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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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