Sherlock Holmes / Sherlock Holmes - Tropes H to N

This page is for tropes that have appeared in the Sherlock Holmes short stories.

For the rest:

• A to G
• O to T
• U to Z

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• Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook: Mentioned in "The Blue Carbuncle", when Sherlock decides to release the man who stole the title gem: "This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life."
• Hastily Hidden MacGuffin:
  • In "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons", a stolen pearl is hastily hidden in a plaster bust of Napoleon — one of a set of six, which are then sold to various customers, forcing the thief to seek out and smash them all.
  • In "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", a stolen gem is hidden by being force-fed to a live goose.
• Haplessly Hiding: In "The Adventure of Norwood Builder", Holmes fakes house fire to invoke the haplessless on the titular character, who's hiding in order to frame Holmes's client.
• Have a Gay Old Time:
  • Watson ejaculates in a couple of the books. Back then it just meant to interject a comment into a conversation.
  • Watson's friend Percy ejaculates every third paragraph in The Summation of "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty".
  • In "The Second Stain", Lestrade warns one of his officers that he would find himself "in Queer Street." This meant he would be in financial trouble back when it was written, but those unfamiliar with hundred year old British euphemisms might take that comment in a whole different direction.
  • "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" does one better. Watson describes a suspect thusly: "a boxer, an athlete, a plunger on the turf, a lover of fair ladies, and, by all account, so far down Queer Street that he may never find his way back again.” For what it's worth, a "plunger on the turf" was a reckless gambler who preferred to bet on the horses.
  • "Very sorry to knock you up, Watson," said he, "but it's the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you." - "The Speckled Band"^noteThe next paragraph helpfully expands upon this turn of phrase, letting modern readers know that it simply means to awaken someone (as in, knock on their door to wake them up)
  • "She pulled a little handkerchief out of her muff" - "A Case Of Identity". A muff in this case being an article of women's cold-weather clothing.
  • "Thank you," said my patient. "but I have felt another man since the doctor bandaged me." - "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb". (Of course, he means he feels like another man.)
  • "Ferguson was evidently devoted to [his baby son], for he took it into his arms and fondled it most tenderly." — "The Sussex Vampire" (At this time, "fondle" simply meant stroke or cuddle, and didn't have today's connotation of inappropriate touching.)
  • "I do not think that in our adventures we have ever come across a stranger example of what perverted love can bring about." - "The Adventure of Thor Bridge" ("Perverted" here doesn't mean sexually deviant, but psychologically warped and unhealthy; the dead woman, out of jealousy, killed herself in such a way as to frame her rival.)
  • "I'll chance it,” he cried, “I believe you are a man of your word, and a white man, and I’ll tell you the whole story." — "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" (He doesn't mean that he trusts Holmes because of his race—after all, he wouldn't say that he "believes" Holmes is white in that sense. Instead, he's using an old-fashioned meaning of "white" as "honest, fair-dealing." Of course, it's not without racial connotations—that sense has fallen out of use for a reason—it's just not the speaker's literal meaning.)
• He Knows Too Much:
  • "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb", features a counterfeiter gang which doesn't include a repairman for their heavy equipment, so once a year or so, they are forced to bring in a disposable one.
  • "The Greek Interpreter," analogously, features kidnappers who require the titular interpreter in order to communicate with their victim. They try to get rid of him when they realize that, despite their precautions and threats, he knows too much and has called Holmes in.
• The Help Helping Themselves: In "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual", Musgrave fires his butler for sneaking around and looking around in the family's papers. To his surprise, it's nothing of any value, only the questions and answers that make up the title ritual. The butler disappears a few days later, having figured out that the ritual in fact showed the location of historical treasures
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Watson and Holmes are ostensibly the ultimate example, though the exact sexualities of both are the topic of much academic debate.
• Historical Character's Fictional Relative: One of the few tidbits Holmes gives about his personal life (in "The Greek Interpreter") is that his grandmother was the sister of a French artist named Vernet (without specifying which of the several French artists with that name it was).
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs:
  • Sherlock Holmes uses cocaine (legal in Victorian London, although Watson disapproves and eventually gets him to give it up offscreen) when he doesn't have a case, because otherwise his mind will burn out like a powerful engine running without a load (or, as he himself said "My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built").
