YCMTSU

For as long as I can remember, the most common phrase that I hear uttered in law enforcement circles is: “You can’t make this s(tuff) up!” It is a form of exasperation for those moments when you thought that you had seen and heard everything before but then along comes some new, and almost unbelievable scenario. It has become so commonplace that most of us do not even realize that we are saying it. I always felt that it was self-explanatory. Therefore, I have never spent a moment wondering where it started or by whom. But I know now.

Since I was a child, I have been a reader. I love a good story. Fantasy tales of dragons and knights, science fiction stories of spacemen, aliens, and the mysteries of the future, and action packed yarns of the wild, wild west. Recently, spurred by my third or fourth reading of 1984 and Animal Farm, I have begun to pull old books from my childhood off the bookcase shelf to refresh the wonder of my youth.

At present I am reading a compendium of short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about the exploits of the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes. Being a detective by trade, I find it amusing to hear Holmes unravelling the “obvious” clues that lead him to his (always) accurate assessments. In 1892, Sir Conan Doyle penned the story which he titled “A Case of Identity”.

As I began to read the opening paragraph, I paused, pondered, reread the first two sentences. I then exclaimed, out loud, “I’ll be damned!”. My wife looked at me and asked me what was wrong. I read the sentences to her:

“My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.”

I told her that I had just realized that Sherlock Holmes, in 1892, may very well have been the first detective to say, “You can’t make this s*** up!”