Above: The cover to the 1987 edition of Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency What's the Opposite of Sherlock Holmes?-
Before moving on to other topics, I wanted to make one last note on variations of the Holmes character. In my brother's e-mail, he suggested an über-Holmes. That led me to wonder what an anti-Holmes might look like. My brother offered a character who has Holmes' level of skill, but an opposite moral inclination (or at the very least a disinterest in solutions except for self-serving purposes). What I wanted was an investigator who took an approach to investigation that was diametrically opposed to Holmes' deductive methods. I wanted a detective who didn't use deductive reasoning, scientific methods of inquiry, or anything close to meticulous attention to detail.
After a few moments thought, it dawned on me that the best example of this I could think of was created by Douglas Adams. (No one who knows me well is surprised that I would turn to this example as I enjoy Adams so much I own many heavily worn copies of his novels.) For his science-fiction/mystery novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Adams created a private eye named Dirk Gently who offered a rather particular kind of investigation service. Dirk's method, such as it was, assumed everything was connected and considered everything he encountered as possible evidence. This meant rather than narrowing his focus to only the most pertinent information and proceeding in a logical and scientific order, he would often proceed at random and get caught up in bizarre tangents. The BBC recently made a television adaptation of the character, and the trailer nicely demonstrates the sort of chaos this normally involved. While any reasonable person would expect Dirk to fail -in truth his approach was probably just an invention to cover for his laziness and shortcomings as a detective- he often succeed because within the finite fictional universe he inhabited everything was connected.
Adams even makes the clash between Dirk and Holmes explicit in his second Dirk Gently novel The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul. Gently scoffs at Holmes axioms of deduction, after hearing of a young woman who recites changes in stock prices exactly 24 hours after they occur. His critique of Doyle's sleuth is laid out in the following interlude:
"What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"
"I reject that entirely," said Dirk sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.'"
"Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replied Kate.
"Ah, yes," said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump. "Your girl in the wheelchair -- a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality."
I don't know if any of that comparison interests anyone, but at least it demonstrates how heavily the works of Douglas Adams influence my thinking on almost any subject. Perhaps someday I'll explain why his line, "the wrong lizard might get in", summarizes all of my complaints about modern politics.
To be continued . . .
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