"Have you read Gaboriau's works?" I asked.

"Does Lecoq come up to

your idea of a detective?"

Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. "Lecoq was a miserable bungler,"

he said, in an angry voice; "he had only one thing to recommend him,
and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question
was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-
four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book
for detectives to teach them what to avoid."

Holmes seems convinced that he is superior to both of them, while

Watson expresses his admiration of the two characters. It has been
suggested that this was a way for Conan Doyle to pay some respect to
characters by writers who had influenced him, while insisting that his is
an improvement over them. However, Holmes pulls a very Dupin-esque
mind reading trick on Watson in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box"
(repeated word for word in the story, "The Adventure of the Resident
Patient", when "The Cardboard Box" was removed from the Memoirs),
and, to a lesser extent, in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men".

Holmes has shown himself a master of disguise:

A seaman (The Sign of Four)

An unemployed groom and a Nonconformist clergyman (A Scandal in

Bohemia)

An opium addict ("The Man with the Twisted Lip")

A common loafer ("The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet")

An old Italian priest ("The Adventure of the Final Problem")

A bookseller ("The Adventure of the Empty House")

A plumber ("The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton")

A dying man ("The Adventure of the Dying Detective")

An old sporting man ("The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone")

A woman ("The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone")

So great a master of disguise is Holmes, in fact, that in "A Scandal in
Bohemia", Watson is compelled to remark of him, "The stage lost a fine
actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a
specialist in crime."

Although Holmes looks upon himself as a disembodied brain, there are

times when he can become very emotional in a righteous cause, as
when he disapproves of the banker Holder as to how the man treated his
son, in "The Adventure of the