Challenging and elementary ideal Holmes exhibition is a must for amateur detectives and super-sleuths
SOLVE IT LIKE
SHERLOCK: Test Your Powers Of Reasoning Against Those Of The World’s Most Famous Detective HHH by Stewart Ross Michael O’Mara, £9.99
THERE are two reasons to delight in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. One is the supremely logical way in which the master detective analyses evidence to solve cases. The other is the equally glorious manner in which the author builds up the tension in telling the story. If you’re a devotee of Holmes’s logic, then this book offers a delightful prospect. Stewart Ross has concocted 25 new Holmesian cases, supposedly from Dr Watson’s archives, some sourced from files marked OPT (Offensive To Public Taste) or PS (Politically Sensitive).
After outlining the facts of each case and giving bare details of Holmes’s investigative methods, he challenges the reader to reproduce the logic that enabled him to identify the villain or villains.
The details of the cases occupy nearly 200 pages which are followed by 50 pages of solutions. There are three important questions to ask of such a collection of puzzles. Do they provide enough clues to be fair to the reader? Is the logic as flawless as it ought to be? And perhaps most important of all, how do they compare with the original Conan Doyle stories?
On the matter of fairness and reasonably flawless logic, Ross just about gets away with it. Identifying the villain is usually easy enough, particularly if you eliminate the obvious suspect as a clearly
unsatisfactory answer, although filling in the details can be very tricky. However, in most stories, cracking the mystery is rather more straightforward than it is in the earlier casebooks of Sherlock Holmes.
For Holmes it helped that he had the advantage of an arsenal of useful information to draw upon. He knows the surnames of relatives of the French king, he is familiar with details of the life of Christopher Marlowe and he also has a working knowledge of Swiss-German. Such knowledge can come in useful. Even he, however, had to consult a list of historical battles from the third century onwards to crack one coded message.
What I missed most was the elegant, web-spinning prose style of Conan Doyle and the urgent way Holmes has to rush around to prevent further dastardly deeds while the slightly dim Dr Watson is always several intellectual steps behind, trying to keep up.
However, if your main delight in Sherlock Holmes stories is in trying to reproduce the logical detective work then this collection will offer hours of entertainment.