Letters From Watson: The Noble Bachelor

[beatrice_otter]

I'm reading Letters From Watson, which is a substack mailing list sending out the Holmes stories in chronological order. And right now we're on The Noble Bachelor. One thing that caught my eye was this exchange. The client has just told them everything he knows (which is not much) and Holmes announces that he knows what happened to the missing woman. Watson is mystified, and says:

"But I have heard all that you have heard."

"Without, however, the knowledge of pre-existing cases which serves me so well."

In other words, Holmes knows what's happened not because he is So Much Smarter Than Everyone Else, but because ... he's got experience with people going missing in weird circumstances.

Comments

[senmut]

YES, this!

[ndrosen]

That’s at least part of it, but there is still the matter of being able to apply one’s knowledge and experience to different new cases as they transpire.

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah, but adaptations pretty much always harp on "Sherlock is So Much Smarter Than Everyone Else, that's why he can solve the case and save the day!" Which is very much not the case here at all.

[genarti]

Yes! I love the moments when the original stories are like, yes, Holmes is incredibly smart and observant, but also he has a lot of experience with people going missing and being stolen from and manipulated and so on, and also he has incredibly detailed case notes, and also he uses his free time to gather more background knowledge and learn more skills that he thinks will be useful to him in his field. And that's so rarely factored into adaptations, it seems, except as background color.

[beatrice_otter]

This is my first time reading the stories, so I'm glad to know it continues.

[krait]

Same here! The point is supposed to be that he can apply a significant amount of intelligence to the evidence he has, including past experience and research, not that he's got so much intelligence he can just pull answers out of nothing. When information isn't available, he develops it - he does his own research into things he needs to know (e.g. how to identify tobacco ash), and what's more, he publishes it so that others have access to it.

Too many adaptations seem to forget that Holmes is a man of science, with all that implies in terms of experimentation, learning, and disseminating information, and instead make him some kind of incomprehensible genius who relies on instincts no one else has or can develop.

Adaptations also seem to forget that he doesn't always "win." Adler got the better of him. There were one or two cases where he solved the mystery only after the key person died. Occasionally he deliberately chooses not to present the solution he's reached. He's not superhuman, and even intelligence plus a heaping handful of specialised information don't always give him the answer, or give it in time, or in a way that leads to justice.