had been forced to admit that his earlier findings ... had been mistaken....
Sherlock Holmes did not invent forensic science, but he probably did more than any other person, fictional or not, to portray it as a valuable tool.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947), dubbed by one biographer “the father of forensics,” will be disappointed to hear it.
Finally, of course, Holmes has the knowledge of previous cases, and his general knowledge of society, to help him focus his attention:
“How did you see that?”
“Because I looked for it.” [“The Dancing Men”]
What he does not have is the improbable, detailed knowledge of every science, craft, and art seen in such later detectives as R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke. Holmes is widely read and experienced, but chiefly in the areas that he knows will come in handy. His methods strongly resemble those of the physician, writes Kathryn Montgomery Hunter in Doctors’ Stories (1991): he compares the symptoms of his current case to those of many previous cases, his own and those of other investigators, before making a diagnosis and prescribing treatment. Chapter V of the present work includes some consideration of the state of science in Holmes’s time.
The form of reasoning Holmes uses, which he variously calls “deduction,” “logical synthesis,” and “inference,” is certainly not the same as the traditional formal logic, which is a form of mathematics developed in the middle ages, concerned not with truth but with consistency. The simplest example of a “syllogism,” the form into which logic casts its ideas, is this:
All dogs are mortal.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is a dog.
Therefore the Hound of the Baskervilles is mortal.
The first two statements, or “premises,” lead to the conclusion; thus the syllogism is logically sound. A second syllogism,
Scotland Yard inspectors are detectives.
Sherlock Holmes is a detective.
Therefore Sherlock Holmes is a Scotland Yard inspector.
is unsound because of what logic calls “the fallacy of the undistributed middle.” The premises may or may not be true, but either way they do not prove the conclusion. On the other hand, a logically sound syllogism can have wildly untrue premises, and thus demonstrate nothing about the truth of the conclusion.
Holmes rarely works in this way, although he speaks of it: “From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara.” If traditional logic is “deduction,” a moving from the general to the specific, from cause to effect, then Holmes’s method is really “induction,” moving from the specific to the general, from effect to cause. (“The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards,” he says in A Study in Scarlet.) The nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce spoke of induction as moving from “case” and “result” to “rule”: “These beans are from this bag. These beans are white. [Therefore,] all the beans from this bag are white.” Peirce also offered a third form of logic, abduction: “All the beans from this bag are white. These beans are white. These beans are from this bag.” As philosophers Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, along with colleagues, explain in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1983), Holmes is strongly inclined to that sort of logic, as in “The Second Stain”:
Here is one of the three men whom we had named as possible actors in this drama, and he meets a violent death during the very hours when we know that that drama was being enacted. The odds are enormous against its being coincidence. No figures could express them. No, my dear Watson, the two events are connected.
But neither induction nor abduction is rigorously valid: the process is prone to error, coincidences do happen, and an effect can have many causes.
As Keefauver demonstrates, Holmes frequently works through “deduction” in a different sense: imagining as many explanations for the facts as possible, then deducting (eliminating) the less promising. In his most famous dictum (“The Beryl Coronet”) he alludes to this process: “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The danger of course is deeming something “impossible” when it is not. Holmes often does that, but such is the art of the detective story that he never goes wrong in his leaps.
THE MYTH AND THE HERO. To call Sherlock Holmes the “hero” of the Canonical stories is more than simply to observe that he is the central figure. A hero is someone who acts in a cause, such as freedom or justice, and according to certain conventions. One classic statement of the hero “pattern” is that of Lord Raglan (in The Hero, 1936), who finds twenty-two common features in the stories of figures from Oedipus to King Arthur. Holmes can be seen to have about thirteen of those features, a higher score than Siegfried’s, and equal to that of Robin Hood. He “prescribes laws,” for example (The Whole Art of Detection), nothing is known of his childhood, nothing is known of his death.
Many of Raglan’s “heroes” are supposed gods. Holmes is not presented as a god (although G.K. Chesterton wrote about his apotheosis in “Sherlock Holmes the God” as early as 1935), or even as a king, but merely as “the head of his profession.” However, it is hard to deny that some of his appeal derives from his conformity to the classic pattern. Most important is his “death” at the Reichenbach and his “resurrection” three years later. (A fall from grace and a mysterious death at the top of a hill are involved in several of Raglan’s points.) The spring dates of Holmes’s death and resurrection, and the name of the adversary whom he conquers (Moriarty, suggesting moriar, “I shall die”), remind the attentive reader of Easter, and the Christian story of the death and resurrection of Jesus (who incidentally scores at least sixteen points on Raglan’s scale). Springtime resurrection is of course not unique to Christianity, for most religions include some hint of it, based on the natural cycle of vegetation.
Holmes’s heroic qualities are such that enthusiasts have tried to associate him with practically every known hero and other prominent figure, pretending that he is the descendant of Shakespeare, the colleague of Marconi, the lover of Sarah Bernhardt, the antagonist of Hitler, the father of Nero Wolfe, the grandson of Horatio Hornblower, and the near relative of Mr. Spock of “Star Trek.” Science fiction master Philip José Farmer connected many heroic figures of popular literature, including Holmes, in his hypothetical “Wold Newton Universe,” first revealed in Tarzan Alive (1972). All such speculations are feeble attempts at describing the emotional, even spiritual, significance of a figure like Sherlock Holmes, who bestrides his world, and the world of the imagination, like a colossus.
There are various short catalogues of the figures who, though fictional or nearly so, have become universally known; they may perhaps include Santa Claus, Robinson Crusoe, Romeo, and Ronald McDonald, but there is no doubt whatsoever that they include Holmes. It is also said that only two characters from literature regularly receive mail. One is Juliet, whose correspondents are lovelorn teenage girls, and the other is Sherlock Holmes.
SEXUAL IMPLICATIONS. Although one might expect a “detective story” to be concerned only with crime and adventure, in fact the Sherlock Holmes tales are rich in love and sexual elements as well. They can be seen from the earliest tales to the latest: A Study in Scarlet is about a murder prompted by sexual jealousy, as is “The Retired Colourman,” the last story in The Case-Book.
Holmes’s
