The Death of Sherlock Holmes – official announcement, May 7, 2026

On the story, creators and cast of the six-part series scheduled for 2027.

Sky Group – official announcement

Andrew Dickson: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

British Library.

On the literary origins of Sherlock Holmes, his popularity, death and return.

British Library – full article

Haia Shpayer-Makov: From Menace to Celebrity: The English Police Detective and the Press, c. 1842–1914

Historical Research, 2010, 83(222), 672–692.

On changing social perceptions of real detectives and the role played by the press.

Oxford Academic – study and abstract

Ian Burney: Our Environment in Miniature: Dust and the Early Twentieth-Century Forensic Imagination

Representations, 2013, 121(1), 31–59.

On the relationship between modern forensic science and detective fiction, with particular attention to Edmond Locard and Sherlock Holmes.

PubMed Central – full study

Hegedűs Robin: A Nagy Játék – avagy a társasjátékok társadalmi meghatározottságáról

Kultúra és Közösség, 2025/1, pp. 115–126.

On the appearance of social patterns of thought in game mechanics, cooperation, and the possible social effects of games.

National Széchényi Library – full study

Robin Hegedűs: The World of Investigation Games

Mindclash Games, August 15, 2026.

On the origins, development and different game mechanics of investigation board games.

Mindclash Games – full article

Donald E. Shelton, Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak: A Study of Juror Expectations and Demands Concerning Scientific Evidence: Does the “CSI Effect” Exist?

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, 2006–2007.

An empirical examination of the proposed relationship between crime television programmes and jurors’ expectations concerning scientific evidence.

Vanderbilt University – full study

Shota Noda, Kentaro Shirotsuki, Mutsuhiro Nakao: The Effectiveness of Intervention with Board Games: A Systematic Review

BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 2019.

A review of empirical research into the educational, cognitive and social effects of board games.

PubMed Central – full study

Eliot Higgins: A Beginner’s Guide to Geolocating Videos

Bellingcat, July 9, 2014.

On identifying the location of online videos, comparing publicly available information, and verifying claims.

Bellingcat – full guide

The post Sherlock Holmes Came Back from the Dead – How Investigation Became a Cultural Phenomenon first appeared on JAMMER 2.0.