In the board game, you’ll find two types of clues Textual Clues and the typical Story Clues that are an important part of any Sherlock Holmes story.
The story clues are listed in two different decks of cards. In the News Cards you’ll find the clues that Sherlock and Watson find reading the newspapers. In the Clues Cards you’ll find all other different types of clues listed below:
Fingerprints
Holmes identified and used fingerprints initially in The Sign of Four, published in 1890. Scotland Yard did not adapt fingerprint recovery, comparison and identification process until almost 11 years after The Sign of Four was published. He did not use fingerprints as the defining evidence, however — generally, the case was irrefutably solved by a variety of clues leading to the correct solution.
In The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, Inspector Lestrade thought he had his murderer when he was able to match a bloody print to John Hector McFarlane, an obvious suspect. Holmes was able to prove that MacFarlane was innocent.
Today, fingerprints have become a significant method of identification for human individuals. Now stored in computer databases, analyzed and compared within seconds, fingerprints still require corroborating evidence to tell the whole story.
Cyphers
In many cases in Victorian times, clues were hidden in ciphers, or coded messages which required a ‘key’ to ascertain letter substitutions. In The Dancing Men, Holmes analyzed 160 separate cyphers, determined that the letter ‘e’ was the most common letter in the English language, and was able to proceed to the answer. In “The Gloria Scott”, he deduced that every third word in lines of gibberish created the message that frightened Old Trevor.
Many of these cipher techniques were applied during the World Wars to decipher messages from the enemy, and law enforcement in many countries have also worked through ciphers using procedures described by Conan Doyle.
Footprints
From the very first story in the Holmes series to the 57th story (the Lion’s Mane from 1926), 29 of the 60 stories revealed and solved footprint evidence. Footprints were found in soil, mud, clay. They were on carpet, in snow, ash and even on drapes and doors — each mark was worth discussion, each print told a story that was instrumental to the outcome.
Sherlock Holmes ‘wrote’ an educational treatise on the preservation of footprints, entitled “The tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of Plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses”. The techniques so described have become a mainstay in preserving prints of shoes, tires, tools and other depressions by police departments worldwide.
Handwriting
In Victorian London, handwriting was more prevalent than it is today. Holmes was able to deduce many details from the written word. By inspecting the pressure, angle, swirls and consistency, Holmes could tell the gender, class and maturity of the author. He could also make determinations about the character of the person whose penmanship was under scrutiny. In The Norwood Builder, Holmes determines by the timing of the imperfections in the scrawl of a will, that it was written aboard a train. Knowing that such an important document would not be transcribed in such a fashion, he correctly assumed duress.
Today, handwriting analysis is used to determine forgeries, psychological profiling and alterations in handwriting due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, duress, exhaustion or illness. The ransom note left at the scene of the JonBenet Ramsey murder was intensely scrutinized, and attempts were made to tie it to one of the parents, without conclusive results.