Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (5 page)

The other operation included in Holmes’s method, as presented by the detective himself, is deduction. As much as observation
and the search for clues, deduction is inextricably linked with the legend of Holmes.

A bit of study shows that deduction is in fact a complex mechanism, which should be divided into at least two distinct operations.
These two are usually successive, though sometimes simultaneous.

First, deduction is made possible not only by the examination of clues but by a preliminary
knowledge
the detective has that makes the clues decipherable. The solutions in Holmes’s cases are funded by a vast treasury of knowledge
he has little by little amassed, specialized knowledge of the sort that might inspire a serious detective to write monographs—on
tobacco ash, for instance, or on the tire tracks left by vehicles.

This first stage of deduction might also be called
comparison
. It is not entirely separate from the act of observation; clues observed are meaningless if not read correctly. Holmes reads
his clues by comparing them to a collection of similar signs, about which he has accumulated a great amount of information.

Many passages in the text reveal the comparative manner in which the reading of clues functions for Holmes. Taking the anonymous
letter Henry Baskerville receives at the beginning of the book, Holmes is soon able to demonstrate that it was written using
individual printed words cut from an article in the
Times
. The conversation at this point between Holmes and Dr. Mortimer, who is impressed by the detective’s results, reveals the
place of comparison in his method:

“Really, Mr. Holmes, this exceeds anything which I could have imagined,” said Dr. Mortimer, gazing at my friend in amazement.
“I could understand anyone saying that the words were from a newspaper; but that you should name which, and add that it came
from the leading article, is really one of the most remarkable things which I have ever known. How did you do it?”

  “I presume,Doctor, that you could tell the skull of a negro from that of an Esquimau?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “But how?”

  “Because that is my special hobby. The differences are obvious. The supra-orbital crest, the facial angle, the maxillary curve,
the—”

  “But this is my special hobby, and the differences are equally obvious. There is as much difference to my eyes between the
leaded bourgeois type of a
Times
article and the slovenly print of an evening half-penny paper as there could be between your negro and your Esquimau. The
detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime, though I confess that
once when I was very young I confused the
Leeds Mercury
with the
Western Morning News
. But a
Times
leader is entirely distinctive, and these words could have been taken from nothing else.”
²³

Comparison, then, is at the heart of the clue’s interpretation, since it helps give it meaning by bringing it closer to similar
clues, and separating it from those dissimilar from it. In this way, there is a plurality of signs to be mobilized in every
interpretation of clues, and not, as one might think, one isolated sign.

If all deduction rests on knowledge and includes a share of comparison—allowing one to compare a given clue to other clues—it
also involves another operation, aimed this time at understanding how the clue came into being, reconstructing its evolution.
This second operation, which could also be called analysis, is described to Watson by Holmes in
A Study in Scarlet
as “reasoning backwards”:

“In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment,
and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the every-day affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards,
and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.”

  “I confess,” said I, “that I do not quite follow you.”

  “I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to
them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that
something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their
own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning
backwards, or analytically.”
²⁴

As in all of Holmes’s investigations, reasoning backward is omnipresent in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
; it occurs during the reading of each clue. It is reasoning backward that allows Holmes to guess, for example, that the footprints
left on the yew alley changed shape because Sir Charles Baskerville had started running.

But beyond the isolated interpretation of each clue, reasoning backward is integral to Holmes’s larger attempts to suggest
an overall version of what happened. It is the association of the tanned face, the wounded left arm, and the military appearance
of a physician that leads Holmes to conclude that Watson has returned from Afghanistan. Similarly, it is the association of
a whole series of clues (Dr. Mortimer’s testimony about a dog’s footprints, Selden’s death, Laura Lyons’s testimony, Stapleton’s
resemblance to the Baskervilles, Beryl Stapleton’s testimony, and so on) that leads Holmes to his final hypothesis.

Thus, reasoning backward, closely linked with comparison, is the final, essential step in interpreting clues. Whereas comparison
opens up an initial, very general reading of the clue, reasoning backward refines this suggestion by reviewing the particular
way it was formed, thus yielding its true meaning.

The Holmes method, the one we see at work in the very first Holmes story and in all the cases that follow, rests on three
operations: observation, comparison, and reasoning backward.

As the detective indicates in his conversation with Watson, these three processes sometimes all occur at the same time (“From
long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious
of intermediate steps. [ . . . ] The whole train of thought did not occupy a second.”
²⁵
). Nonetheless, it is desirable to separate the three constituent operations of Holmes’s method if one wants to study how
they function.

Thus presented, this method offers all the appearances of rigor, since it rests on logic and relies on the discoveries of
science. (We too will come to use it, especially when we resort to animal psychology and backward reasoning.) But can Holmes
be sure that his trusted method will lead him to the truth? Nothing could be less certain, as we shall see.