  • Played straight with tobacco: he famously calls one case "quite a three-pipe problem" and solves another by sitting up all night and smoking an ounce of shag tobacco.
• High-Heel–Face Turn: In "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" there is a female character involved with the villain who ends up helping the heroes.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", Dr. Grimesby Roylott is bitten by the venomous snake he intended to use to murder his stepdaughter Helen. Holmes plays an indirect role in Dr. Roylott's death by attacking the snake with his cane and driving it back through the vent with Roylott on the other side, but notes that he's unlikely to feel much remorse over it.
  • In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", when Jephro Rucastle is maimed by the starved mastiff he releases to kill his imprisoned daughter. Particularly appropriate, as he was the one who ordered the dog starved and imprisoned the girl.
  • In "Silver Blaze", the killer is the titular horse, whom the victim intended to make lame after betting against it.
• Hollywood Beauty Standards: there are very few women mentioned, and even fewer who are young and/or middle class or above, whom Watson does not describe as among the most beautiful he has ever seen.
• Horsing Around: The Reveal in "Silver Blaze": the horse spooked and kicked the victim in the head.
• Human Ladder: In "The Adventure of the Priory School", Holmes stands on Watson's back so he can peer into a window.
• Hyper-Awareness: One of the ways Holmes takes after C. Auguste Dupin is his belief in the powers of real observation, and as such, typically nothing gets past him.
• Idiot Ball:
  • In "The Five Orange Pips", Holmes knows that the bad guys have killed John Openshaw's uncle and father (when they were away from home, no less as Openshaw was), and that Openshaw is their next target. But he still tells Openshaw to go back home, unescorted. Unsurprisingly, the bad guys meet him on the way home and kill him (To be fair, Holmes' advice to Openshaw was to give them what they wanted because his life was in genuine danger, he just didn't expect the danger to come quite so quickly). Holmes must've been carrying the Idiot Ball that day, because there is only one other short story besides this where a person who has sought his help gets subsequently killed.
  • His experiment with the powder in "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot", which quickly becomes a case of Gone Horribly Right. After Watson barely escapes with Holmes in tow, Holmes even lampshades it:
    "It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson. A candid observer would certainly declare that we were so already before we embarked upon so wild an experiment."
  • In "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet," Mr. Alexander Holder not only takes the coronet home instead of leaving it at the bank, but tells his family about and exactly where he has stashed it.
  • In "The Greek Interpreter", Mycroft's idea for finding a gang of kidnappers is to put an advertisement in the newspapers that shows the interpreter talked, leading to his being kidnapped again and nearly killed this time.
• I Have This Friend: In "Sussex Vampire", the client is an old friend of Watson's who says he's approaching Holmes on behalf of a neighbor with a delicate problem. Holmes isn't fooled for a moment, and is amused when Watson remarks that it's just like his friend to want to help a neighbor.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In "Black Peter", the victim, an old sea captain, is harpooned through the chest with such force that he is pinned against the wall.
• Impoverished Patrician: Lord Robert St. Simon from "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor". He comes from a long line of nobility, but he himself only owns a small estate and is largely broke. It's strongly implied that his reason for getting married to the daughter of a wealthy American is for the money that she would bring with her into the marriage.
• Improbable Taxonomy Skills: The title character correctly identifies the lion's mane jellyfish as the killer of the victim when he sees it at the bottom of a small pool. Very much justified, however, in that this is one very distinctive species (it's really, really big), that he'd spent a day reading up on it to confirm a vague memory, and that the victim's last words were "the lion's mane."
• Inconveniently Vanishing Exonerating Evidence: In "The Problem of Thor Bridge", a woman commits suicide using an elaborate method that disposes of the weapon, having already planted evidence that will frame the woman she considered a rival.
• The Infiltration: "His Last Bow" (the in-universe last story) involves Holmes infiltrating a German spy ring for two years on the eve of the First World War and making sure they get nothing of worth and all the spies are arrested once it's too late for Germany to replace them.
• Inner Monologue Conversation: Holmes does the C. Auguste Dupin version (deducing someone's inner monologue through observing their body language) once just to prove that he's as good as Dupin, though he describes it as "showy and superficial".
• Inside Job: In "Silver Blaze", two of Holmes' hints are "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" (it was completely silent) and the fact that powdered opium was put in a dish spicy enough to hide its taste. A dog would have barked at a stranger, and only a member of the household could have arranged for a spicy dish to be served on that particular night, so the trope must be in effect.
