Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (19 page)

At the beginning of the investigation, Holmes and Lestrade start from the exact same point, as John Hector McFarlane gives the entirety of his statement in their joint presence. In fact, it’s Lestrade who has an edge of a sort. He has already been to the scene of the crime, while Holmes is only now hearing of it for the first time. And yet, right away, their approaches diverge. When Lestrade, prior to arresting McFarlane and leading him away, asks Holmes whether he has any further questions, Holmes replies, “Not until I have been to Blackheath.” Blackheath? But the murder took place in Norwood. “You mean Norwood,” Lestrade corrects the detective. “Oh, yes, no doubt that is what I must have meant,” replies Holmes, and proceeds, of course, to Blackheath, the home of the unfortunate Mr. McFarlane’s parents.

“And why not Norwood?” asks Watson, just as Lestrade had wondered before him.

“Because,” replies Holmes, “we have in this case one singular incident coming close to the heels of another singular incident. The police are making the mistake of concentrating their attention upon the second, because it happens to be the one which is actually criminal.” Strike one, as you’ll see in a moment, against Lestrade’s overly straightforward approach.

Holmes is disappointed in his trip. “I tried one or two leads,” he tells Watson upon his return, “but could get at nothing which would help our hypothesis, and several points which would make against it. I gave it up at last, and off I went to Norwood.” But, as we’ll soon see, the time wasn’t wasted—nor does Holmes think it was. For, you never know how the most straightforward-seeming events will unfold once you use that attic space of imagination to its fullest potential. And you never know just
what piece of information will make a nonsensical puzzle all of a sudden make sense.

Still, the case does not seem to be heading toward a successful resolution. As Holmes tells Watson, “Unless some lucky chance comes our way I fear that the Norwood Disappearance Case will not figure in that chronicle of our successes which I foresee that a patient public will sooner or later have to endure.”

And then, from the most unlikely of places, that very lucky chance appears. Lestrade calls it “important fresh evidence” that definitively establishes McFarlane’s guilt. Holmes is stricken—until he realizes just what that fresh evidence is: McFarlane’s bloody fingerprint on the hallway wall. What to Lestrade is proof positive of guilt to Holmes is the very epitome of McFarlane’s innocence. And what’s more, it confirms a suspicion that has, to that point, been nothing more than a nagging feeling, an “intuition,” as Holmes calls it, that there has been no crime to begin with. Jonas Oldacre is, as a matter of fact, alive and well.

How can that be? How can the exact same piece of information serve, for the inspector, to condemn a man and, for Holmes, to free him—and to cast doubt on the nature of the entire crime? It all comes down to imagination.

Let’s go through it step-by-step. First off, there’s Holmes’s initial response to the story: not to rush immediately to the scene of the supposed crime but rather to acquaint himself with all possible angles, which may or may not prove useful. And so, a trip to Blackheath, to those very parents who are supposed to have known Jonas Oldacre when young and who, of course, know McFarlane. While this may not seem to be particularly imaginative, it does entail a more open-minded and less linear approach than the one espoused by Lestrade: straight to the scene of the crime, and the scene of the crime only. Lestrade has, in a way, closed off all alternate possibilities from the get-go. Why bother to look if everything you need is right in one place?

Much of imagination is about making connections that are not entirely obvious, between elements that may appear disparate at first. When I was younger, my parents gave me a toy of sorts: a wooden pole with a hole in the middle and a ring at the base. Through the hole was threaded a thick string,
with two wooden circles on either end. The point of the toy was to get the ring off the pole. It seemed like a piece of cake at first—until I realized that the string with its circles prevented the ring from coming off the obvious way, over the top of the pole. I tried force. And more force. And speed. Maybe I could trick it? I tried to get the string and circles to somehow detach. The ring to slide over the circles that it hadn’t slid over in the past. Nothing worked. None of the solutions that seemed most promising were actually solutions at all. Instead, to remove the ring, you had to take a path so circuitous that it took me hours of trying—with days in between—to finally have the patience to reach it. For you had to, in a sense, stop trying to take the ring off. I’d always begun with that ring, thinking that it had to be the right way to go. After all, wasn’t the whole point to remove it? It wasn’t until I forgot the ring and took a step back to look at the overall picture and to explore its possibilities that I came upon the solution.

I, too, had to go to Blackheath before I could figure out what was going on in Norwood. Unlike Lestrade, I had a strict guide: I would know when I had solved the puzzle correctly. And so I didn’t need Holmes’s nudging. I realized I was wrong because I would know without a doubt when I was right. But most problems aren’t so clear-cut. There’s no stubborn ring that gives you only two answers, right and wrong. Instead, there’s a whole mass of misleading turns and false resolutions. And absent Holmes’s reminder, you may be tempted to keep tugging at that ring to get it off—and think that it has been removed when all you’ve really done is lodged it farther up the pole.

So, Holmes goes to Blackheath. But that’s not the end to his willingness to engage in the imaginative. In order to approach the case of the Norwood builder as the detective does—and accomplish what he accomplishes—you need to begin from a place of open-minded possibility. You cannot equate the most obvious course of events with the only possible course of events. If you do so, you run the risk of never even thinking of any number of possibilities that may end up being the real answer. And, more likely than not, you will fall prey to that nasty confirmation bias that we’ve seen in play in previous chapters.

