“And he distrusted the sort of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!”

- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

Sherlock Holmes is fun to read, but completely, utterly unrealistic.

That said, I still enjoy the books as well as the RDJr Movies.