There are also peculiar collaborations with yourself and with your adversaries. Chapter 4 - Documentation describes how you build up a satellite brain in your documentation, to which you sub-contract out the storage of content so that your mind is clear of clutter and thus enabled to put this content into context. This satellite brain is a sort of distillation of your experience as a result of all your past cases.

You are also in a strange collaborative relationship with your adversaries. Criminal and criminologist are in a symbiotic relationship. If there is no crime, then there is no criminology. The good detective has a certain empathy with the criminal. This enables the detective to enter the mind of the criminal and thus anticipate what the criminal will do. I once shocked Watson by saying that I would be a good criminal. Since the criminal is on the edge of society, so the detective must be eccentric - that is, away from the centre. There is no lack of evidence of my eccentricities. They are not the result of pose but simply a lack of concern for social conventions. This empathy with the criminal played a role in a number of cases.

You know my methods in such cases, Watson: I put myself in the man's place, and having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances [MUSG].

You'll get results, Inspector, by always putting yourself in the other fellow's place, and thinking what you would do yourself [RETI].

I then put myself in the place of Small and looked at it as a man of his capacity would [SIGN].

I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal [CHAS].

There are limits, you see, to our friend's intelligence. It would have been a coup-de-maltre had he deduced what I would deduce and acted accordingly [FINA].

I am conscious always of power and design [HOUN].

Let us follow it up in every direction and we can hardly fail to come upon the motive, which shall in turn lead us to the criminal [LION].