How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

A masterful combination of literary study and author biography, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick guides us through the parallel careers of two inseparable men: Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Reconsidering Holmes in light of Doyle’s well-known belief in Victorian spiritualism, Brian McCuskey argues that the so-called scientific detective follows the same circular logic, along the same trail of questionable evidence, that led Doyle to the séance room. Holmes’s first case, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887, when natural scientists and religious apologists were hotly debating their differences in the London press. In this environment, Doyle became convinced that spiritualism, as a universal faith based on material evidence, resolved the conflict between science and religion. The character of Holmes, with his infallible logic, was Doyle’s good faith solution to the cultural conflicts of his day. Yet this solution has evolved into a new problem. Sherlock Holmes now authorizes the pseudoscience that corrupts our public sphere, defying logic, revising history, and promoting conspiracy theories. As this book demonstrates, wearing a deerstalker does not make you a mastermind—more likely, it marks you as a crackpot. Fascinating and highly readable, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick returns the iconic Holmes to his mystical origins.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: The Book of Life 1. Reason and Revelation, 1887 2. Reasoning Backward, 1881-1887 3. Theory and Preaching, 1887-1930 4. Wonderful Literature, 1930-2020 5. Negation at Any Cost, 2001-2020 Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Brian McCuskey is Associate Professor of English at Utah State University.

Review :
“McCuskey takes Arthur Conan Doyle to task for creating Holmes and setting a dangerous paradigm loose in the modern world, while tracing the origin of Holmes’s ostentatious pseudo-logic to Doyle’s belief in spiritualism.” —Phil Baker Times Literary Supplement “How Sherlock Pulled the Trick is a useful corrective to the popular image of Sherlock Holmes as a genius, and McCuskey’s examination of the ways he has been put to use by the forces of irrationality is illuminating. The book should act as a warning to those who are lazily tempted to drop in a Holmes quotation because they assume it will strengthen the validity of their claims, and remind the rest of us that employing him to support a statement does not confer legitimacy on it.” —Tom Ruffles Fortean Times “There is undoubtedly a strong dash of hocus-pocus in Doyle's presentation of Holmes's so-called Science of Deduction and Analysis, and McCuskey brings this out better than any other critic of Holmes that I've read. How Sherlock Pulled the Trick is certainly enough to make me question some of the confident—and, it turns out, credulous—pronouncements I've made about Holmes's scientific positivism down the years.” —Darryl Jones Preternature “How Sherlock Pulled the Trick is highly readable and often very engaging, driven as it is by the author’s energy and, at times, his outrage. It is also filled with a fascinating array of primary sources on science, spiritualism, and ways of thinking, from the nineteenth century to the present.” —Melissa Dickson Victorian Popular Fictions Journal “McCuskey’s study is not only a compelling work of literary criticism and cultural history, but a plea for scientificity in a rapidly heating world.” —Misha Kakabadze Correspondences “A detailed and insightful exposition of a powerful and compelling literary figure. We know Holmes is central to a late-Victorian worldview, and How Sherlock Pulled the Trick demonstrates how he is also significant today.” —Catherine Wynne, author of Lady Butler: War Artist and Traveller, 1846-1933