I wouldn’t call myself a person who likes mystery stories. Locked rooms, remote islands, strange killings with no earthly explanation – all of that stuff strikes me as arbitrary in a way I don’t really want to read. Part of it comes down to the fact that such stories are often liars, or at least not tellers of the whole truth. Sherlock Holmes stories are deceivers – Sherlock Holmes himself is not a detective, but a magician. When Sherlock Holmes pulls out a solution, we are astonished not because he used the same information we had in a more elegant or insightful way, but because his brandishing of new, unheard information was so dazzling that we believed in the trick anyway.

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