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The Whole Art of

Detection




Written by

Sherlock Holmes





And edited by

W. Lambert Gardiner

TABLE OF CONTENTS


STRUCTURE OF CONTENTS



The eight elements of the whole art of detection are represented as an octagon rather than
simply as a list, in order to illustrate the fact that they are a system rather than a set. All elements
are involved at all times. Each element is related to all other elements, as symbolized by the links
between them. Thus INTUITION is the balance of OBSERVATION and DEDUCTION,
EXPLANATION is not the fast act of detection but is simultaneous to all other elements,
DOCUMENTATION is PREPARATION by creating your own personal history,
DOCUMENTATION and COLLABORATION are ways of sub-contracting out some functions
so that you are capable of INTUITION, and so on and on.

EDITORS PREFACE
It is often said that reports of detective cases are like jokes and puzzles. That is, they can
only be enjoyed once. Having got "it", you can not get it again. Not so with Sherlock Holmes.
Would Shakespeare be spoiled if a groundling yelled "Macbeth done it" during Act 1, Scene 1? I
have read the 60 cases of Sherlock Holmes, published in four books and five compilations of
short cases, several times and enjoyed them each time. (For your convenience they are listed,
with the codes by which I will refer to them, as Appendix 1)

The case which enthralls me the most, however, is a sort of meta-case, which could be
called The Mystery of the Missing Manuscript. A couple of times within this canon of cases,
Sherlock Holmes mentioned a book he was writing which summarized, in the form of a manual,
the principles which guided him during those cases. When Holmes criticized Watson for
sensationalistic aspects of his narratives, the patient Watson - in one of the few occasions in
which he got annoyed at Holmes - said Why don't you write them yourself? Here is the reply:

I will, my dear Watson, I will. At present, I am, as you know, fairly busy, but propose to
devote my declining years to the composition of a text-book which shall focus the whole
art of detection into one volume [ABBE].

Holmes hints that he was well advanced in his project early in his career:

-- young Trevor began to talk about those habits of observation and inference which /
had already formed into a system -- [GLOR].

Indeed, when Watson first met Holmes, he had already published a preliminary version,
entitled The Book of Life, which expounded on the Science of Deduction and Analysis [STUD].
We know Holmes only through the writings of Watson, just as we know Socrates only through
the writings of Plato. We tend to consider those "middle-men" as the world's foremost authority
on their subjects. However, each person is the world's foremost authority on themselves.
Whereas Holmes and Watson had a long and fruitful collaboration, there are large periods of the
life of Holmes to which Watson did not have access. The most dramatic period was, of course,
the "Great Hiatus", between 1891, when Watson assumed that Holmes had died [FINA], and
1894, when Holmes reappeared disguised as a book-seller [EMPT]. Even during the period of
their collaboration (March 1881 - August 1914), they were not inseparable. In the very first case,
we learn that Holmes

had invariably breakfasted and gone out before / (Watson) arose in the morning.
Sometimes he spent his day at the chemistry laboratory, sometimes in the dissecting
rooms, and occasionally in long walks, which appeared to take him into the lowest
portions of the city [STUD].

In a later case, Watson points out that he had not seen Holmes for some days [3GAB]. At
one point, Watson was living not at 221 B Baker Street but in his own rooms at Queen Anne
Street [ILLU]. In the two cases, written by Holmes himself, Holmes explained that the good
Watson had deserted me for a wife [BLAN] and that the good Watson had passed beyond my
ken [LION].
Watson is most unreliable as a witness of the late stages of the career of Holmes. As he
notes himself - / have seldom drawn my cases from the later phases of my friend's career [ILLU].
He claims that Holmes moved to the Sussex Downs to raise bees and that he published a book
entitled Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the
Queen [LAST].

I would modestly suggest that there was more afoot than Watson knew. It seems highly
unlikely that someone with the mind of Holmes would retire quietly to the country in his early
fifties and raise bees. On a number of occasions, Holmes gave us insight into his mind:

My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up
with the work for which it was built [WIST].

