These "gentlemen," are, of course, the illustrators, and, more important, the hundreds of actors during and since Doyle's time who h

This deduction from a hat in 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' is one of Holmes' most remarkable. Yet it only works if the reader accepts certain assumptions, some of which are specific to Late Victorian England:

Points one and three are unspoken links in Holmes' reasoning that point to the specificity of his semi-logical system. As Roland Barthes once said, 'there is no culture without classification and therefore no classification without culture or cultural conventions.’

The appeal of Sherlock Holmes is more complex. He is, on the face of it, a cold fish. 'Detection', he says in The Sign of Four, 'is an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.' Part of his charm resides in the amiable, doltish character of Dr Watson. A lot of his fascination rests with the devilish cunning of Conan Doyle's stories. His popularity is a tribute to the insatiable public appetite for the well-told tale.

However, one must always remember that Doyle's mysteries tend to centre on situations. He tends to present the reader with some extremely puzzling situation, one that is difficult to explain. He then solves the mystery, by developing some brilliant twist that stands the apparent situation on its head. Doyle had little interest in alibis in his work. This is not because mystery fiction was unaware of them: they were used by such 1860's writers as Harriet Prescott Spofford and Charles Martel. In general, Doyle was not deeply interested in whodunit. He did not present a crime, have several suspects around who might equally have committed it, and then challenge the reader to pick, which one of them actually did. Doyle's very popular contemporary Fergus Hume did this in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), a book Doyle had read, and disliked. So Doyle could have set up his mysteries this way: he had certainly seen the pattern in Hume's work. Whodunits were also used by Anna Katherine Green, another author whose work Doyle knew. Doyle only rarely begins his stories with a murder. Instead, Holmes is most commonly called on to investigate a theft, blackmail, a disappearance, or a strange job a middle class person is asked to do, as in "The Red-Headed League", "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" or "The Stockbroker's Clerk". When there is a killing, it is usually a by-product of a theft, such as in "Silver Blaze" or "The Reigate Puzzle". Doyle, and Holmes and Watson, loved the fantastic, the outré and the bizarre in his cases. He is at the start of a great tradition of surrealism in modern mystery fiction. Virtually all the great 20th Century authors of detective stories had a strong surrealist element to their work. This cuts across schools. It is a dominant tradition among intuitionist writers, such as Carr, Queen and Chesterton, but one also finds it in Rinehart, Frederick Irving Anderson, and other Early American writers of their generation, and among Freeman, Sayers and the Realist school. Most of these writers were strongly influenced by Doyle, and paid written tribute to his work. Throughout this Guide I have often referred to this as a "surrealist" aspect of their work; but Doyle's fiction preceded by many years both Surrealism, and its ancestor Dada. Dada emerged around World War I, c1917, with Surrealism following in the 1920's, while Doyle's love for the bizarre was emphasized in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes of 1891 - 1892. Doyle also influenced surrealist-like activity in other media, such as film. For example, take Juve contre Fantômas (1913). This hour long film is Chapter 2 of Louis Feuillade's movie serial Fantômas. The bedroom scenes here seem to be directly derived from Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892). Feuill

Some topics in this essay:
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