The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes by Sherlock Holmes, Don Libey

forty-six years from 1874 to 1920 as being over twelve-thousand pounds per annum . The average number of cases per annum was one-hundred and thirty. Therefore, the average fee per case was a bit over ninety-two pounds. In point of fact: the nobility, aristocracy and gentry paid over two-hundred pounds a case; the middle and upper classes paid about fifty pounds; and the working class paid from naught to twenty-five pounds per case.
    Average annual expenses, including living expenses, were one-thousand five-hundred pounds per annum , thus leaving ten-thousand five-hundred pounds for either investment or interest-bearing accounts. Over the course of my career, after all expanses, I earned nearly half a million pounds which, when invested at three percent, produced nearly a million pounds in toto. My initial deduction has been proven correct: crime pays.

9
    I never married. I was never engaged to be married. I was never what is referred to as being ‘in love.’ Women were simply not essential to my life. Where others preferred to devote large portions of their intellectual energies to their relationships with women, I preferred to focus entirely on my personal interest: the study of crime in all of its forms. One can fill the lumber-room of the mind with many things, or one can be highly selective as to what constitutes a worthy object for storage. My practice of cerebral retention was one of asceticism; my mental processes were greatly similar to those of a yogi: dressed only in a spare cloth, standing on one leg, the mind fixed intently on other worlds, and physically content with a few drops of water and a few grains of rice upon which to live. Time and space and appetite did not exist for the complexities of women.
    Irene Adler was a woman I respected. She was a worthy opponent. I admired her mind. Other women who were central in my cases may have caused a momentary admiration for their insight, or their loyalty, or their intelligence, even their compassion; but Irene Adler possessed a multiplicity of traits to be admired and respected. However, respect and admiration was as far as I was willing to go; to even consider an emotion such as ‘love’ demands far too much space in the mental lumber-room to ever be profitable. Important and essential things would have to have been removed in order to have found space for such temporary and ephemeral shades as love or affection.
    Evolution has predisposed the human to pursuit. Humans pursue multiple things: sustenance or caloric heat, warmth, shelter, survival, reproduction, pleasure. These pursuits tend to be visceral. But there exist the rare individuals who pursue cerebral things: creativity, power, wealth, knowledge, logic, philosophy. It is the cerebral pursuits that engender passion and artistry; that all-consuming intellectual drive that fences out all distractions which might interfere with the exquisite purity of purpose.
    For me, the passion was the purity of logical deduction. I chose to apply that passion to crime, but I could have easily applied it to mathematics or science or bee-keeping. But the singular passion is not inclusive of rival passions; room exists only for one, dominant passion. And when that one passion is recognized, pursued and mastered, what evolves, given a well-equipped, disciplined brain, is genius. And when one emerges a genius in one’s chosen pursuit, one has chosen to forego all other lesser passions. This conscious decision is not pathology: it is choice.
    The zenith of my genius was not at Reichenbach Falls. Reduced to brute strength and luck, my ascendancy over Moriarty was, indeed, the nadir of my career. When he was gone, I had no parallel genius with whom to contend, and it had been accomplished not by genius but by physical force. That was a hollow victory and one that would be reconciled only by several years of exile and introspection. There was no triumph of genius, just the randomness of strength and balance. In his plunge to