The game is afoot.
Arguably the single most famous metaphor related to Sherlock’s adventures in found in this collection. Sherlock’s metaphor framing of the act of criminal detection as a game to be played and won is found is found at the very beginning of “The Abbey Grange” when an excitable Holmes awaken a slumbering Watson to answer an urgent plea for help arriving at 3:30.
There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans.
The metaphorical attribution to late onset “eccentricity” is particularly apt for this collection of cases in which Sherlock’s need for involvement results from a long period of gestation among the principles. “The Dancing Men,” “The Norwood Builder,” “The Priory School,” and “The Golden Pince-Nez” all involve crimes committed by people who have to bide their time for one reason or another before the development of an “unsightly eccentricity” leads to a sudden explosion of psychopathy and tragedy.
He was more like a malignant and cunning ape than a human being.
The comparison being made in this particular case is directed toward Jonas Oldacre, “The Norwood Builder” who malignancy is a pathological patience. He has waited for decades to act out his carefully conceived plan for revenge. The simile carries connotations that the criminal mind is at a subhuman level of development and that Darwinian implication hardly applies to just Oldacre. Charles Augustus Milverton presents himself as a being of greater intellectual and evolutionary development than those whom he blackmail, but Holmes himself sees the man quite differently, describing him as a personification of those “slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces” that make everyone shudder in unease. In another story, a suspect named Beppo is labeled a “dangerous homicidal lunatic, with Napoleonic delusions.” The villains in almost every story in this collection exhibited an intensified and heightened level of psychosis that allows them to also be castigated as possession less humanity than the norm.
Fierce Tiger/Skulking Jackal
This is Watson’s characterization of the two potential types of criminals in which he and Holmes lie in wait for in “The Adventures of Black Peter.” Sometimes the predator is a fierce tiger like Milverton and at other times a danger only to weaker individual like the noxious Woodley pursuing “The Solitary Cyclist.”
Hunting
The most pervasive metaphor through the entire Holmes canon almost certainly has to be that of the hunt. When in the midst tracking or ensnaring their prey, the former soldier Watson seems especially fond of making comparisons of the situation to the act of hunting game. A reference to hunting or being on the trail of prey seems to pop up in just about every single story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes the allusion is concrete as in “The Dancing Men” when Watson writes that “Holmes hunted about among the grass and leaves like a retriever after a wounded bird.” Sometimes the metaphor is extended through an entire section of the story as in “The Adventure of the Black Peter.”
