Sherlock & Sir Arthur
While in London, Linda and I saw a newly-erected statue of Sherlock Holmes, around the corner from 221B Baker Street, where the legendary sleuth was supposed to have hung his trademark deerstalker cap. As with most statues, few passers-by take notice. But we had made a special trip to see it.
To think of Sherlock Holmes as just another detective is to think there's no difference between Beef Wellington and a Big Mac. Ellery Queen and Mike Hammer -- even Hercule Poirot and Nero Wolfe -- were neophytes to the genius creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The reason is that Doyle was both a good storyteller and a fine writer. Consider his description of London as "that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained." One of the poorer sections of the city Doyle described as "a riverside city of a hundred thousand souls where the tenement houses swelter and reek with the outcasts of Europe". London is a city besmogged by the burning of too much coal, Dr. Watson says of a morning outing: "We could dimly see the occasional figure of an early workman as he passed us, blurred and indistinct in the opalescent London reek."
Doyle was a true thinker, who noted that "life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind could invent....It would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions moot, stale and unprofitable." Doyle has created in Holmes a Zen-like character, a man painstakingly aware of detail who tells Watson early on that "To a great mind, nothing is little."
Holmes compares the brain to an attic. "While the fool takes in lumber of every sort, the skillful workman will bring up only such pieces as he needs." The issue is, of course, discerning what is important. As a consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes has no use for astronomy, for example; he says, "What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Holmes approaches problems from the point of view that the universe is finite. If you know all of the links, then you know the chain. "When a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation." And perhaps his most famous maxim, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Marshall McLuhan noted that he who doesn't understand that entertainment and education are inextricably entwined doesn't understand either. Sherlock Holmes may appear to be only entertainment, but to the open mind, he is also a great source of learning.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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