Sherlock Holmes is another example of Wilder's penchant for digging beneath the surface of famous personalities and professions to expose the painful contradictions between the image and the actuality…. Wilder and his coscenarist I.A.L. Diamond take a more serious attitude toward Holmes's weaknesses than his creator does, making him a more vulnerable and human figure. He operates beyond the law, like most of Wilder's central characters, but the fact that he is also a servant of the law makes his fallibility more poignant. Holmes's attraction to crime is not, as in the stories, the fascination exerted by imperfection on a superhuman "deductive machine," but, characteristically for Wilder, a man's dalliance with his own self-destructive impulses.

The classical detective story, the "whodunnit," is a highly moralistic genre which insists upon a totally rational moral system and an ambiguous approach to character…. To Wilder, a moralist malgre lui...