• Inspector Lestrade: The Trope Namer, if not the Trope Maker.
• Insufferable Genius: While rarely outwardly rude, Holmes wasn't exactly big on humility. He even says at one point: "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers." (from "The Greek Interpreter")
• Intelligence Equals Isolation
• Inter-Class Romance: "A Scandal in Bohemia" has the "rich guy, common girl" romance with the Prince of Bohemia and Miss Irene Adler. Used to show how superior the resourceful and clever Miss Adler is to her "superior":
  "Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity she was not on my level?"
  "From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very different level to Your Majesty", said Holmes, coldly.
• In the Blood: Holmes states that his amazing deductive skills and genius is hereditary, he and his brother both possessing them. He theorized it might have been because they were descended from the famous Vernet line of French painters. Interestingly, Vernet really did have a sister, who did have a few children, one of which would've had to have been a Holmes parent, legitimately or otherwise.
• I Regret Nothing: Captain Croker in "The Abbey Grange" declares he has no regrets about killing Sir Eustace Brackenstall, has no fear for himself (his fear is for Sir Eustace's wife whom Croker loves), and would do it all again and be proud of it.
• I Should Write a Book About This: And Holmes berates Watson for doing so.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Not quite "It", but in "Sussex Vampire", the baby is referred to as "(the) Baby" and never by name.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy:
  • In "The Lion's Mane", a man dies horribly on the day he was planning to elope with his fiancée. One of the suspects is a friend of the victim's who was in love with the same woman and is assumed to harbor some ill feeling toward his rival. After he is cleared, he explains that, once he was sure she would be happier with his friend he was content to stand aside, and even helped them arrange the elopement.
  • In "The Abbey Grange", Captain Croker was initially pleased to hear that his love Mary Fraser had apparently found someone she loved and hadn't thrown herself away on a penniless sailor like him. That lasted until a chance meeting with her maid where he learned that the marriage had wound up on the rocks.
• I Will Wait for You: Deliberately invoked in "A Case of Identity".
• Impressed by the Civilian: There are a few times when ordinary people manage to impress Holmes, himself.
  • Irene Adler, neither a master criminal nor a recurring character (despite what Fanon would have you believe), managed to defeat Sherlock Holmes so impressively that Holmes only refers to her as The Woman, as if, according to Watson, she somehow summed up the whole of her sex.
  • The Big Bad of The Hound of the Baskervilles impresses Holmes by being cunning enough to tell the cab driver that he was Sherlock Holmes.
• Inheritance Backlash: In "The Five Orange Pips", a guy receives a mansion from his uncle, but soon he's sent death threats from the KKK because his uncle had some papers incriminating them (unknowingly, these papers had been burnt long ago). Also note that Watson, nor the guy's nephew had any clue as to what the KKK was. Adding to the KKK's mystique is the fact that they're able to murder three people and Make It Look Like an Accident each time.
• Insistent Terminology: Private Consulting Detective.
• Interpretative Character: All the characters are this when it comes to adaptations, most noticeably Holmes and Watson. At the end of the day, the stories are about a highly intelligent recluse and a more emotional doctor solving crimes, leaving plenty of room for interpretation when it comes to personality, gender and race.
• Invincible Hero: Averted, surprisingly. Holmes didn't always win.
  • In "The Five Orange Pips", Holmes freely confesses that he has been beaten four times; three times by men, and once by a woman (which is a Continuity Nod to "A Scandal In Bohemia"). And this was still early in his career. Presumably, those are just the ones where he knew who outsmarted him.
  • In the "Problem of Thor Bridge", Watson mentions his records contain many utter failures, which he only doesn't write about because Holmes's failure means that there was no resolution anyway.
  • "The Yellow Face" is a whole case about how Holmes nearly screwed the pooch but the truth was still discovered regardless; Holmes assumed that the client's wife was hiding the survival of her first husband, but in reality she was hiding the existence of her mixed-race daughter from that first marriage. Holmes ends the case by asking Watson to remind him of this incident if it ever seems like he's phoning it in again.
    "Watson", said he, "if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you."
• It's Personal: In "The Five Orange Pips", Holmes declares that the case has become a personal matter for him after John Openshaw gets murdered after consulting Holmes.
