Four careers over 50+ years. USMC, engineering, consulting, education. Past twenty years have focused on helping leaders become and remain relevant during times of change.
Sherlock is Doing OK
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Reader, I’ve been a fan of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes ever since my friend Pat gave me a copy of the complete works in the 1960s. I keep getting drawn back to “Sherlockian” adventures and am pleased that I have never run out of reading material. I recently asked my son Mark what he wanted for his birthday and he said “How about a Sherlock Holmes book?” Well, that sent me on a happy adventure looking for some of my favorite “new” authors. That, in turn, got me wondering. How many people have written Sherlock Holmes stories and why are they so popular? I was kind of surprised, but pleasantly so. It turns out that even my intern, ChatGPT, is not sure. I asked it to look back for twenty years and give me some data. Here’s its response.
Yowza! That’s a bunch. And now the big question is “Why?” I mean there’s no sex, very little violence, no bulging muscles, no guns (except of Watson’s trusty army revolver that hardly ever gets used), and Holmes mostly sits still, smokes a pipe, and thinks. No adventure there! Why?Basically, I think the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes is largely cognitive pleasure. Readers are invited into a world that initially looks confusing, fragmented, even irrational and then they get to watch someone make sense of it. That is the central draw. A Holmes story usually begins with disorder: an inexplicable death, a strange behavior, a missing object, an apparently impossible event. The reader experiences uncertainty alongside Watson. Then Holmes observes, separates relevant from irrelevant detail, detects patterns, forms hypotheses, and gradually imposes intelligibility on the situation. In that sense, the emotional payoff is not primarily excitement. It is the restoration of order through thought. And in today’s world of political turmoil, “influencers,” artificial intelligence mania, and ongoing wars, isn’t that what all of us would like to see more of – restoration of order through thought? Cheers, Bill |
Bill @ MindPrep
Four careers over 50+ years. USMC, engineering, consulting, education. Past twenty years have focused on helping leaders become and remain relevant during times of change.
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