Not so elementary
Tom Ruffles finds that Sherlock Holmes was no great paragon of logic, and that he and his Spiritualist creator were not so very different
How Sherlock Pulled the Trick
Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method
Brian McCuskey
Penn State University Press 2021
Hb, 195pp, £27.95, ISBN 9780271089874
The “trick” Brian McCuskey investigates involves the frequently drawn contrast between the cool, analytical approach of Sherlock Holmes (regarded as good) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s credulous Spiritualism (definitely bad). He argues that the distinction is bogus, because Holmes is not the paragon of rationality he is so often held up to be, and Holmes and Spiritualism are not as far apart as the casual reader might assume.
McCuskey starts by looking at the development of Conan Doyle’s thinking in the context of the intellectual climate of the late 19th century, outlining the friction between science and religion.
Conan Doyle, having discarded his Catholicism but possessing a spiritual impulse, found a way to side-step the issue by espousing Spiritualism, which he trustingly considered to have a basis in observable fact rather than a reliance on faith.
The same period saw the origin of his consulting detective. The key year was 1887, when he wrote to the periodical Light about a successful séance, and published the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. McCuskey traces their twin development as Conan Doyle’s interest in Spiritualism waxed and that in Holmes waned, Summerland and Baker Street both, in the author’s view, “spinning the same ineffable twaddle”.
If Holmes’s methods seem sound on the surface, McCuskey finds they actually rest on shaky foundations. Holmes appears capable of amazing feats of deduction; however on closer inspection it transpires that his scientific approach is not scientific after all. It is pseudoscientific, his “reasoning” merely an exercise in confirmation bias. The successes owe less to his powers of deduction than to Conan Doyle rigging the game in his favour.
For example, the famous dictum, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”, does not work in the real world because one can never guarantee to have eliminated all competing possibilities. How can we determine what we don’t know? It only makes sense in a world in which a writer is reasoning backwards, manipulating those possibilities to achieve a desired outcome.
Similarly, the dog that does not bark in the night-time could be silent for any number of reasons, not necessarily the one alighted on to provide the correct solution.
These weaknesses do not matter in an entertainment, but Conan Doyle was not afraid to trade on Holmes’s supposedly superior faculties to bolster his own assessment of Spiritualist phenomena, suggesting that as the detective’s creator he must naturally share similar capacities, and therefore had to be correct.
McCuskey traces the twin tracks as they evolved after Conan Doyle’s death, his family fighting to maintain a monopoly on his legacy: his widow the Spiritualist message and his sons the literary estate, whether it was mediums independently claiming to communicate with him, or fans expanding the Holmes universe.
Bringing the story up to the recent past, he looks at how Holmes is depicted in the television series Sherlock and Elementary. It may not always be 1894, but Holmes continues to pursue his own singular version of “the science of deduction and analysis”.
Despite severe shortcomings in his approach to problemsolving, Holmes continues to be co-opted as shorthand for dependable conclusions (which necessitates distancing him from the fairy-tainted author). McCuskey shows that unfortunately this unfounded reputation has reallife consequences. The erroneous assumption that Holmes is the supreme logician enables those with a pseudo-scientific agenda to buttress their arguments by referencing him.
Thus, Holmes has been pressed into service by those pushing dubious causes, such as holocaust and climate change deniers, promoters of intelligent design and 9/11 conspiracy theorists, trading on his alleged ability to observe what others do not to suggest by association that their case must be similarly compelling.
The irony is that while their proponents may think invoking Holmes bolsters their credibility, Holmes is as pseudo-scientific as they are.
How Sherlock Pulled the Trick is a useful corrective to the popular image of Sherlock Holmes as a genius, and McCuskey’s examination of the ways he has been put to use by the forces of irrationality is illuminating. The book should act as a warning to those who are lazily tempted to drop in a Holmes quotation because they assume it will strengthen the validity of their claims, and remind the rest of us that employing him to support a statement does not confer legitimacy on it.
★★★★