• Jerkass Has a Point: At the end of "The Noble Bachelor", after explaining to Lord St. Simon that his bride-to-be was already married to a man she truly loved but had believed until recently was dead, hence why she abandoned him at the altar, he invites all the parties to the affair to join him in dinner, hoping that it might aid with reconciling the hard feelings. Lord St. Simon coldly declines and leaves. While Watson has some hard comments about his Lordship's lack of grace, Holmes does acknowledge that he does have a point about not personally finding much to celebrate about recent events, especially as they also mean that he is now denied access to a fortune.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He keeps it well hidden behind a cold, logical exterior, but Holmes isn't entirely without a heart; it usually expresses itself through his friendship with Watson. "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs" presents a particularly striking example, when Holmes is moved to a panic at the idea of Watson being wounded.
• Karmic Death:
  • Many throughout the stories, but notably the murder of the blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton. Both Holmes and Watson saw it happen and decided to protect the murderer, who was one of Milverton's victims (the fact that Holmes and Watson were burglarizing Milverton's home at the time would also complicate matters).
  • The murderer in "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" poisoned their victims with a rare and obscure African plant, causing them to either go insane or die in nightmarish agony. The person he stole the plant from finds out what he did and, furious, tracks him down and poisons him in turn with the remainder of it.
• Kangaroo Court: Unusually for the trope, The Abbey Grange features a version cooked up in order to release the defendant. Watson-as-jury finds the culprit not guilty (probably by virtue of his acting in immediate self-defence and the defence of an abused woman) and Holmes-as-judge lets him go. He likely would have been found not guilty by a real jury, but none of the three men wanted to see a lady's name dragged into public scandal.
• Kick the Dog: In "The Abbey Grange" the Asshole Victim is said to have once set his wife's dog on fire.
• The Klan: The bad guys in "The Five Orange Pips." Controversially, Holmes expresses revulsion at them at a time when they were still publicly seen as a respectable organisation.
• Known by the Postal Address: Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street, and this location is iconic of the series and character. There's even a reference to it in the real Baker Street in London.
• Last-Name Basis: Sherlock and Dr. Watson even after living with and knowing each other for decades only address each other by their surnames. Men of their social class would be expected to do so in Victorian and later Edwardian England. The only person who calls Sherlock by his first name is his brother Mycroft.
• Later Instalment Weirdness: The last book of stories (which were previously always written in first person from Watson's POV) feature two stories narrated by Sherlock Holmes himself (though still presented as his memoirs), one that was basically a play, and one in third-person narration.
• Leeroy Jenkins: In "The Gloria Scott", Hudson was fairly certain that the first mate didn't set off the gunpowder that wrecked the ship, but one of the mutineers with bad aim.
• Let Off by the Detective: Holmes sometimes does this, reasoning that his job is simply to find a solution to a crime. Since he's not technically a member of the police or the courts, he doesn't feel obliged to turn someone over if he thinks their motive was noble, although he makes no promises that the police won't reach their own conclusion even without his help.
• Let's See YOU Do Better!: combined with an invoked dose of Surprise Difficulty for Holmes at the beginning of "The Blanched Soldier", one of the few stories in the canon narrated from the perspective of Holmes himself. After being challenged by Watson to try it himself after one-too-many derisive comments and dismissive put-downs about Watson's writing, Holmes is forced to concede that turning one of his investigations into a narrative that people actually want to read is a lot harder than he gave Watson credit for.
• Locked Room Mystery: "The Speckled Band", in which the victim is killed while locked inside her room by a snake that then returns to the other room via ventilator.
• Loser Friend Puzzles Outsiders:
  • The Boscombe Valley Mystery subverts this. Two former Australians, John Turner and Charles McCarthy, are apparently such good friends that John is letting Charles live on his land for half-rent, and there is even talk of their children marrying. McCarthy is actually blackmailing Turner due to a robbery he committed in the past, and the marriage, while mutually agreeable to both children, would have allowed McCarthy to control Turner's money.
  • Similarly, The Gloria Scott has an Old Friend of Trevor Sr. show up as The Thing That Would Not Leave, abusing his position every day until Trevor's son tries to kick him out. It turns out Trevor Sr. was an ex-criminal being blackmailed by the so-called friend.
