Review: How Holmes did it – and we can too!

Review of: Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Author: Maria Konnikova

Publisher: Viking Penguin

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: A

If your literary heroes include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterly creation, Sherlock Holmes, or even if you just drool over Holmes’s latest incarnation as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, you’ll love psychologist Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.  

Brilliant thinking, she assures us, is not a talent we’re born with, but one we can cultivate – “improving our faculty of mindful thought . . . in order to accomplish more, think better, and decide more optimally.” 

 

Sounds daunting, but Konnikova lays out the steps as clearly as Holmes explained his in elucidating to Dr. Watson how he surmised at first glance that the good doctor had recently arrived from Afghanistan, from observation to imagination, to deduction, to making sure our minds remain youthful and resilient for life.

Along the way she provides illustrations from the Holmes canon, particularly lesser known stories such as “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” and “The Adventure of the Priory School,” that sent me in search of the master detective’s complete works. As enticingly as an accomplished fiction writer – after all, she learned from one of the best – Konnikova withholds any story spoilers. 

She traces her own fascination with Sherlock Holmes to childhood, when her father read the stories to his children before bedtime. Through her own book, she drops small clues to a personal mystery she will reveal at the end – unless we’ve paid enough attention to the Holmesian method to winkle it out for ourselves.

What is that Holmesian method? Perhaps we remember (but she’s kind enough to remind us) that Holmes early own described his mind as an attic, which he was careful to stock with only the best materials. 

The concept of the brain as an attic may sound outdated, but Konnikova notes, “Subsequent research on memory formation, retention, and retrieval has . . . proven itself to be highly amenable to the attic analogy,” as she explores “how its structure and content work at every point – and what we can do to improve that working on a regular basis.”

But while singing the praises of mindful, purposeful thought, Konnikova doesn’t forget that the brain behind both Holmes and his lovably doofus sidekick, Dr. Watson, was Doyle himself. As she reminds us in her late chapter, “We’re Only Human,” if Holmes sometimes went astray, how much more likely it was for Doyle to do so also? Hence, his flip in later life from stories about the rationalist detective to obsessions with such paranormal phenomena as ghosts and fairies. She puts Doyle’s fascinations with the irrational in the context of his time, reminding readers of our own fallibility as well. 

I can’t resist adding an additional discussion of Holmesian (and Doylesian) fallibility, in recommending literary professor Pierre Bayard’s reexamination of a classic Holmes tale. In Sherlock Holmes Got it Wrong, Bayard reexamines the great detective’s reasoning in The Hound of the Baskervilles. And I add my deductions about the reasons behind Doyle’s possible blunder in “Look to the femme, not the chien,” at this site. It could be quite a three-pipe problem.