World's Greatest Detective
(This isn't really a spoiler:) The Dark Knight has a useless, throw-away scene where Batman extracts a brick from a wall with a bullet-hole in it, takes it back to his Bat Lab and does a bunch of ridiculous CSI bullshit where he re-assembles the shattered bullet with computer imagery so he can glean a fingerprint from when the shooter pushed the round into the clip.
This is a stupid waste of time, of course, but then I thought about it and realized that it is one of the few things in any of the Batman movies that establishes Batman as "The World's Greatest Detective." ' Cuz mostly he just punches people.
It got me wondering, though, if Batman had any serious competitors for World's Greatest Detective nowadays. So I went on Google and came up with a list:
- Sherlock Holmes (of course, although he might be disqualified by being dead).
- Batman
- L from Death Note
Those three win pretty handily in the Google estimation. There are some other contenders for the title:
- Inspector Clouseau (surely this is debatable).
- Hercule Poirot
- Daryl Zero
- Detective Conan
- Elvis Cole
- Dick Tracy
- Sherlock Hemlock :D
- Shamrock Bones
- Herlock Sholmes (although Ellen says Arsene Lupin was a pretty good detective himself...)
- Nero Wolf
- Supersleuth®
- Big Max
- Jay J Armes
...and I could go on...