Improving Your Deductive Skills

‘“When I hear you give your reasons,” I remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself,
though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process.”’
‘A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA’
To improve your own deductive powers, you can do no better than read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon. School yourself in the many incredible
examples of deductive reasoning that litter the stories and aim to mirror as many of the master’s techniques as humanly possible.

Logic and Deduction

‘THE SIGN OF FOUR’
Holmes’s remarkable faculties are shown at their best time and again when he is making deductions from evidence that seems to the rest of us to
yield little of value. Indeed, so accurate are the conclusions he draws that at times it seems almost as if he has mystical powers or psychic abilities.
But what is the process of logical deduction?
Accumulate evidence.

Keeping Focus

‘My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.’
‘THE ADVENTURE OF WISTERIA LODGE’
As your old school teachers wearied of drumming into you as a child, the best way to avoid making mistakes is to maintain concentration. As
Watson recorded in ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’, Holmes ‘loved above all things precision and concentration of thought’.
For most of us, our minds are in a state of flux. We keep a lot of stuff in our heads and too easily we can fall into the trap of turning it over to no
real advantage. Without a bit of focus we might find ourselves utterly submerged beneath the chaos going on in our skulls.

Learning From Your Mistakes

‘I made a blunder, my dear Watson – which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through
your memoirs.’
‘SILVER BLAZE’
Everybody makes mistakes. Even the Great Detective. But he knew that to make a mistake is forgivable so long as you make it only once.

Choosing Your Friends Wisely

‘I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.’
‘THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES’
For all that Holmes stands alone as the greatest detective in English literature, he was but one half of a remarkable double act even though he was
sometimes reluctant to admit it. Holmes was self-confident (even arrogant) and occasionally teased Watson mercilessly.

Thinking Laterally

‘What is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance.’
‘A STUDY IN SCARLET’
In recent times the world has become filled with overpaid and self-appointed consultants extolling the virtues of ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘pushing the
envelope’ and ‘thinking outside the box’. For all its silliness, there is a valid point hidden amidst their jargon. Simply put, an ability to think laterally –
to look at a problem from many different angles rather than blundering into it head-on – can be a richly rewarding enterprise.

Keeping an Open Mind

‘The more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a
commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.’
‘THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE’
In sporting parlance, Holmes was extremely adept at playing what was in front of him. That is to say, whatever plans he may have had up his sleeve,
he would alter them to suit the scenario in which he found himself. No matter how odd or surprising a situation became, he kept his mind open to all
sorts of extraordinary possibilities. He realised that just because something seemed unlikely, it was not impossible. Such flexibility of thinking was
crucial to his solving many a case.
For us mere mortals, having our presumptions knocked to pieces can be an extremely disconcerting experience and throws many of us off kilter,
rendering us unable to deal with a new situation or to process a new piece of information. We are so sure that we are right about so many things
that the possibility we may actually be wrong about them is all but inconceivable to us.
History throws up plenty of examples of lack of open-mindeness. Galileo had a very serious falling-out with the Roman Catholic Church over his
insistence that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round – a proposition few would have trouble accepting today. Yet still we
accept all sorts of ideas as irrefutable truth when, in fact, they are simply not true. Consider a few of these urban myths.
The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object on Earth visible from the moon. False – it is not visible from the moon.

Reading Between the Lines

‘I read nothing except the criminal news and the agony column.’
‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR’
It is probably fair to assume that Holmes made the above statement somewhat archly. Able to pluck just the right fact at the most opportune
moment, he clearly had a significant breadth of reading. However, his quote about reading only news and gossip columns is suggestive of his ability to fix his focus on the material most useful to the job in hand. But rather than restricting his reading, it is far more likely that Holmes was an
accomplished exponent of speed reading, able to digest large amounts of text at a high tempo and extract the information he required.

Keeping an Ear to the Ground

‘My night was haunted by the thought that somewhere a clue, a strange sentence, a curious observation, had come under my notice and had
been too easily dismissed.’
‘THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LADY FRANCES CARFAX’
Just as important as developing your visual observation skills is improving your listening abilities. After Holmes had made the observation above in
the case of Lady Carfax, he revealed that ‘in the gray of the morning, the words came back to me’, recalling an apparently off-the-cuff utterance from
the previous day that would serve to help him resolve the case. In another story, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, he understands the
importance of a ‘low, clear whistle’ in the dead of night better than any other figure in the story, with the exception of the perpetrator of a terrible
crime. In the same way that Holmes could attach meaning to what his eyes saw like few others, he could grasp the connotations of sound quite
magnificently (even when that sound was relayed to him by a witness rather than heard by his own ears).

Being Alert to the World Around You

‘You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.’
‘A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA’
Holmes’s powers of observation were unmatched. He could scan a scene and alight on a telling detail that countless others had missed. He stated
as much in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’: ‘You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.’

Developing an Agile Mind

‘I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.’
‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAZARIN STONE’
While Holmes’s personality and motivations are endlessly interesting enigmas, were it not for his remarkable intellectual capacity, you would not be
here reading about him. There are plenty of interesting characters in life and literature, but very few able to solve an apparently unsolvable riddle like
the Great Detective.

Do You Have the Personality?

‘The strong, masterful personality of Holmes dominated the tragic scene …’
‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLITARY SCIENTIST’
We all make sweeping judgements about people. Him over there is arrogant, her in the corner is needy, and as for her friend … well, where do I
start?
The truth is that many of the judgements we make about personality are instinctive and say as much about us as they do about the person we are
judging.

Understanding Sherlock

‘I play the game for the game’s own sake.’

‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE BRUCE-PARTINGTON PLANS’

Dear old Sherlock has rather acquired a reputation over the years as an anti-social, unfeeling machine with a fearsome streak of arrogance. Such

a description is not entirely unjustified. Even faithful Watson – in one of his more exasperated moments – described him as ‘a brain without a heart,

as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence’. Then, in a more considered moment, Watson called him ‘the best and

wisest man whom I had ever known’.

Introduction How to Think Like Sherlock

Something strange has happened in the last few years. Sherlock Holmes – that uptight, cold, sexless sleuth who inhabited the grimy streets of
London in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth – has become cool.
Hollywood (in the form of Robert Downey Jnr) has got hold of Sherlock and made him tough, streetwise and even funny. Meanwhile, the BBC has
given us Benedict Cumberbatch as a Holmes who oscillates between brooding moodiness one moment and manic energy the next.