Zen in the Art of Sherlock Holmes

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These enigmatic phrases easily could come from some exalted spiritual teacher, imparted perhaps by an Eastern guru or a mystical priest trying to shake listeners free from their everyday perceptions. In fact, they are the words of the world's most famous private consulting detective: Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221-B Baker Street, London.

A strange religious sage, this unemotional, logical man!

From the moment of his creation by Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes has been a wildly popular figure, known and revered for his uncanny ability to deduce the truth from the smallest clues. Doyle presents Holmes as being thoroughly skeptical and immune to the lure of the supernatural. In 56 stories and four novels, never once are Holmes and Dr. Watson, the detective's trusted friend, shown attending a worship service or expressing the slightest interest in organized religion. Even Watson admits that Holmes seems to be immune to sensitive feelings of any sort. Thoughts of love, in particular, are "abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind." He is, Watson concludes, "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen."

Despite all this, there is a religious teacher here, and a deeply wise one at that. On the surface, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries do seem to be singularly unlikely guides to the ineffable secrets of life. Still, I have discovered in them

an intriguing gateway to understanding something quite surprising: that detective stories of all kinds may be seen as subtly humble religious parables. As vividly demonstrated in the works of Doyle, the best mystery stories contain clues--and even a method--for unraveling a deeper mystery we all share.

A competent but unsuccessful doctor, Doyle intended to write only six adventures of a figure he first called Ormond Sacker, then agreed to write six more in response to an explosion of interest. After the original stories were published as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1892, Doyle hoped to end the series. He believed that these detective tales were obscuring his other "serious" work, especially his religious life, expressed in Spiritualism. But his mother, his editor, and countless readers thought otherwise. When he suggested killing off his hero, his mother wrote back with keen editorial judgment: "You won't! You can't! You mustn't!"

Late in 1892, new adventures began to appear; and yet, determined to get Holmes out of his life forever, Doyle titled one of them "The Final Problem." To this end, Doyle created someone who could credibly match the intellect of Holmes, though not his morals: Professor James Moriarty. The master criminal takes the sleuth, literally, to the brink of oblivion, when both go over Switzerland's 200-foot-high Reichenbach Falls. In this story, Watson sadly records the demise of "the best and the wisest man I have ever known."

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