Elementary?

I have long been enamoured of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion, Dr. Watson. A vocation in which one could use intelligence, reasoning, logic, and the art of disguise to solve perplexing mysteries and earn a living — it has always seemed to me like a dream.

“It is an old maxim of mine,” the famous sleuth says in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” What’s certainly true — and not at all improbable — is that many others have fantasized about walking in Holmes’s fictional footsteps. One Canadian, Nicholas Power, may have actually tried. His logic and deductive reasoning seemed impeccable. His ability to crack cases was almost uncanny. Power’s role in saving a high-ranking member of the British royal family earned him international esteem, so much so that the New York Times noted his death, on October 2...