Werewolves and sense of smell, what is reasonable for them to accomplish with it?

I was thinking of a story with a Werewolf as a detective, using mostly conversational skills and his sense of smell to solve crimes similar to many of the UK types of detective stories (Morse, Lewis, Frost, Dielzy and Pasco etc), in contrast to most American detective stories I watch where practically no episode goes by without a shootout or guns being drawn by the detectives in question (these have their own merits ofcourse).

I've read a lot of stories where enhanced sense of smell does any number of things, the most extreme of which are things like smelling what kind of diet someone has lived on for their entire lives or what kind of house they lived in half a year ago. The sense of smell is also used as shortcut where a character simply smells someone lying. But could you really sift through the layers of emotions and tell apart a lie from a half-truth to save face or the difference between guilt of killing a person or guilt because the last words you said were insulting or a bit too close to what happened (like "drop dead")?

Assuming the sense of smell of this particular werewolf is akin to that of a dog or wolf (excluding extreme dogbreeds that have diminished sense of smell) what could you expect from a sense of smell this powerful?<-- That there is the question. I would like to know it in these categories:

1. Where someone or something has been in the last X time.
2. What someone has eaten in the last X time.
3. How accurate you can smell social cue's.

These are 3 separate questions with so much overlap I don't see a reason to separate them at this point.

posted over 4 years ago

Demigan‭

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