SECRET 22

Mimic the Method

[Holmes] was able, by the exercise of his sense organs and his reasoning faculties on some concrete object, to construct a whole chain of facts with which that object was connected.

—E. A. LAMBORN

 

 

 

 

 

It’s difficult for modern audiences to understand the influence Sherlock Holmes’s method of detection had on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society. The character was a phenomenon; virtually every educated person in London and America followed his exploits from the late 1800s until well after World War I ended in 1917. Professionals from all walks of life realized that, although they were reading fiction, the principles laid out in the stories nonetheless had enormous practical value. An anonymous reviewer writing in The Critic in 1892 summed up Holmes’s method this way:

This man [Holmes] does not belong to Scotland Yard or to any other organized band of men who follow his profession. He works alone and with such success that his reputation becomes national, and mysteries, the solution of which has completely baffled other men, are placed in his hands with perfect confidence as to their ultimate unraveling. His methods are simple, logical and curiously interesting. When the subject upon which he is to work is laid before him he thinks it all out and makes up his mind as to the solution and where it may be sought. Then he begins to build upon his theory, closely observing the smallest details of each circumstance as it appears, seizing eagerly upon this one and promptly rejecting that until his theories become facts and the chain of evidence is welded to his satisfaction. A worn side to a shoe, an unexpected opening of a window, a knot in a bundle tied in a peculiar manner, or some other item equally insignificant will give him the necessary clue and make his work a simple process.

Professionals in various fields took that Holmesian method seriously and began applying it to some of the thorniest problems of the day. In 1905, for instance, the scholar E. A. Lamborn proposed using the Sherlock Holmes method to teach elementary-school children and develop their logical faculties more quickly. He broke the method down into four major parts, using the plot of “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” and one of its major characters, Henry Baker, as an example.

The first part of the method was careful observation. Lamborn gave the example of how, in the story, Holmes “was able, by the exercise of his sense organs and his reasoning faculties on some concrete object, to construct a whole chain of facts with which that object was connected.” He pointed out how the detective took a rather common object—a man’s hat, belonging to Baker—and examined it extremely closely, observing, in Lamborn’s words, “the size, shape, condition, kind of lining, newly-cut grizzled hairs, smell of lime-cream, tallow stains,” and so on.

With these external facts in hand, Holmes moved on to the second part of the method, deduction. By analyzing the facts associated with Baker’s hat, he was able to deduce, even before meeting Baker, that due to its high quality but slightly shabby condition, he had once been quite well-off, but had recently fallen on hard times.

Then, Lamborn said, it was on to stage three, as Holmes used the memory of past experiences to help him fill in even more details. “For example, his memory informed him that the particular shape he had observed was in fashion three years before, so fixing the time of the hat’s purchase,” the educator wrote. The final piece to Holmes’s method was constructive imagination, defined by Lamborn as the detective’s ability “to combine his facts and build them into a homogenous hypothesis—that the person he wished to discover was Henry Baker, a man formerly well-to-do, fallen on evil days, of sedentary habit, in poor domestic circumstances, etc.”

Another real-life example of the Holmes method in action can be found in the British Medical Journal from 1900. An eye doctor decided to apply Holmes’s principles to his own practice, with remarkable results:

In another case the patient was a nurse-maid, aged from 16 to 17, who came with a little boy, aged from 12 to 14 months, in her arms. She was suffering from trachoma, which had become acutely inflamed.... Dr. Van Duyse at once forbade her carrying the child, and she promised to obey. When she returned two days later, however, the surgeon on seeing her frowned and said in a severe tone: “In spite of my prohibition you have been carrying the child. I shall be obliged to let your master and mistress know what is the matter with you.” The girl stoutly denied that she had been carrying the child, but Dr. Van Duyse insisted that hardly twenty minutes before she had been carrying it on her right arm, and had handed it over to someone else at the door. The girl, amazed at the almost supernatural insight of the surgeon, confessed her transgression. Here, too, there was nothing more occult than a recent tell-tale trickle of urine running obliquely from right to left across the girl’s apron. The art of observation may be cultivated by attention to such apparent trifles . . . the method of Sherlock Holmes is a powerful aid to success in treatment.

The Holmes method can even be applied to sales. At the height of Holmes’s popularity, in 1915, master salesman Harlan Read wrote in his training manual Read’s Salesmanship, “A perusal of any of the Sherlock Holmes stories will interest the salesman in the quality of observation which the salesman must cultivate. Sherlock Holmes had a remarkable faculty for finding out what sort of people he was dealing with, through powers of close observation. The author, Conan Doyle, takes pains to explain in every story that Sherlock Holmes did nothing by chance, and did not rely upon any invisible, peculiar or mystic power to aid him in making his deductions. He had simply cultivated a shrewdness of observation. This is a quality that the salesman must cultivate. It will enable him to understand his customer.”

Education, sales, real-life law enforcement . . . the Holmes method is applicable to almost any field of endeavor, antiquated or modern.