Since I was young, Sherlock Holmes has fascinated me. So, when I was presented to Franco Moretti's study of clues in detective stories, I knew I had found the ideal subject to write on this post.
Recently, as I delved into the world of literary research, I discovered there are many ways to analyze books. In his essay, Moretti proposes a new one, the distant reading. It aims at employing computational techniques to gather literary data from different books at once. He decided to apply this procedure on Sherlock Holmes stories and on the other authors who also wrote detective stories at the same time. With a large corpus, the object of study is no longer the book but the new landscape composed of many books. Close reading won’t do the job. Digital reading, instead, will. The unreadable corpus of many books will give room to statistical and visual outputs that will become the root of new questions.
What really astounded me was the outcome of this experiment. Most of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries used no clues in their stories which may help to explain, although it is not certain, why Sherlock Holmes became so famous— readers enjoyed looking for clues. They enjoyed so much that according to Moretti’s tree graphic on figure 1 a new bifurcation was created, the stories where the clues are present but have no purpose. However, these narratives fell short, as authors just planted the clues without understanding their contextual significance. Another startling revelation emerged, a large parcel of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries used invisible clues, only mentioned during the detective’s “final explanation.” What’s shocking about this? Half of the stories of The adventures of Sherlock Holmes fall in this category.
Since I was young, Sherlock Holmes has fascinated me. So, when I was presented to Franco Moretti's study of clues in detective stories, I knew I had found the ideal subject to write on this post.
Recently, as I delved into the world of literary research, I discovered there are many ways to analyze books. In his essay, Moretti proposes a new one, the distant reading. It aims at employing computational techniques to gather literary data from different books at once. He decided to apply this procedure on Sherlock Holmes stories and on the other authors who also wrote detective stories at the same time. With a large corpus, the object of study is no longer the book but the new landscape composed of many books. Close reading won’t do the job. Digital reading, instead, will. The unreadable corpus of many books will give room to statistical and visual outputs that will become the root of new questions.
What really astounded me was the outcome of this experiment. Most of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries used no clues in their stories which may help to explain, although it is not certain, why Sherlock Holmes became so famous— readers enjoyed looking for clues. They enjoyed so much that according to Moretti’s tree graphic on figure 1 a new bifurcation was created, the stories where the clues are present but have no purpose. However, these narratives fell short, as authors just planted the clues without understanding their contextual significance. Another startling revelation emerged, a large parcel of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries used invisible clues, only mentioned during the detective’s “final explanation.” What’s shocking about this? Half of the stories of The adventures of Sherlock Holmes fall in this category.
Based on those results, it seems that Conan Doyle in his early stories used clues primarily to build the myth of Sherlock Holmes, rather than as part of a logical puzzle that readers would be able to solve by themselves. If the public could not find the clues or decode them it rises the geniality and omniscience of his celebrated detective.
Based on those results, it seems that Conan Doyle in his early stories used clues primarily to build the myth of Sherlock Holmes, rather than as part of a logical puzzle that readers would be able to solve by themselves. If the public could not find the clues or decode them it rises the geniality and omniscience of his celebrated detective.
The data gathered in both works opens up new interrogations and interpretations that we may not have considered otherwise. What distinctive qualities made Conan Doyle part of the literary canon while many authors faded into obscurity or what patterns emerge when analyzing the frequency and significance of clues in Sherlock Holmes stories are just a glimpse of the possibilities enabled by distant reading techniques.