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People really like Sherlock Holmes stories, to the point that they're probably the best candidate for the progenitor of the entire Mystery genre. To those here who enjoy these stories, would you mind putting on your over-analysis caps and explaining what it is about the stories that you enjoy?
I used to like Holmes a lot more till I realized that Doyle was being a lazy bastard and cheating. I mean, that's a bit harsh given the standards of his time but the point still stands.
Deductions and clever reasoning are fun, but the kinds Holmes regularly makes are only true by author fiat. That's not how Bayesian reasoning (or reasoning in general) works. Sometimes the reason the dog didn't bark in the night was because it was constipated and really had to take a shit. The sheer confidence with which he just takes a look at a whole bunch of random phenomena which could very well have other reasonable explanations and zeroes in on the right one.. That's not the right way to model someone brilliant, even superhumanly so.
A good mystery novel, IMHO, is one where enough of the pieces are laid out in clear sight, and an astute reader can make the same deductions as the protagonists can. That's never been how it worked in Holmes. Sure, plot twists and aha moments can be entertaining, but the mechanistic underpinnings aren't there.
What you're describing is precisely the reaction I had to the first Christie novel I read, Death in the Clouds. The summation didn't have me thinking "oh my God, the answer was staring me in the face all along, how did I fail to cop it?"; it had me thinking "well, sure, I guess that makes sense, sort of, if you say so". I felt like the killer could have turned out to be a completely different person and I would have found the ending exactly as satisfying, which is to say, not very.
By contrast, when I read my second Christie novel And Then There Were None, the summation seemed ingenious and completely logical, and I felt like there were enough clues that a sufficiently attentive reader could have figured it out well in advance. All that in addition to being a more genuinely terrifying work of fiction than most horror novels and stories I've read.
I think anyone with an output on Christie’s level is going to have (many) misses. But at her best she’s a genuinely great writer with a great skill at concise characterization.
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You might get a kick out of "The Great Ace Attorney" games. They're from the Phoenix Wright series where you play as a defense lawyer investigating crimes, but these ones are set in London in the Victorian Era. Sherlock Holmes is a character in the game and he acts just like you described, drawing elaborate conclusions from scant evidence - which you then have to correct using your own evidence. These deduction sequences are probably my favorite part of the game.
That's kind of ironic, considering that the AA games are all about drawing elaborate conclusions from scant evidence lol.
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Yeah.
Also, another thing that bugs me is that, while we do see in the background some hints of how intensely Holmes studied various empirical fields, in the stories all of that takes a back seat to his brilliant feats of deduction. He comes across as effortlessly cool, and we rarely if ever see the kind of work that would be required for someone to build up such a base of knowledge. (It sounds similar to parts of being a doctor, that people have been writing about here, recently.)
To be fair, the first story at least showed a downside of Holmes' hyperspecialization: to leave some empty space in his memory, he gave up on ever learning any non-crime-related fact (such as that the Earth revolves around the Sun).
This is true, but in later stories we see "cool" bits where Holmes busts out familiarity with various bits of culture, but we very rarely if ever see the "uncool" side, where his hyperspecialization interferes with his work or leaves him looking foolish. IMO, too much of the fan work and re-imaginings lean into the "cool" side, or alternately completely undermine his whole character, but I appreciate the ones like "Seven Percent Solution" that manage to show him with flaws but also keep his heroic side intact. I've watched some of the Jeremy Brett TV series, and one of the many things I like about them is that they humanize Holmes.
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