“No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.” (“The Sign of Four,” Chapter One)
The Sherlock Holmes story, “Silver Blaze,” contains one of the Great Detective’s most famous and oft-quoted deductions. Having learned all he can from the stables at King’s Pyland, Holmes and company are preparing to move on to the next location. When asked if he has observed anything crucial, Holmes merely remarks cryptically that he would like to draw their attention:
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
What Holmes is referring to, of course, is that fact that the guard dog did not bark when the intruder entered the stable to steal the racehorse, Silver Blaze. The absence of this activity indicated that whoever had come in must have been familiar to the canine, and did not arouse suspicion. The villain, John Straker, was the lead trainer and someone who was seen every day around the stables, and the dog would have felt no fear of him, and thus no need to bark. Rather than looking at a silent guard dog and seeing no clue, Sherlock Holmes observed an absent behavior, which in and of itself turned out to be one of the case’s most crucial clues. In another instance, Holmes would rely upon the absence of a conclusion in one mystery, in order to find the correct solution to another.
One of the more interesting features of “The Six Napoleons” is the fact that Holmes had already worked the case once before. As he tells Lestrade and Watson, “You will remember, Lestrade, the sensation caused by the disappearance of this valuable jewel, and the vain efforts of the London police to recover it. I was myself consulted upon the case, but I was unable to throw any light upon it.” If Sherlock Holmes seems to be positively blasé about this supposedly less than successful investigation, it is not because he has finally brought the case to an end. It is not to say that he previously worked the case without success, but instead that he worked the case without conclusion. However, Sherlock Holmes being Sherlock Holmes, the Detective knew that the absence of a solution in one instance did not preclude the existence of one entirely.
Holmes refers to his detective work in SIXN as “a connected chain of inductive reasoning,” and Inspector Lestrade calls the case “workmanlike.” They are both correct, of course, but the item of note is that observing a missing element was a crucial step in the deductive process. Marking the missing conclusion from his previous case, Sherlock Holmes knew that a satisfactory solution—and by association, the missing pearl of the Borgias—must exist somewhere. Simply labeling a case without a solution as unsolvable would not do, and regarding an elusive object as lost forever—simply for the crime of being elusive—would not stand either.
|Not pictured: The "I'm not following this" expression |
on Lestrade's and Watson's faces.
In “The Second Stain,” upon opening his despatch-box to find the missing diplomatic letter safely within its depths, Trelawney Hope exclaims, “Thank you! Thank you! What a weight from my heart. But this is inconceivable–impossible. Mr. Holmes, you are a wizard, a sorcerer! How did you know it was there?” To which Sherlock Holmes replies, “Because I knew it was nowhere else.”
Empty. But what of the Great Detective’s deductions, his logical inferences? Although he is for a moment stymied, it does not take Holmes long to realize that the absence of the document from the place he imagined it to be—the place he knew it to be—was the key indicator in another solution entirely.
Remarking on the absence of activity or behavior is not the same as a guess. A guess indicates a lack of knowledge and the need to move ahead without some crucial piece of information. With a lucky jump, a guess can sometimes get one over the gaps in the deductive bridge, but can just as easily leave you plunging into the abyss of blunder and falsehoods. In SILV, SIXN, and SECO, what Sherlock Holmes is doing is observing nothing, and discovering the various ways in which the nothing is itself, a clue. As Holmes says in SILV: “See the value of imagination…It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified. Let us proceed.”
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