When people think of Doyle, they don’t just remember the puzzles. They remember the voice of his stories: the smoky London streets, the steady, reliable narration of Watson, and of course, Sherlock Holmes himself. Holmes wasn’t just clever. He was eccentric, sometimes cold, sometimes surprisingly compassionate, and always unforgettable. That mix of character, atmosphere, and suspense is what made Doyle’s work last well over a century.

Now, AI has its strengths. It can juggle huge amounts of detail, spin out complicated plots, and even write in Doyle’s style if you ask it to. In some ways, it might even create mysteries with trickier puzzles or more unexpected twists than Doyle ever did.

But writing a great mystery isn’t only about outsmarting the reader. It’s about making them care. Doyle’s stories reflected the mood of his time—Victorian faith in science, the fascination with rational thought, and the fear that the world was getting too complicated to understand. Holmes wasn’t just a detective; he was almost a symbol of human reason itself. That’s the part AI can’t quite capture, because it doesn’t live in a culture or a moment the way a human author does.

So could AI technically write something “better” than Doyle? Maybe if you’re only measuring the complexity of the crime. But if you’re talking about characters who stick in the imagination and stories that shape culture, Doyle still has the edge.