• Love Forgives All but Lust:
  • In The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, Holmes must find a way to prevent the marriage of a rich young woman to a depraved baron, who has already convinced her that a man of his quality has many enemies, who are happy to spread rumours about his philandering, even when it is all but confirmed that the baron killed his first wife. When one of the baron's old victims fails to convince his current fiancé, Holmes looks for a diary in which the baron "collects" his former conquests (his "lust-diary", as Holmes calls it). Once Holmes delivers the diary to the current fiancé (and the baron is disfigured by said former mistress), the marriage is called off.
  • In "The Problem of Thor Bridge", Gibson's Costa Rican wife is fanatically in love with him, even though he's long ceased to love her. Then when she finds out he's making advances to the governess, and even though the governess refused him, the governess has more influence over the husband than the wife does, so the wife comes up with a plan to kill herself and frame the governess for it. It almost works, and Holmes hopes Gibson will be less of a Corrupt Corporate Executive afterwards.
• Love Martyr: Watson to Holmes, essentially. For every Friendship Moment, there are many more instances of Holmes deliberately making him feel like an idiot or asking him for a favour and then criticizing the way he does it, but Watson is eternally loyal and says that a single sign of affection from Holmes is worth all the grief he puts up with.
• The Mafia: Older Than Television, at least as far as fiction goes, since the Mafia are mentioned in "The Six Napoleons". Doyle describes the Mafia as "a secret political society, enforcing its decrees by murder."
• Mandatory Unretirement: In "His Last Bow", Holmes, who had retired to the country to raise bees, is revealed to have come out of retirement at the behest of the Prime Minister to catch a German spy. (Doyle wrote one more short story collection later, but in-universe, "His Last Bow", set in 1914, is the last Sherlock Holmes story chronologically.)
• Marrying the Mark: In "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", Holmes himself goes in disguise as a plumber and gets close - in fact, engaged - to Milverton's housemaid to help him gain access to the house, and the vault in which Milverton keeps the blackmail material. Watson thinks Holmes went too far, but Holmes replies with I Did What I Had to Do.
  "But the girl, Holmes?"
  He shrugged his shoulders.
  "You can't help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table. However, I rejoice to say that I have a hated rival who will certainly cut me out the instant that my back is turned."
• Marry the Nanny:
  • In "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist", the young lady who seeks Holmes' help was hired by Mr. Carruthers, a rich widower, to be a live-in music teacher for his daughter. Carruthers turns out to have been part of a scam to inherit Violet's fortune, but he fell In Love with the Mark and comes to her rescue near the end. Of course, the lady in question was already engaged at the time (to a character who does not actually appear in the case) and had no interest in acquiring another suitor.
  • In "Thor Bridge", Holmes makes his contempt for Gibson (who tried to make his children's nanny his mistress, while already married) very clear, and only takes the case for the girl's sake (she was accused of murdering Gibson's wife).
• Masking the Deformity: Subverted in the story "The Adventure of the Yellow Face". Learning that his client's wife is making secret visits to a mysterious person wearing a yellow mask, Holmes suspects that this is the woman's first husband, concealing "some loathsome disease". He's completely wrong; the masked person is the woman's mixed-race daughter, who's been made to wear the mask so there wouldn't be "gossip about there being a black child in the neighbourhood". Fortunately the story ends well as the client is willing to adopt her, and Holmes takes his defeat in stride, viewing it as a warning against complacency.
• Master of Disguise:
  • Holmes often disguises himself for his investigations, and in most instances not even Watson recognizes him. Notably, Watson can't see through Holmes's disguise when he first returns to London after pretending to be dead. Watson faints when Holmes takes off his disguise.
  • Irene Adler's claim to fame, canonically, is that she actually noticed Holmes' ploy, saw through his disguise, deduced who he was - and then, just to be sure, disguised herself as a man, sped to his address in time to watch him laughing his way up the steps into 221B Baker Street, still in the disguise he'd just used on her. She then walks past, wishing him good night and using his name. Holmes himself, still drunk on how smart he is, fails to realize he's in disguise and a stranger on the street just called him by name. A fandom was born.
  • Note that Holmes' ability to see through other people's' disguises wasn't always consistent with his usual perceptiveness. Many fans choose to believe that he did see through disguises, every time: he just didn't let on unless it suited his plans to do so.
