OK, as an admirer of the Great Detective, I have to disagree with you.

Not that you aren't correct in the main, Christie, and many who followed her, are scrupulous in making sure that their readers have all the clues and information the detective has. This allows the reader their chance to out-detect Poirot or Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey or Commander Dalgliesh.

But Homes is unique. His cases usually, if not always, hinge on something Holmes has observed that we, the reader as represented by Watson, cannot and has not. We, after all, cannot recognise the difference between the ash of a Trichinopoly cigar and that of a Havana! Though as a teenager, I sometimes astonished my friends by noting the presence in the company of someone who was at the bar or in the khasi. I had, of course noted the presence of a specific coat on the back of a chair, or a particular type of cigarette end in the ashtray (St Moritz and Black Sobranie were dead giveaways, as were Mores, but with others there were things like gold rings etc that took more practice), even on one occasion a distinctive shade of lipstick on a cigarette butt!

In any event, the purpose of a Holmes story is to present a methodology of observation and deduction Conan Doyle had learned from Dr Bell and wanted people to apply to criminal investigation. Which has happened so now we have CSI!