My teenage daughter decided to challenge herself and started reading the Sherlock Holmes books. She’s been on a mission lately to read all the old classics of English literature—which means she has to educate herself on how to read the style and language writers were using at that time.
She asked me the other day, “What makes Sherlock Holmes the greatest detective?”
She knows that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle basically invented the detective genre and that Holmes is considered the greatest detective of all time. So what makes him the greatest?
First, we have to call a spade a spade and say that Holmes’s attention to detail far surpasses anything we’ve seen from any other detective. Not even Hercule Poirot could match Holmes. Poirot was more of an ordinary person who was just exceptionally good at his job.
Holmes is always the smartest person in the room. He has almost superhuman powers of observation and he’s lightyears ahead of everyone else in extrapolating what these tiny details mean. His mind instantly leaps ahead to the logical conclusion and he’s always right.
He has encyclopedic knowledge on a vast array of subjects. He can call on this knowledge to solve his cases and he goes out of his way to increase his knowledge all the time. He never rests on his laurels.
The most important thing about Holmes is that he’s never an idiot. The problem with the modern mystery/detective genre—and the fiction market in general—is that all the characters are morons—especially the detectives.
The majority of sleuths and detectives in the modern mystery genre are bumbling retards who can’t think their way out of a paper bag. They always miss the clues. They don’t recognize the red flags when someone is acting suspiciously right in front of them.
There’s a saying in the fiction world that a writer can never write a character smarter than themselves. We might be inclined to conclude that all these writers are as stupid as their characters, but the writers seem to go out of their way to make the sleuths even dumber.
These fools are always blindsided by the culprit and the sleuth almost never solves the crime themselves through their own intelligence, logic, and deductive reasoning power. They usually have to fall all over the solution because they never see it coming.
The writers of these pathetic mysteries do this because they think they have to surprise the reader with something they didn’t see coming. The writer makes it so that the sleuth didn’t see it coming, either—which reveals the sleuth to be the brainless sloth that they are.
Most modern mystery and detective fiction relies on the sleuth having some sparkling personality trait or witty dialogue style rather than being smart or good at what they do. The sleuth usually wouldn’t be able to solve the case at all if the culprit didn’t make a stupid mistake or a full admission—which isn’t admissible in court or considered evidence of guilt—so it wouldn’t work to catch the culprit at all.
Sherlock Holmes never does any of this. He’s never stupid. He’s never behind the eight-ball. He never stumbles or misses anything. He’s almost superhuman in his intelligence.
His intelligence is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. His intellectual detachment makes it difficult for him to relate to other people, which makes him seem cold, superior, and aloof.
Watson is Holmes’s only friend. Watson is the only person Holmes allows to get close enough to understand the way Holmes’s mind works and why he acts the way he does.
Watson is a normal person. Later in the series, he falls in love with a woman who is involved in one of their cases. Watson marries her, settles down in his own private medical practice, and starts a family.
Watson is what is known in the business as a heroic straight man. In comedy, the straight man represents a stand-in for the audience. The straight man is a normal person who reacts to the comic the way a normal person would react.
The straight man makes the jokes funnier because we see the juxtaposition between the comic’s words and actions versus the straight man’s reactions. We see how differently the comic is speaking and behaving compared to what is normal. This makes the jokes land more effectively.
The same process takes place with the heroic straight man. The straight man is a normal person who reacts to the hero and makes the hero’s actions appear more heroic.
This is the fundamental problem with making the hero the main point of view character of the work. Riding around in the hero’s head and listening to all the hero’s fears, doubts, and frustrations humanizes the hero and makes him seem less heroic.
We don’t get this if we watch and hear the hero from a different point of view—the point of view of a much more normal, much less heroic person. We only see what the hero does and hear what he says out loud. We aren’t privy to all his innermost pain and uncertainty, so he seems more certain in his course and his actions appear more heroic.
A perfect example of this is the character of Dragline from the movie Cool Hand Luke (1967). Dragline is a normal guy. He is the one who expresses all the doubts and uncertainties about what Luke can do and how much he can get away with. Dragline voices all the incredulity about Luke’s rebellion. Luke never expresses any of this. He comes across as always cool, always certain, and never in doubt that all his efforts are going to work out in his favor.
Watson is the heroic straight man to Sherlock Holmes. Watson starts out by saying that Holmes’s deductive methods are “twaddle” and doubting that anyone can do what he says he can. This is exactly the same reaction any of us would have to meeting someone like Holmes. His powers of reasoning, logic, and deduction are so far out of our league that they would appear magical to us. We wouldn’t understand them until we had spoken to him, gotten to know him, and started to learn and understand how he does it.
Watson represents the audience in this process. We admire Holmes through Watson’s eyes. Holmes explains himself to us through the vehicle of Watson. We come to care about Holmes even if he’s incapable of caring about us in the same way. We feel something for him. We feel more for him because he’s incapable of feeling the same way even about his best friend. This is his fundamental character flaw and makes him more human to us.
We don’t get any of this depth or complexity in modern mystery or detective fiction. The mystery and detective genre is a sludge pit of performative attitudes that only succeed in broadcasting how vacuous and brain-dead they are.
The book Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson revolutionized the children’s fiction genre and the book became a worldwide classic. The book was written for ten-year-old boys and spread like wildfire among its target audience.
Most modern adults would struggle to get through the first chapter of this book. The language, style, and the complexity of the story are far, far above the reading level of most modern adults.
The education system at the time when Treasure Island was published didn’t lower its standards to make sure everyone passed. Children at that time were simply expected to learn to read to a certain standard. If you failed, you failed. Those who passed held certain positions in society. Those who failed held different positions in society. This was considered normal.
No one expected every single person to graduate from college. We have to lower our standards to make that happen and a college degree becomes meaningless.
The rule in the modern publishing field is to write at a sixth grade reading level because most adults read at that level. The education system has failed so drastically that they can’t adults can’t read above a child’s level even after they graduate from school.
This is a tragedy and we shouldn’t tolerate it. We shouldn’t tolerate lowering our standards this far. We shouldn’t lower our standards at all. We should have a minimum reading and vocabulary level required to achieve certain academic qualifications. If you don’t meet that standard, you fill a certain level of society in line with your education and abilities.
These levels are no less valuable. Some of them pay a lot better than the higher levels. This is just the way life works. We’re making a huge mistake by trying to tailor the standards so that everyone can pass. It’s unnatural and causes more harm than good.
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