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to
pieces [DEVI].

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most
abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my most proper
atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of
existence. I crave for mental exultation [SIGN].

Hence the cocaine. / can't live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? [SIGN].

Watson himself recognized that his companion's brain was so abnormally active that it
was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work [MISS] and conceded that his
razor brain could be blunted and rusted with inaction [VALL]. Does this sound like a mind
content to retire to a little farm of my dreams and raise bees? [CREE].
Watson claimed that Holmes disliked the country:

--- neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. He loved to
lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and
running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved
crime [CARD].

Unless Holmes, with his considerable competence in chemistry had found some way to
synthesize cocaine out of pollen, he would have been strung out on cocaine within weeks of
moving to the country. Since he did indeed retire to the country, there must have been something
to occupy his active mind. I contend that he retired to the country to write his magnum opus -
The Whole Art of Detection - as he promised. The bee book was simply a front to justify his
many visits to the local library and to distract, as a red herring, the less active mind of the solid,
yet stolid, Watson.

Why would he delude his faithful colleague for those many years? I humbly suggest that
he did not want to embarrass his friend with his low opinion of the accounts of the cases. He had
indeed expressed such an opinion to Watson's face in occasional flashes of anger:
You have attempted to tinge it (detection) with romanticism, which produces much the
same effect as if you had worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of
Euclid [SIGN].

--- you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your
statements, instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe
reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the
thing [COPP].

However, the carefully documented publication of this opinion is an entirely different
matter.

There is some evidence that Holmes was somewhat embarrassed by those "adventures" as
told by Watson. Soon after they met, Holmes was already complaining that
There is no crime to detect or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so
transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it [STUD].

Certainly, after he had defeated the only criminal who was almost a match for him in
intellect - his arch-rival, Professor Moriarty - there was little left to challenge him.

From the point of view of the criminal expert, London has become a singularly
uninteresting city since the death of the late lamented Professor Moriarty [NORW].

What Holmes was really interested in were the larger mysteries of nature. The criminal
cases were simply puzzle-solving exercises at a local and recent level. He made this most clear in
practically the last statement he made to Watson before his disappearance.

Of late I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by Nature rather than
those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible [FINA].

That "of late" is a trifle suspicious since, even on their very first case, Holmes argues
that One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature [STUD].

I would contend that Holmes had already, unknown to Watson, worked on those larger
mysteries, that his disappearance was less due to the avoidance of Professor Moriarty's gang than
to the avoidance of Watson and the relatively trivial day-by-day problems into which he was
sucked, and that his "retirement" was to enable him to focus on those larger issues.

During a sabbatical in the 1990-1991 academic year, I was able to pursue my theories.
Following the first clue that the farm to which Holmes retired was five miles from Eastbourne
[LAST], I took a train from London to Eastbourne. Using two other clues - that the farm
commanded a great view of the Channel and that it was a half-mile from The Gables, a famous
coaching establishment [LION], by triangulation I zeroed in to its approximate location. Taking
the advice of Holmes himself, I inquired at the local public-houses about the farm [SOLI]. A
regular at the third pub I entered, who fancied himself as a local historian, directed me to it.
Fortunately, it neither continued its career as a farm or evolved, as had 221 B Baker
Street, into a sort of shrine to the memory of Holmes-and-Watson but was being rented to
tourists. Since it was off-season, I was able to rent it for the month of March 1991 and pursue my
investigations at my leisure.

The attic revealed nothing. An apocryphal manuscript of Watson, describing a case with
Sigmund Freud, was ostensibly found in an attic.
1
However, that was too obvious for a mind like
Holmes. Following his advice once again, I measured the height of the farm-house, the height of
the rooms, and the thickness of the ceilings [SIGN].