In this instance, not only does Holmes hold very real the chance that McFarlane is innocent, but he maintains and plays out a number of
hypothetical scenarios that exist only in his mind, whereby each piece of evidence, including the central one of the very death of the builder, is not what it appears to be. In order to realize the true course of events, Holmes must first imagine the possibility of that course of events. Otherwise he’d be like Lestrade, left saying, “I don’t know whether you think that McFarlane came out of jail in the dead of the night in order to strengthen the evidence against himself,” and following up that seemingly rhetorical statement with, “I am a practical man, Mr. Holmes, and when I have got my evidence I come to my conclusions.”

Lestrade’s rhetorical certainty is so misplaced
precisely
because he is a practical man who goes straight from evidence to conclusions. He forgets that crucial step in between, that space that gives you time to reflect, to think of other possibilities, to consider what may have occurred, and to follow those hypothetical lines out inside your mind, instead of being forced to use only what is in front of you. (But never underestimate the crucial importance of that observational stage that has come before, the filling up of the staging area with pieces of information for your use: Holmes can come to his conclusions about the thumbprint only because he knows that he did not miss it before. “I know that that mark was not there when I examined the hall yesterday,” he tells Watson. He trusts in his observations, in his attention, in the essential soundness of his attic and its contents both. Lestrade, lacking his training and ruled as he is by System Watson, knows no such certainty.)

A lack of imagination can thus lead to faulty action (the arrest or suspicion of the wrong man)
and
to the lack of proper action (looking for the actual culprit). If only the most obvious solution is sought, the correct one may never be found at all.

Reason without imagination is akin to System Watson at the controls. It seems to make sense and it’s what we want to do, but it’s too impulsive and quick. You cannot possibly assess and see the whole picture—even if the solution ends up being rather prosaic—if you don’t take a step back to let imagination have its say.

Consider this counterexample to the conduct of Lestrade. In “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” Holmes pays one of his rare compliments to Inspector Baynes: “You will rise high in your profession. You have instinct
and intuition.” What does Baynes do differently from his Scotland Yard counterparts to earn such praise? He anticipates human nature instead of dismissing it, arresting the wrong man on purpose with the goal of lulling the real criminal into false complacency. (The wrong man, of course, has a preponderance of evidence against him, more than enough for an arrest, and to a Lestrade would seem to be the right man. In fact, Holmes initially mistakes Baynes’s arrest as nothing more than a Lestrade-like blunder.) And in this anticipation lies one of the main virtues of an imaginative approach: going beyond simple logic in interpreting facts and instead using that same logic to create hypothetical alternatives. A Lestrade would never think to do something so nonlinear. Why in the world expend the energy to arrest someone if that someone is not who should be arrested according to the law? Lacking imagination, he can think only in a straight line.

In 1968, the high jump was a well-established sport. You would run, you would jump, and you would make your way over a pole in one of several ways. In older days you’d likely use the scissors, scissoring out your legs as you glided over, but by the sixties you’d probably be using the straddle or the belly roll, facing down and basically rolling over the bar. Whichever style you used, one thing was certain: you’d be facing forward when you made your jump. Imagine trying to jump backward. That would be ridiculous.

Dick Fosbury, however, didn’t think so. To him, jumping backward seemed like the way to go. All through high school, he’d been developing a backward-facing style, and now, in college, it was taking him higher than it ever had. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but if he thought about it, he would say that his inspiration came from the East: from Confucius and Lao Tzu. He didn’t care what anyone else was doing. He just jumped with the feeling of the thing. People joked and laughed. Fosbury looked just as ridiculous as they thought he would (and his inspirations sounded a bit ridiculous, too. When asked about his approach, he told
Sports Illustrated
, “I don’t even think about the high jump. It’s positive thinking. I just let it happen”). Certainly, no one expected him to make the U.S. Olympics team—let alone win the Olympics. But win he did, setting American and Olympic records with his 7-foot-4.25-inch (2.24-meter) jump, only 1.5 inches short of the world record.

With his unprecedented technique, dubbed the Fosbury Flop, Fosbury did what many other more traditional athletes had never managed to accomplish: he revolutionized, in a very real way, an entire sport. Even after his win, expectations were that he would remain a lone bird, jumping in his esoteric style while the rest of the world looked on. But since 1978 no world record has been set by anyone other than a flopper; and by 1980, thirteen of sixteen Olympic finalists were flopping across the bar. To this day, the flop remains the dominant high jump style. The straddle looks old and cumbersome in comparison. Why hadn’t anyone thought of replacing it earlier?

Of course, everything seems intuitive in retrospect. But what seems perfectly clear now was completely inventive and unprecedented at the time. No one thought you could possibly jump backward. It seemed absurd. And Fosbury himself? He wasn’t even a particularly talented jumper. As his coach, Berny Wagner, put it, “I have a discus thrower who can jump-reach higher than Dick.” It was all in the approach. Indeed, Fosbury’s height pales in comparison to the current record—8 feet (2.45 meters), held by Javier Sotomayor—and his accomplishment doesn’t even break the top twenty. But the sport has never been the same.

Imagination allows us to see things that aren’t so, be it a dead man who is actually alive, a way of jumping that, while backward, couldn’t be more forward looking, or a box of tacks that can also be a simple box. It lets us see what might have been and what might be even in the absence of firm evidence. When all of the details are in front of you, how do you arrange them? How do you know which are important? Simple logic gets you part of the way there, it’s true, but it can’t do it alone—and it can’t do it without some breathing space.

In our resistance to creativity, we are Lestrades. But here’s the good news: our inner Holmes isn’t too far away. Our implicit bias may be strong but it’s not immutable, and it doesn’t need to affect our thinking as much as it does.

Look at the following picture:

Try to connect these dots with three lines, without lifting your pencil from the paper or retracing any of the lines you draw. You must also end the drawing where you began it. You can take up to three minutes.