Sherlock Holmes and the Trial of Joseph Carr

In Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K (here rendered Joseph Carr) is arrested one morning although he has not done anything wrong, and is put on trial although no charge is ever disclosed to him.

Here Holmes conducts his own investigation into the arrest and subsequent legal process and his solution has uncanny pre-echoes of the early 21^st century banking crisis and, in an extraordinary twist, Watson’s text even name-checks some of the people that caused it.

In its new guise The Trial emerges truly as a story of Holmes’s time, our time and for all time.