"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