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Solve a murder at Sherlock exhibit
Columbus, Ohio - If you make your way to the Center of Science and Industry to see The International Exhibition Of Sherlock Holmes, which opened last Saturday, there is a new mystery.
You are meant to follow in the footsteps of the fictional detective described by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen". The case involves a seaside murder (which you are asked to solve), a smashed bust of Napoleon (which you must piece together), a blood-spattered wall (which you must interpret by creating similar spray patterns), a burnt worm in an ashtray (do not ask) and marks on the sand (which you try to replicate using a rotating footprint machine).
Before investigating that case (which, admittedly, is a pale shadow of the originals), you have already been led through a lushly imagined reconstruction of the detective's Victorian sitting room at 221B Baker Street.
This semi-immersion in a fictional universe might seem in keeping with contemporary intoxication with this Victorian dynamic duo: Robert Downey's two recent Holmes films, the BBC's startling re-envisioning of the characters in Sherlock, and the escapades of a New York-based sleuth with a female Watson in the TV series Elementary.
And, indeed, the exhibition ends with contemporary fanboy Holmesiana, including a costume worn by Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson in Elementary, an electric prod brandished by Downey in Sherlock Holmes and an "explosive vest" Moriarty forces onto Watson in Sherlock.
This 10,000 sq ft exhibition will tour eight other cities in North America before heading overseas.
And while the show does not solve the mystery of how Holmes, after more than 125 years, still grips obsessively at people's brains, most of it is so informative, thoughtful and amusing that the viewer glimpses what a revolutionary figure he was.
The evidence is in the exhibition's first half, which is devoted to the creation of Holmes and the nature of his era. It includes not just Conan Doyle manuscript pages and early publications but also a preserved heart with a stab wound (from 1831) and a "tibia and fibula with osteomyelitis (bone infection)". There is a discussion of botany, photography and ballistics. How, out of all this, did Holmes evolve?
Some fictional predecessors appear in a display of "shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls".
"What a swindle," Conan Doyle wrote in 1888, soon after creating Holmes. A fictional detective, he noted, typically "obtains results without any reason". Conan Doyle was inspired instead by Edgar Alan Poe, whose stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin made him "the master of all". The real inspiration came at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, where Conan Doyle enrolled in 1876 at 17. His teacher, surgeon Joseph Bell, became the model for Holmes.
Conan Doyle recalled watching Bell scrutinise a patient in street clothes before beginning a conversation a conversation which anticipates the deductions of Baker Street: "Well, my man, you've served in the army." "Aye, sir." "Not long discharged?" "No, sir." "A Highland regiment?" "Aye, sir." "A non-commissioned officer?" "Aye, sir." "Stationed at Barbados?" "Aye, sir."
The first collection of Holmes stories was dedicated to Bell. Diagnosis of disease became the model for Holmes' diagnosis of crime.
One gallery here surveys the advances of the late Victorian era which made the modern detective possible. The Kodak box camera turned the photo into a tool (and into evidence). Fingerprints were analysed. The telegraph provided instant communication. And forensic science advanced. "The common maggot," you read, "has a fixed life cycle, and when its eggs or larvae are found upon a dead body, scientists are able to work backward to calculate the time of death."
New York Times
Columbus, Ohio - If you make your way to the Center of Science and Industry to see The International Exhibition Of Sherlock Holmes, which opened last Saturday, there is a new mystery.
You are meant to follow in the footsteps of the fictional detective described by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen". The case involves a seaside murder (which you are asked to solve), a smashed bust of Napoleon (which you must piece together), a blood-spattered wall (which you must interpret by creating similar spray patterns), a burnt worm in an ashtray (do not ask) and marks on the sand (which you try to replicate using a rotating footprint machine).
Before investigating that case (which, admittedly, is a pale shadow of the originals), you have already been led through a lushly imagined reconstruction of the detective's Victorian sitting room at 221B Baker Street.
This semi-immersion in a fictional universe might seem in keeping with contemporary intoxication with this Victorian dynamic duo: Robert Downey's two recent Holmes films, the BBC's startling re-envisioning of the characters in Sherlock, and the escapades of a New York-based sleuth with a female Watson in the TV series Elementary.
And, indeed, the exhibition ends with contemporary fanboy Holmesiana, including a costume worn by Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson in Elementary, an electric prod brandished by Downey in Sherlock Holmes and an "explosive vest" Moriarty forces onto Watson in Sherlock.
This 10,000 sq ft exhibition will tour eight other cities in North America before heading overseas.
And while the show does not solve the mystery of how Holmes, after more than 125 years, still grips obsessively at people's brains, most of it is so informative, thoughtful and amusing that the viewer glimpses what a revolutionary figure he was.
The evidence is in the exhibition's first half, which is devoted to the creation of Holmes and the nature of his era. It includes not just Conan Doyle manuscript pages and early publications but also a preserved heart with a stab wound (from 1831) and a "tibia and fibula with osteomyelitis (bone infection)". There is a discussion of botany, photography and ballistics. How, out of all this, did Holmes evolve?
Some fictional predecessors appear in a display of "shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls".
"What a swindle," Conan Doyle wrote in 1888, soon after creating Holmes. A fictional detective, he noted, typically "obtains results without any reason". Conan Doyle was inspired instead by Edgar Alan Poe, whose stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin made him "the master of all". The real inspiration came at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, where Conan Doyle enrolled in 1876 at 17. His teacher, surgeon Joseph Bell, became the model for Holmes.
Conan Doyle recalled watching Bell scrutinise a patient in street clothes before beginning a conversation a conversation which anticipates the deductions of Baker Street: "Well, my man, you've served in the army." "Aye, sir." "Not long discharged?" "No, sir." "A Highland regiment?" "Aye, sir." "A non-commissioned officer?" "Aye, sir." "Stationed at Barbados?" "Aye, sir."
The first collection of Holmes stories was dedicated to Bell. Diagnosis of disease became the model for Holmes' diagnosis of crime.
One gallery here surveys the advances of the late Victorian era which made the modern detective possible. The Kodak box camera turned the photo into a tool (and into evidence). Fingerprints were analysed. The telegraph provided instant communication. And forensic science advanced. "The common maggot," you read, "has a fixed life cycle, and when its eggs or larvae are found upon a dead body, scientists are able to work backward to calculate the time of death."
New York Times
