How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

English professor McCuskey misses the mark with his debut, a questionable reinterpretation of the Sherlock Holmes stories as a demonstration of pseudoscience rather than a model for logical, evidence-based thinking. For McCuskey, Holmes the character is inextricably interwoven with his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, and thus the latter’s belief in spiritualism requires that his fictional detective be rethought. Holmes as a character was conceived by Conan Doyle during a “burst” of spiritualist research, and as such, “Holmesian thinking,” McCuskey writes, “is an excuse for not testing your reasons, on the grounds that you are always right when it counts and only wrong when it doesn’t.” McCuskey reviews the religious questions dominating Victorian England and Conan Doyle’s own spiritual journey, but along the way he drops plenty of jargon and is often sloppy in his description of the Holmes canon (ignoring, for example, the ways in which Conan Doyle portrayed his lead as someone fallible and capable of making mistakes and outright failures). McCuskey is especially bent out of shape by 9/11 conspiracy theorists misusing one of Holmes’s maxims (“eliminate the impossible”) for their own purposes, but doesn’t make the case that any author, of fiction or nonfiction, could be immune from ideological distortions. While his angle has potential, readers looking for a new viewpoint on Holmes’s characteristic logic will be disappointed. (June)