Simple subtraction revealed missing space and pointed to a false ceiling. Taking my cue
from Holmes, I will not describe my emotion but simply state the fact that, in the space above the
false ceiling, there lay my quarry - the manuscript of The Whole Art of Detection. What
follows is a transcription of this wonderful document. I have taken the liberty of adding footnotes
to place it in its modern context, trusting that Holmes would have approved since he conceded
that even he had little capacity to foresee the future [HOUN].


1
Nicholas Meyer, The Seven-per-cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson,
M.D. New York: Ballantine, 1974.

AUTHORS PREFACE
Having retired, I now have the leisure to write my long-promised magnum opus, in which I pull
together into a manual the various principles I have derived during a long career as a consulting
detective.
First, let me make clear that those principles do not apply only to the solution of crimes. They are
the general principles of scientific method, which apply to all research.
1
My little exercises, as
documented by my friend and colleague, Dr. John H. Watson, are merely illustrations of those
principles in action, within a domain in which they can be concretely demonstrated. The various
sciences differ only superficially in their technologies but not in their basic principles, as
expounded here. Observation is observation, regardless of what is being observed. If what you
must observe is too far away to observe clearly, then you need a telescope to bring it close
enough, if what you must observe is too small, then you need a microscope to make it large
enough.
2
The principles of observation (see Chapter 1), despite those superficial differences,
apply equally well to the work of detectives, astronomers, and biologists. Deduction (see Chapter
2) puts content into context, regardless of the type of content.
However, since all you know of my work is that corpus of 60 cases, which Watson published in a
forty-year period between 1887 and 1927, I will use them to illustrate the principles. It is
important to keep in mind that they apply to those larger issues in which the investigator asks
questions of nature. From time to time, I will make this point clear. You may consider that, by
doing so, I stray from my area of expertise, but I assure you that Watson captured only a limited
aspect of my investigations.
Since my revelations here would be somewhat embarrassing to my good friend, I will not publish
them until his death. In case, perchance, by some accident, I precede him in that final journey, I
will hide this manuscript. There is no one else to whom I can entrust it. Watson attested to my
solitary nature, and no one has replaced him. It should take some time to find it. A detective is
essentially a searcher and any child who has played hide-and-seek knows that the good seekers
are also the good hiders. However, anyone who has a deep interest in my work, as described by
Watson, has sufficient clues in that corpus to find it. Should there be no such person, then it will
indeed never be exposed to the light of public scrutiny. This is entirely appropriate, since it will
be obvious that my work has not generated enough interest to justify this further imposition on
the valuable time of a future generation of readers.


1
The generality of the principles expounded in The Whole Art of Detection is attested by the fact that
the cases have since been used in teaching within such a wide variety of disciplines: in scientific methods
[Faia, Jean E., Sherlock Holmes in the classroom. Science Scope, November-December 1988, 12 (3),
Pages 6-81]; in geography [Tuan, Yi Fu, The landscapes of Sherlock Holmes. Journal of
Geography, March-April, 1985, 84 (2), Pages 56-60]; in history [Vacha, J. E., Holmes for historians-
Sherlock and the elusive quest. OCSS Review, Spring 1988, 24 (1), Pages 28-34]; in nature studies
[Ferbert, Mary Lou, Nature in the city. Science and Children, November-December 1981, 19 (3), Pages
1012]; in chemistry [Reeves, Robert, Filtrates and Residues. Journal of Chemical Education, December
1985, 62 (12), Pages 1060-1068]; in medicine [Sheldon, Stephen H. & Peter A. Noronha, Using classic
mystery stories in teaching. Academic Medicine, April 1990, 65 (4), Pages 234-235]; and in political
science [Ward, Veronica & John Orbell, Sherlock Holmes as a social scientist. Political Science
Teacher, Fall 1988, 1(4), Pages 15-18].
2
This principle can be extended to a tool not available to Holmes (though it is fascinating to speculate
what he would have done with it). If what you must observe is too complex to observe clearly, then you
need a computer to make it simple enough.
I
OBSERVATION
1.1 Observation is Not Simply Seeing

