Letter
In It for the Money
20 February 2014
Alice Spawls isn’t correct to describe Sherlock Holmes as a ‘gentleman amateur’: he is in fact a paid private professional (LRB, 20 February). This is made unmistakeably clear when he is first introduced in A Study in Scarlet, where the mystery of his profession is posed, over breakfast, to his new roommate, Dr Watson. One of Holmes’s most distinctive features as a detective is that he has...
