Sherlock Holmes: The American Years by Michael Kurland Page B

could work. Not that I had one. Nor, as far as I could fathom, did the tin-plated heroes in illustrated magazines packed with farfetched feats of city detectives, railway detectives, prairie detectives—maybe even squirrel detectives. Seeing how rich a vein it was, I’d done some prospecting on a detective yarn of my own, calling back my old jumping-frog character and titling the yarn
Simon Wheeler, Amateur Detective
. Tried it as a story and a play, and in each it was a thundering failure, which did not render my heart fonder of the detective species.
    “How can one recognize and evaluate clues without systematic knowledge?” Holmes was saying. “And so, yes, a crucial element might be discovered in the intricacies of umbrella manufacture.” He waggled a forefinger like a schoolmaster. “And in subjects more arcane.”
    A Boston hitter rocketed a ball into center field, and the 4 vanished from Boston’s peg on the green telegraphic board beyondthe left-field foul flag, and was replaced by a 5 . Beneath it, Hartford’s 0 hung sadly.
    “Do you truly believe,” I said, “that crimes can be solved mainly by applying brainpower?”
    “I
know
it,” he said with exasperating smugness. “When all other possibilities are eliminated through a process of keenly applied deduction, the one remaining must be the truth, however improbable.” It came rattling out of him like a Sunday-school verse.
    “
Could
be the truth,” I amended. “Could be pure bunkum, too. Look, if this was as simple as you claim, Holmes, every sneak thief and back-alley mugger would be snared in no time—the big crooks, too. Didn’t the Pinkertons take a stab at the James gang just this past winter?” I jabbed a finger of my own, sure I had him in a corner. “The papers told how they tossed a bomb into his mother’s house and blew off her hand—but they didn’t get Jesse.”
    “I would venture to remind you that it all depends on who is employing the deduction,” he said. “Police may
see
but as a general rule they fail to
observe
. And deduction in criminal cases is rarely simple—in fact, it is complex and demanding, but ultimately it is reliable.” He’d gotten excited—at least for him—his nostrils flaring slightly the way I’d once seen an Arabian gelding’s. “As Flaubert said,
‘L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout.’
The man is nothing, the work is everything.”
    “Yes, he wrote that to George Sand.” I felt considerable glee at Holmes’s look of startlement. Now I set myself to trump him to flinders, having taken to memory some of Flaubert’s phrases reprinted in London papers. “I believe it goes,
‘L’homme
N’EST
rien, l’oeuvre tout.”
    His frown at my drawling French deepened into a scowl as he perceived my accuracy. Again I’d astonished him, and this time he was not charmed. It didn’t take a gallery of scholars to see that he wasn’t used to being corrected—and that it suited him about like a case of hives.
    “But despite
you
being a mere man,” I added for spice, “I gather you claim this singular capacity to observe and deduce?”
    “Now you fault me for immodesty,” he retorted. “I do not count modesty as a virtue. To the logician things should be seen exactly as they are. To underestimate oneself is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s powers.”
    “In my line of wares,” I told him, “truth is often a laughing matter, and things rarely form up in anything like a straight logical chain. Won’t you agree that life doesn’t operate according to—”
    Fittingly,
my
logic was lost in an explosion of yells as the Hartfords finally began to show their mettle. A Dark Blue hitter smacked a long ball that sent two runners home. Rattled, the Boston pitcher called time-out.
    “See?” I pointed to the diamond and proceeded to float new arguments. Who’d have predicted—putting cash on logical deduction alone—this shift in fortune? Wasn’t the human lot