The foundation of detection - and scientific method in general - is observation. Except for
a few unfortunates, we all see. However, only a few of us observe. I made a concrete example of
this distinction, when I demonstrated that Watson had seen the steps leading from the hall to the
rooms we shared at 221 B Baker Street hundreds of times but had not observed that there were
17 of them [SCAN]. He saw, but he did not observe. In reporting another case, Watson admits:

I had heard what he had heard, I had seen what he had seen, and yet from his words it
was evident that he saw clearly not only what had happened, but what was about to
happen, while to me the whole business was still confused and grotesque [REDH].

Watson expressed some surprise that I knew Miss Mary Sutherland was a short-sighted
typist. This was visible to me but invisible to him.

Not invisible, but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed
all that was important [IDEN].

While Watson was seeing her clothes (and gave me a description of them which could
have graced a fashion magazine), I was observing the indentations on her wrists and on the sides
of her nose.

When Inspector Gregory expressed surprise that I found a matchstick in the mud which
he had overlooked, I replied: I only saw it because I was looking for it [SILV] and again when
Inspector Martin expressed surprise that I noticed a bullet hole, I could only answer that I noticed
it because I looked for it [DANC], You are more likely to find something when you are looking
for it. The scientist is, after all, a seeker rather than a finder. It is an active process. There is
nothing to be learned by staring [STUD].

1.2 Observation Requires Training
After Watson and I had examined together the apartment of Dr. Grimesby Roylott, we had
the following conversation:
You have evidently seen more in those rooms than was visible to me. No but I fancy that I
may have deduced a little more, I imagine that you saw all that I did [SPEC].

The difference between Watson and me is that I have trained myself to observe. In answer to
the incredulous comments of clients about some little demonstration of the science of
observation, I have said

I have trained myself to see what others overlook [IDEN].

I see no more than you but I have trained myself to notice what I see [BLAN].
Such demonstrations are impressive only because, with considerable training,
observation with me is second nature [STUD].

1.3 Observation Requires a Respect for Details

My method is based on the observation of trifles [BOSC], Watson once pointed out that I
had an extraordinary genius for minutiae [SIGN] and I once stated that genius is an infinite
capacity for taking pains [STUD]. It's a very bad definition but it does apply to detective work.
Clues, which contributed to the solution of some of my cases, include:

A letter in which the name was in blacker ink than the address [TWIS]. This indicated
that whoever wrote it was unfamiliar with the address, and was therefore not the husband of the
receiver. While looking for the address, the name had dried itself, whereas the address had been
blotted.

Roy, a wolfhound belonging to Professor Presbury, tried to bite him [CREE]. The
professor, after taking monkey glands in an attempt to acquire eternal youth, had regressed to our
ancestors and had been teasing the dog.

Parsley on top of the butter which had sunk a certain distance on a hot day [SIXN], a
mark on the parapet of a bridge [THOR], and many other apparently insignificant observations
were clues contributing to the solution of other cases. Those are all trifles but significant trifles.
Nothing, however small, can be dismissed as insignificant.

My exploration of apparent trifles include ashes, ears, tyres, and perfumes as indicated,
respectively, by the following quotations:

--- written a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and
cigarette tobacco [BOSC],

I have made a special study of cigar ashes - indeed I have written a little monograph on
the subject [STUD]. This monograph is called Upon the Distinctions Between the
Ashes of Various Tobaccos [SIGN].

Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive, and differs from all other ones. In last
year's Anthropological J ournal you will find two short monographs from my pen upon
the subject [CARD].

I am familiar with forty-two different impressions left by tyres. This, as you see, is a
Dunlop with a patch upon the outer cover. Heidegger's tyres were Palmer's, leaving
longitudinal stripes [PRIO].

There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should
be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my
experience depended upon their prompt recognition [HOUN].

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