“Not for worlds” [BLAC]
Consider this: the Sherlock Holmes stories, even with their spectral hounds, severed ears, and dead bodies on railway tracks, are less an escape from life as we know it, than a reflection of it.
“There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before, as Sherlock Holmes told Inspector Gregson in A Study in Scarlet. While he was referring to the a specific case in the annals of crime history, the inference was clear: human nature is constant.
The crimes reported to us by Dr. Watson are by their very nature worthy of stories, but they indicate how common and similar humans are throughout time, driven by many of what are known as the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath, greed, pride, sloth, envy, gluttony, and lust. These core vices make up the basic physical, emotional, and mental needs of humans, as expressed in the extreme.
The way these vices are manifested in the stories may seem outrageous enough to readers, but they hold true enough to not be completely shocking. That is, they would be recognizable to anyone, in any land.
The older man who is trying to make himself more vigorous for his object of desire, the con man who concocts a story to make a willing dupe that much more pliable, the heartbroken lover who seeks revenge, a man of honor who kills to defend the woman he loves... these are all examples from the Canon that we can imagine happening in our world today.
Sherlock Holmes agreed on this point, and even expressed it similarly to Watson in "A Case of Identity":
“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
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