• Master Forger: The crux of events in The Adventures the Three Garridebs is the antagonist, dangerous gunman 'Killer' Evans was in a partnership five years before the story, with one called Prescot, which ended when Evans shot him. Released from prison he attempts to get hold of the fortune in Counterfeit notes Prescot had already made. When caught he even claims he should have received a medal, as even the Bank of England couldn't tell that Prescott's notes were fakes.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: ...or maybe just karma. Either way, the murderers of "The Five Orange Pips" meet a sudden end, shortly after Holmes vows revenge.
• Mistaken for Own Murderer: The Twist Ending of "The Man With the Twisted Lip" is that the man suspected of murdering the client's husband is actually the supposedly murdered man, in disguise.
• The Mole:
  • Discussed in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" where Holmes and Inspector Hopkins note that Sir Eustace's murderers clearly knew that the bell rope, which they used to tie up Lady Brackenstall, wouldn't alert anyone, so they clearly knew the layout of the house from one of the servants. Holmes is quick to suspect Lady Brackenstall's maid Theresa Wright since Sir Eustace threw a decanter at her, but notes that would be a betrayal of the mistress who served as a surrogate daughter.
  • It's mentioned in "The Adventure of the Second Stain" that Eduardo Lucas had a spy in the British government who informed him of the foreign paper which he forced Lady Hilda to steal.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: While readers may be alerted that some piece of evidence is important, the nature of the evidence might not be known until near the end of the story. Of course, this could be dismissed as an Unreliable Narrator who tells the story from their point of view rather than getting the information from Holmes.
• Murder by Cremation: Subverted in the "The Mystery of Shoscombe Old Place". A ruined gambler is found to be burning bodies in the furnace, and might have done away with his sister by the same method. However, it soon turns out that the burned bodies were long dead: they came from the (sister's husband's) family crypt, and he was only burning the bodies so as to make room for the wife's corpse (she had died of natural causes, but the news that the gambler's only source of income was dead would have been his financial ruin). The entire point was to disguise the death for a few days until a horse race where he expected to make back his money and then some.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Not entirely, but Holmes is very thin yet surprisingly strong. For example, in "The Speckled Band", he laments that Dr. Grimsby Roylett left before Holmes could show him that he could bend the fireplace poker (which Roylett bent into a curve) back into its original form.
• Mutually Unequal Relation: In "The Musgrave Ritual", Holmes theorizes that this is what happened to the butler, who was found dead in an underground vault. Brunton had a history as The Casanova, and had previously been affiliated with a maid named Howells, but soon took up with another girl. Howells was seen acting strangely on the day Brunton was reported missing, and disappeared herself soon afterwards. Holmes believes Brunton thought Howells was still devoted to him, got her help to enter the vault, and only when she realized her chance for revenge (it's implied he got her pregnant) was right there did she slam the door on him.
  Holmes: This girl had been devoted to him. A man always finds it hard to realize that he may finally have lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.
• My Card: Due to the Victorian setting, it's common for men to use business cards.
• My Greatest Failure: "The Yellow Face", in which Holmes forms a plausible theory for the solution that turns out to be utterly wrong. Downplayed in that not much actual harm is done as a result, but Holmes still comes out looking humbled (to his credit, he asks Watson to remind him of this if ever he looks to be half-assing a case in the future). Watson mentions that there were other cases where Holmes failed, but he doesn't write about them for the simple reason that where Holmes failed often nobody succeeded and a case without a resolution would be narratively unsatisfying; "Yellow Face" was written as an example of a situation where Holmes erred but the truth was still discovered.
• Mysterious Past: Sherlock Holmes himself. Watson often wondered what set of circumstances could've produced Holmes, and Holmes never gave away anything about his history, larger family (except his brother), or education. We only know he's descended from French artists and British country squires. He went to University for two years, and has a brother, which doesn't even begin to explain all his weirdness. Then again, we actually learn even less about Watson (Father was fairly well off, dead before start of the series, elder brother was a wastrel who wasted his inheritance and drank himself to death) - but of course Holmes has way more strangeness to account for. Explaining Holmes' mysterious past is a common topic in pastiche and fanfiction.
