"You will become Holmes’ eyes and ears as he tackles a baffling new case in a world steeped in innovation and experimentation. Along the way you’ll see a dazzling array of original manuscripts, publications, period artefacts, film and television props and costumes. You’ll learn to use investigative tools and techniques from Holmes himself, and test yourself with exciting, interactive crime-solving opportunities."  The International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes

"The State Museum’s exhibit, which opened earlier this month, is massive in scope. It’s the result of a collaboration between two different exhibition-development groups, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate and two other museums, and the idea is to fully immerse people into Holmes’ world.

Guests will be able to visit Holmes’ fictional sitting room and view items from Conan Doyle’s actual study. They’ll see various examples of the detective’s massive presence in pop culture, from card games, comics and magazines to radio scripts, movie and television show props and costumes. They’ll be able to learn about the scientific crime-solving methods used by Holmes and real-life investigators of his era. And perhaps most intriguingly, they’ll have the chance to be Sherlock Holmes, taking a book full of clues and trying to solve a murder mystery, written exclusively for the exhibit by Conan Doyle’s biographer, Daniel Stashower. Geoffrey Curley, whose consulting company spearheaded the development of the exhibit, says that Conan Doyle’s depth of knowledge and larger-than-life Sherlock Holmes character deserved a large-scale effort.

“The writings of Conan Doyle really have a wide breadth of content,” he offers. “So we’re looking at literature. We’re looking at technology. We’re looking at history, science and of course contemporary forensic science, and how they all blend together. The exhibit really has a lot of story-driven content to it, and a lot of theatricality to it.”

Curley says that the exhibit is meant to educate people not just about the size of Holmes’ influence on modern culture, but about the reasons behind it.

“The impact of Sherlock Holmes is hard to wrap your mind around,” he posits. “So we wanted to make sure that that we embraced the idea that Sherlock is everywhere, but also to get people to understand where this came from. And it didn’t come from nowhere. Conan Doyle was impacted by his experiences. He was a doctor studying medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland, at a time when Edinburgh was the center of medical innovation. So there were all these new innovations happening.”

“He was also impacted by what was happening in newspaper publications,” Curley continues, “and the way that you could have information at your fingertips. That was all part of Sherlock Holmes, this character that could evaluate this world and understand the difference between what’s fact and what’s fiction by using the scientific method, observation and logic to understand what is around us.”