I like you as I’ve never liked anyone.
You’d be crazy to let him go. You need someone normal around here.
Old Sherlock Holmes book covers (via Facsimile Dust Jackets)
As you are aware, E is the most common letter in the English alphabeth.
Probably both. Although technically, that was more of a compliment.
“You don’t mean to say that you have been walking about London with that thing?”
“Some Personalia about Mr Sherlock Holmes”, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1917
An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. […] I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime ; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks. I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
— The Musgrave Ritual, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1893)
A simple case, and yet, in some ways, an instructive one.
from The Adventure of the Empty House by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