• Mythology Gag: At the beginning of "The Three Garridebs", Watson narrates that he remembers it happened in June 1902 because that was the same month Holmes turned down a knighthood. There was a special list of knighthoods and other honours announced in June 1902 to mark the coronation of King Edward VII, and this was the occasion of Arthur Conan Doyle becoming Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
• Never Found the Body: Even though Conan Doyle fully intended to kill Holmes for real in "The Final Problem", he was savvy enough to use this trope, so when he changed his mind and decided to bring Holmes back, his death was easy to retcon away. The trope also applies to Moriarty, but he was never resurrected.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • In the "Red-Headed League", if John Clay had kept the League running for two more weeks as a cover, Jabez Wilson would not have gotten suspicious and gone to Holmes, who in turn would not have been able to foil his heist.
  • Similarly, in "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder", Jonas Oldacre's plan to frame McFarlane for killing him was so good that even Holmes believed McFarlane might have done it; he only realized the truth when Oldacre tried to plant additional evidence against McFarlane, in the form of a bloody thumbprint on the wall of Oldacre's main hall, when Holmes knew for a fact there hadn't been such a mark there the day before.
• No Antagonist:
  • In "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" Lord St. Simon's bride goes missing shortly after their wedding. At first a former lover of St. Simon's is suspected. But it turns out the bride's first husband, whom she believed dead, showed up at the wedding and she decided to just abscond with him.
  • In "The Missing Three-Quarter", Holmes is asked to look for a rugby player who's gone missing. It turns out that the athlete left to visit his dying wife and didn't tell anyone.
  • In "The Yellow Face," a man becomes concerned about his beloved wife's suspicious behaviour and worries she's concealing something horrible. She's only concealing her daughter from her first marriage, as she feared their family would be targeted for scandal because the little girl is half-Black. He readily reconciles with her and accepts the child as his own.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Charles Augustus Milverton is based off of a real life (alleged) blackmailer, Charles Augustus Howell.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In "The Gloria Scott", two former criminals are blackmailed by an Ungrateful Bastard whose life they saved years earlier.
• No Romantic Resolution: Watson, with some disappointment, notes that Holmes takes no further interest in Miss Violet Hunter once she is no longer his client, at the end of "The Copper Beeches."
• Nobility Marries Money: "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" concerns the marriage of Lord Robert St. Simon, an Impoverished Patrician, with Hatty Doran, an American heiress.
• Noodle Implements:
  • "The Reigate Squire", where thieves broke in a rich landowner's home and made off with "an odd volume of Pope's Homer, two plated candlesticks, an ivory letter-weight, a small oak barometer, and a ball of twine". They actually have nothing to do with the real crime, the burglars were looking for certain legal papers and grabbed random stuff off the desk to make it look like a break-in.
  • "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger" opens with a threat to whoever has been attempting to steal Watson's papers that if the attempts continue, he'll publicise the full details regarding "the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant".
  • Occasional references are made to Noodle Clues from unpublished cases, such as one Holmes solved by winding a dead man's watch, or another solution based on how far some parsley had sunken into the butter on a hot day^note This could plausibly provide information as to how long ago the parsley landed on the butter, which could help construct a timeline of events, but there weren't enough other pieces of information to say why this was so important. And quite apart from that, experiments from Sherlockian scholars have shown that parsley floats in melted butter - so clearly something odd was going on.
• Noodle Incident: Several cases are referred to by name, but never explained — which has given many writers who came after Conan Doyle, including his son Adrian, much scope for writing non-canonical Holmes adventures. Examples include "the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, which so nearly cost us both our lives", and "the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared."
  • Also, in "The Red Circle", the reason Sherlock admires Pinkerton Detective Leverton is because of a "Long Island cave mystery".
  • "The Second Stain" was occasionally referred to by Watson, but when the actual story came out it had nothing to do with the previously alluded-to version.
  • In "The Priory School", Holmes mentions that he and Watson are in the middle of the case of the Ferrars document, while another of his cases, the Abergavenny murder, is coming up for trial.
• Not So Stoic:
  • Holmes in "The Three Garridebs", after Watson gets hurt.
  • There are a few minor examples of Holmes' unshockable demeanour being cracked by a sufficiently out-of-the-blue revelation: "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor," when Watson reads that the bride went missing; "The Second Stain," when Watson tells him he won't be able to talk to one of his suspects because the man in question is dead; and "The Man with the Twisted Lip," when the wife of a man thought to be dead announces she's just had a letter from him.
  • Holmes's initial exclamation after Watson saves his life after the near-disastrous experiment with the powder in "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" is specifically noted as a case of this by Watson.

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