The Aphrodito Murder Mystery: A Return to the Scene of the Crimes

Early in Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (Chapter III), Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, M.D., who have only recently met and begun to cohabit, find themselves in what becomes their familiar mode of conveyance, a hansom cab, "driving furiously for the Brixton Road" and thence to the scene of an apparent crime at 3 Lauriston Gardens. Watson recalls a morning whose glumness matched his own dismal mood, an edgy mood that was further exasperated by a Sherlock Holmes who, "in the best of spirits," ... "prattled away" about fiddles and violins: "You don't seem to give much thought to the matter in hand," I said at last, interrupting Holmes's musical disquisition. "No data yet," he answered. "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment." It is certainly a lucky thing that papyrologists are not detectives, because any one of them who is tempted to theorize must necessarily violate Holmes's rule. As everyone.knows, the full papyrological documentation is never in; and even that which is available has regularly suffered the ravages of time-from tears and folds, dampness, mice and worms, and even (or especially) from willful human destruction. The papyri therefore, usually fragments themselves, tend to produce data that "exist only as a congeries of contiguously related fragments." And often, in the papyri, even the contiguity is missing.