“You see, but you do not observe”: Sensory Manipulation and Sense-Making in the Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories

The Sherlock Holmes stories provide excellent examples of how readers of detective stories may be presented with misleading information for the purposes of plot manipulation. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sometimes presents descriptions at the set-up and investigation stages of these stories which appear credible, but which are actually unreliable, missing key details, or misleadingly focused. Such deficits in reporting evidence in detective stories can serve the purpose of burying key clues. The erroneous or distorted information may be mediated through unreliable (but often supposedly reliable) narrators, detectives, and/or witnesses. In Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, this creates puzzles which may be obscure to the reader and the innocent characters for the main parts of the stories, but which are eventually solved at the end by Holmes. Holmes’s ability to find solutions is often attributed to his superior sensory observations and the conclusions he draws from those observations through his reasoning skills. Sherlock Holmes says that he is able to see and observe what others see but fail to observe. However, in reality, providing satisfactory solutions may also sometimes depend on a certain amount of rhetorical manipulation of sensory details by Doyle. At the solution stage, the sensory information may be re-presented in a rather different way, so that Holmes’s explanation—the sense-making stage—appears to be credible, even though in reality it may not be fully convincing. Hence, Doyle’s art in these stories lies not only in producing a character who is probably fiction’s most iconic detective but also in carefully handling how the evidence is presented at different stages in the stories. We will examine this by discussing the Sherlock Holmes stories in general, and also by looking at examples from three specific cases: The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The adventure of the lion’s mane,” and “The adventure of the cardboard box.”