How Sherlock Pulled the Trick
Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method
-
- $35.99
-
- $35.99
Publisher Description
A masterful combination of literary study and author biography, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick guides us through the parallel careers of two inseparable men: Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Reconsidering Holmes in light of Doyle’s well-known belief in Victorian spiritualism, Brian McCuskey argues that the so-called scientific detective follows the same circular logic, along the same trail of questionable evidence, that led Doyle to the séance room.
Holmes’s first case, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887, when natural scientists and religious apologists were hotly debating their differences in the London press. In this environment, Doyle became convinced that spiritualism, as a universal faith based on material evidence, resolved the conflict between science and religion. The character of Holmes, with his infallible logic, was Doyle’s good faith solution to the cultural conflicts of his day. Yet this solution has evolved into a new problem. Sherlock Holmes now authorizes the pseudoscience that corrupts our public sphere, defying logic, revising history, and promoting conspiracy theories. As this book demonstrates, wearing a deerstalker does not make you a mastermind—more likely, it marks you as a crackpot.
Fascinating and highly readable, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick returns the iconic Holmes to his mystical origins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English professor McCuskey misses the mark with his debut, a questionable reinterpretation of the Sherlock Holmes stories as a demonstration of pseudoscience rather than a model for logical, evidence-based thinking. For McCuskey, Holmes the character is inextricably interwoven with his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, and thus the latter's belief in spiritualism requires that his fictional detective be rethought. Holmes as a character was conceived by Conan Doyle during a "burst" of spiritualist research, and as such, "Holmesian thinking," McCuskey writes, "is an excuse for not testing your reasons, on the grounds that you are always right when it counts and only wrong when it doesn't." McCuskey reviews the religious questions dominating Victorian England and Conan Doyle's own spiritual journey, but along the way he drops plenty of jargon and is often sloppy in his description of the Holmes canon (ignoring, for example, the ways in which Conan Doyle portrayed his lead as someone fallible and capable of making mistakes and outright failures). McCuskey is especially bent out of shape by 9/11 conspiracy theorists misusing one of Holmes's maxims ("eliminate the impossible") for their own purposes, but doesn't make the case that any author, of fiction or nonfiction, could be immune from ideological distortions. While his angle has potential, readers looking for a new viewpoint on Holmes's characteristic logic will be disappointed.