* Another form of indirect trace is the stain, which does not appear in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
.

* The devout Sherlock Holmes reader will recall the central importance of animal psychology in “The Crooked Man,” “The Adventure
of the Creeping Man,” “Silver Blaze,” “The Speckled Band,” and, most famously, the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time,”
also in “Silver Blaze.”—Trans.

IV
The Principle of Incompleteness

CONSIDERED A MODEL of scientific rigor, even an inspiration for certain procedures taught in police academies, the Holmes
method still does not yield the anticipated results every time—far from it. And an uncompromising examination of its results
throughout the detective’s years of activity leads to complex conclusions that shatter the Holmesian image of success—as well
as the Holmesian image of unfailing self-satisfaction.

To begin with, it is not insignificant that the weaknesses of Holmes’s method are brought out in the prologue, during the
first meeting with Dr. Mortimer, as if the admission of failure were an epigraph to the investigation that follows. Mortimer
had stopped by the detective’s flat the previous day and, finding Holmes absent, had absentmindedly left his cane there. As
they wait for a return visit from their future client, about whom they as yet know nothing, Holmes and Watson amuse themselves
by applying the detective’s method to this unknown object.

Watson begins, indulging in a whole series of deductions based on clues taken from the cane. From the presence of inscriptions
on the cane he deduces that it’s a gift offered to an elderly doctor, and from its poor condition that its owner is a country
practitioner visiting his cases on foot. The engraved initials suggest to him that the gift was offered to the doctor by members
of a local hunting association.

Holmes ironically congratulates Watson on his abilities before explaining to him that he was mistaken on most of the points.
He acknowledges that the visitor is probably a country practitioner and a great walker, but challenges his friend’s other
deductions. A gift made to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunting club; further, it is legitimate
to suppose, since the doctor went to the country where positions are less sought, that he is a young doctor.

But although he questions his friend’s deductions and arrives at a certain number of results, Holmes too is wrong, on one
point at least. It was not to settle in the country but to get married that Dr. Mortimer left the hospital. At the beginning
of the book, the detective acknowledges his mistake:

As he entered his eyes fell upon the stick in Holmes’s hand, and he ran towards it with an exclamation of joy.

  “I am so very glad,” said he. “I was not sure whether I had left it here or in the Shipping Office. I would not lose that
stick for the world.”

  “A presentation, I see,” said Holmes.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “From Charing Cross Hospital?”

  “From one or two friends there on the occasion of my marriage.”

  “Dear, dear, that’s bad!” said Holmes, shaking his head.

  Dr. Mortimer blinked through his glasses in mild astonishment.

  “Why was it bad?”

  “Only that you have disarranged our little deductions. Your marriage, you say?”

  “Yes, sir. I married, and so left the hospital, and with it all hopes of a consulting practice. It was necessary to make a
home of my own.”

  “Come,come, we are not so far wrong, after all,” said Holmes.
²⁶

Unfortunately, Holmes’s initial mistake about why Dr. Mortimer left the hospital is not the only one he makes in the book.

There are others, with much more serious consequences. First, the slowness with which Holmes catches the killer (assuming
we believe that Stapleton is the killer) allows another murder to take place. Faced with Selden’s corpse (which he mistakes
for Baskerville’s—another error), as Watson is blaming himself for having lost sight of the man he was supposed to protect,
Holmes rather reasonably takes the blame on himself:

“I am more to blame than you,Watson. In order to have my case well rounded and complete, I have thrown away the life of my
client. It is the greatest blow which has befallen me in my career. But how could I know—how
could
l know—that he would risk his life alone upon the moor in the face of all my warnings?”
²⁷

That Holmes, as we will demonstrate, is completely mistaken about the identity of the murderer does not excuse the casualness
with which he accuses himself here. This error is different from the mistake with Dr. Mortimer’s cane, since it is not an
error in deduction, but it does rest on a faulty evaluation of criminal psychology—a black mark against the detective.

Unable to protect Baskerville a first time, Holmes is equally incapable in the final scene, in which he causes his charge
to run the gravest risks—in fact, to be almost torn apart by the hound. Even if the mistake here is not strictly speaking
intellectual, Holmes has once again let us glimpse his difficulty in taking reality into account and adapting his conduct
to it intelligently.

