How to Think Like Sherlock (5 page)

‘That would suit me very well,’ said I. ‘And the pay?’

‘Is four pounds a week.’

‘And the work?’

‘Is purely nominal.’

‘What do you call purely nominal?’

‘Well, you have to be in the office, or at least in the building, the whole time. If you leave, you forfeit your whole position forever. The will is very clear upon that point. You don’t comply with the conditions if you budge from the office during that time.’

‘It’s only four hours a day, and I should not think of leaving,’ said I.

‘No excuse will avail,’ said Mr. Duncan Ross; ‘neither sickness nor business nor anything else. There you must stay, or you lose your billet.’

‘And the work?’

‘Is to copy out the Encyclopedia Britannica. There is the first volume of it in that press. You must find your own ink, pens, and blotting-paper, but we provide this table and chair. Will you be ready tomorrow?’

‘Certainly,’ I answered.

‘Then, good-bye, Mr. Jabez Wilson, and let me congratulate you once more on the important position which you have been fortunate enough to gain.’

Questions

1. How much does Ross propose to pay Wilson?

2. Which famous work is Wilson to copy out?

3. What hours is Wilson expected to work?

4. What tools must Wilson provide for himself?

5. When is most business at a pawnbroker’s shop done, according to Wilson?

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.

President Kennedy told the German people that he was a jelly doughnut. False. It is true that in a 1963 speech he said ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner
’. It is also true that there is a certain kind of doughnut called a
Berliner
. If, as it is often said he should have, Kennedy had said ‘
Ich bin Berliner
’, he would have been suggesting he was a native of the city, which he wasn’t. His formulation was grammatically correct and put across his desired sentiment: he was at one with the people of Berlin.

To demonstrate the limitations of kingly power, Canute, the eleventh century King of England, commanded the sea to halt before it wet his feet. False. The story is almost certainly apocryphal.

Sherlock Holmes was real. He wasn’t. Honestly. To be able to maintain openness of mind is a potent skill and requires of us that we do not spring to judgement or take things at face value, nor refuse to countenance that what we thought was one thing is actually another.

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.

Holmes was an undeniable master of lateral thinking. Virtually every case written up by Dr Watson involves Holmes making a dextrous intellectual leap that no-one else proves capable of. Your chances of matching Holmes in feats of lateral thinking are, quite frankly, minimal. You might as well decide you can out-dribble Lionel Messi, talk about string theory more convincingly than Stephen Hawking, or wear something weirder than Lady Gaga. Some talents are bestowed on just a few, and when it comes to lateral thinking, no one touches Holmes.

Yet that should not stop you from developing your skills in this direction as far as you possibly can. Here are a few quizzes to get the cogs whirring.

Quiz 7 – Lost for Words

In this exercise, add a word in Column B that makes two new words when added to the end of the word in Column A and to the beginning of the word in Column C. (Write your answers, in order, on a sheet of paper.)

Quiz 8 – Dingbats

In this exercise, each of the following dingbats represents a different Sherlock Holmes story. Can you work out which each refers to? Write your answers on a separate sheet of paper.

1

2

3

4

5
Fred Astaire, Rudolf Nureyev, Nijinsky, Gene Kelly

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