In "A Study in Scarlet," Holmes observes tiny details at a murder scene-- cigar ash, spots of blood, a sour smell on the dead man's lips-- which allow him to expose a tale of poison and betrayal.

I want to ask Sherlock's modern-day equivalent, forensic anthropologist Sue Black, if his techniques have stood the test of time.

Black: We can tell a little bit about your age, if you don't mind me saying.

Worsley, voice-over: And she's subjecting my hands to a very Sherlockian examination.

You see that little patch of pigmented skin?

So that's an age spot.

So that's a little piece of punctate pigmentation that we used to call liver spots that start to develop and become more prominent as you get older, as well, but they're totally unique as to where they occur, so nobody else will have them in the same pattern or in the same shape as you do, so that makes it useful when I want to compare images.

Sue, you make a bit of a speciality of hands, is that right?

I do.

A lot of the casework that I do with police involves images of hands, and these images of hands are often found on cameras, on people's computers.

It's amazing the number of times a photograph is found that has the back of a hand involved in it.

People forget that you're just as identifiable from the back of your hand as you are from your face.

So if my databases could go into the millions, I suspect we would get fairly close to DNA in terms of probability because I do think the human hand is unique.

Wow.

So it's like fingerprints but on steroids.

On steroids.

Wow!

Now, Sherlock Holmes wrote a book about deducing people's occupations from their hands.

He did.

Would you be happy to read out that passage from "A Study in Scarlet"?

I would indeed.

Yes.

So what it says is "By a man's fingernails, "by his coat sleeve, by his boots, "by his trouser knees, "by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, "by each of these things, a man's calling is plainly revealed."

Do you see any similarities between what you're doing today with your database of hands and what Sherlock Holmes did?

Yes.

We had a case of an unidentified individual, and what we could see were lots of little pock marks all over his skin, and the suggestion from us was, well, maybe he was involved in welding and these were little sparks and little burn marks on the skin from welding.

So sometimes what you see can tell you what somebody is or tell you what they aren't.

This is a very Sherlockian view of the world.

It is a bit, isn't it?

His world view is observation, deduction, and knowledge.