These blunders should not come as a surprise. In the sixty works in the Holmes canon there are countless mistakes, illustrating
all the weaknesses of the Holmes method and putting its ostensibly “scientific” quality very much in perspective. There are
two kinds of mistakes: either Holmes is wrong—in his actions or in his reasoning—or he doesn’t arrive at the solution.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” one of the very first stories, Holmes undergoes a bitter failure and lets himself be completely
manipulated.
^*
In “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” he fails to find the criminals. He is negligent in “The Five Orange Pips” and
in “The Resident Patient,” in which he allows crimes to be committed and murderers to escape; in “The Adventure of the Solitary
Cyclist” and in “The Greek Interpreter,” in which he cannot prevent kidnappings; in “The Illustrious Client,” in which he
fails to prevent an attack against himself and the disfigurement of a criminal; and in “The Adventure of the Three Gables,”
in which he does not foresee either a major burglary or the destruction of a manuscript.

To these errors in tactics a great many errors in reasoning could be added. Holmes acknowledges at the end of “The Adventure
of the Speckled Band” that his first conclusion was “entirely wrong”; at the end of “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” where
the solution comes to him only when he at last remembers something he has read, he allows that he “went astray” all throughout
the investigation. In “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” he wrongly tells a man’s wife that her husband has died. In “The Adventure
of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” someone other than the expected suspect falls into the trap. In “The Disappearance of Lady
Frances Carfax,” Holmes forces open a coffin lid without finding the person he was looking for and acknowledges that he has
suffered the “temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be exposed.” In “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter,”
he misses the truth completely, and in “The Yellow Face” he is so sorely mistaken from start to finish that he will afterward
refer to this affair as a model of mistakenness.
^*

The idea that the infallible Holmes sometimes makes mistakes
^†
does away with the notion that any superior authority may be entirely entrusted with deciding true and false; it makes the
truth inherently unstable. And if the person who is supposed to determine the truth can be mistaken in his first conclusion,
he may just as easily, when he thinks he has corrected his mistake, simply have fallen into another one in his second conclusion.
Thus all the solutions to Holmes’s cases are open to suspicion.

Besides the cases left uncertain by Holmes’s mistakes, there are also a certain number that remain simply unsolved, either
partially or completely. Far from embracing an unequivocal solution, they leave open multiple hypotheses. They are un-decidable.
At the end of “The Musgrave Ritual,” for instance, Holmes acknowledges that one important detail will never be able to be
clarified. Likewise, at the end of “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” the detectives turn out to be incapable of explaining
an essential clue; in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” doubt persists about who fired the gun; and in “The Adventure of
the Six Napoleons,” the method by which a thief came into possession of the jewel remains obscure.

In other texts, undecidability does not afflict one detail or another of Holmes’s hypothesis; instead, the hypothesis itself,
satisfying as it may be, fails to preclude the coexistence of alternative explanations. In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,”
Holmes himself points out that half a dozen theories would fit the facts. In “The Adventure of Black Peter,” similarly, he
studies several different hypotheses, toying with them happily before settling on one.
^*

There is actually nothing surprising about the uncertainty of Holmes’s solutions. In fact, the famous detective’s method contains
within it three basic elements that, taken together, open up the range of possible conclusions much more broadly than the
detective allows.

The first of these is the way the clues are collected. In the Holmes method, clues are not indisputably obvious things on
which the deductive process is exercised after the fact; rather, they arise largely through an act of creation. For there
to be a clue, there must first occur a selection within the infinite field of potential clues that a given scene presents.
Clues present themselves only after a twofold process of choice and nomination.

A clear example is the main “clue” that Dr. Mortimer brings Holmes during their first meeting: the footprints of a giant hound,
a bit of evidence neglected by the police.

I confess at these words a shudder passed through me. There was a thrill in the doctor’s voice which showed that he was himself
deeply moved by that which he told us. Holmes leaned forward in his excitement and his eyes had the hard, dry glitter which
shot from them when he was keenly interested.

  “You saw this?”

  “As clearly as I see you.”

  “And you said nothing?”

  “What was the use?”

  “How was it that no one else saw it?”

  “The marks were some twenty yards from the body and no one gave them a thought. I don’t suppose I should have done so had
I not known this legend.”
²⁸

The investigators did indeed see the dog’s footprints, but paid them no mind. What constitutes a clue for one person may be
meaningless to another. And a clue is named as such only when it serves as part of a more general story—of an overall construct
at the disposal of the person who has decided to grant it the status of a clue.

If a clue is a choice, it follows that a number of elements of the book’s reality must form “virtual clues,” ones that the
chosen hypothesis ignores. Thus we can suppose that the investigators ignored a multitude of signs that could have become
clues but that do not figure in the text, since they weren’t transmitted by Dr. Mortimer. What’s more, even confining ourselves
to the signs we know about,we’ll see that the text delivers a whole series of signs that are not officially granted the status
of clues—and whose correct interpretation can significantly change the overall solution.