Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong Read Online Free Page B

Afghanistan, I perceive.”
      “How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.
      “Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself. 17
    Watson will have to live with Holmes for several weeks before the detective explains the analytic method that allowed him
     to guess at his sojourn in Afghanistan:
    “You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”
      “You were told, no doubt.”
      “Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. 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. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman
     of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for
     his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness,
     as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the
     tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train
     of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.” 18
    Although this is far from the most interesting of Holmes’s analyses, even in A Study in Scarlet , the first of the detective’s deductions—or more precisely the first to appear in print—does include in miniature all the
     elements of his method. And it is all the more interesting because it is accompanied by an explanation of this method by Holmes
     himself.
    Holmes had explained his method only after Watson, having read an article in a magazine lying on their table, reproached the
     author of the article for being “some arm-chair lounger who evolves all these neat little paradoxes in the seclusion of his
     own study,” 19 but whose ideas are impractical—someone who, locked up in a subway compartment in the Underground, would be unable to guess
     the professions of his traveling companions:
    “I would lay a thousand to one against him.”
      “You would lose your money,” Sherlock Holmes remarked calmly. “As for the article I wrote it myself.”
      “You!”
      “Yes, I have a turn both for observation and for deduction. The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to
     you to be so chimerical are really extremely practical—so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.” 20
    Observation and deduction: revealed for the first time here but repeated throughout all the stories, these are the two keys
     to Holmes’s method, the ones that allow him to carry out his investigations successfully. We must study each of these two
     operations attentively if we want to form a correct idea of the method created by Sherlock Holmes, and to evaluate its validity.

    Let us begin, then, with observation—which is to say, searching for clues . Clues can take many different forms, but they can be sorted into two main categories: material elements and psychological
     behavior.
    The category of material elements is undoubtedly the one that has most contributed to making Holmes’s method known. It is this material search that has popularized
     the image of a detective, magnifying glass in hand, in search of minute clues that let him reconstruct a whole chain of disparate
     facts. These elements may be divided into several types, many of which are present in one form or another in The Hound of the Baskervilles .
    A first type is what we could call the identifying sign: the various physical elements that allow us to recognize an individual.
     It is resorted to twice in the novel. During the London episode, it is this sort of sign that Holmes uses to try to identify
     the man who has been shadowing Baskerville. Further, it