Sherlock Holmes' Sadism

It is puzzling that three out of six Doyle´s favorite Holmes stories (in the list published in 1927) are stories where Holmes powers of deduction fail (The Speckled Band) or he is matched by a rival (A Scandal in Bohemia and The Final Problem). This coincides with many readers' favorites lists. These stories do not violate the laws of the detective genre as Hodgson (1994) holds. On the contrary, they derive their interest from the very peculiarities of the reader’s reaction to detective stories. They are interesting because the hero is flawed and they underline, more than perfect reasoning stories, the tragedy of the reader of detective fiction.

As Caprettini (1994) keenly sees Holmes/Watson relationship is based on the master/servant patron, and as such, "we always find in the servant/master topos a certain form of sadism". We can trace examples of this sadism towards Watson in many stories:

"You have not observed...since your are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you may be interested in this (A Scandal in Bohemia)"

"After all you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications (The Dying detective)"

This sadism by Holmes generates in Watson some resentment against Holmes aloofness. Watson, and the reader is identified with Watson in his role as a witness of Holmes adventures, wishes Holmes to be wrong from time to time. As we have seen, the reader likes the best the stories in which Holmes fails, because before one of Holmes masterful and commanding reasoning the reader can not help joining Watson in complaining about his own limitations:

"when I hear you give your reasons," I remarked, "the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled, until you explain tour process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours (A Scandal in Bohemia)"

The reader of detective fiction is continuously trying to anticipate and outwit the detective in the solving of the crime, to beat him in his own game, as Watson sometimes fancies:

"Then I began to think of Holmes´ own method and to try to practice them in reading this tragedy. It was, alas! only to easy to do. (The final problem)"

Moreover, if the reader is to derive any pleasure from this form of fiction, his mental movements must be akin to that ascribed by Aristotle to the audience of a tragedy in the Poetics: the turning of events must, in a first movement, surprise; and then it must come to be recognized as necessary given the plot, in a second and wider awareness. Holmes, himself experiences this feeling when recalling his deductions:

"I confess that I have been as blind as a mole, but is better to learn wisdom late, than never to learn it at all. (The Man With The Twisted Lip)"

The reader likes to fail in anticipating the resolution, but to acknowledge its failure the very next moment:

"«There I was stretched when you, my dear Watson, and all your following were investigating in the most sympathetic and inefficient manner the circumstances of my death...At last, when you had all formed your inevitable and totally erroneous conclusions (The Empty Room)"

"All your following" are evidently the readers, who do not like a straightforward anticipation of the events, neither an insurmountable heap of reasoning that can not be given sense in a rear-view after the conclusion. If we admit a certain anagnoresis in the reader of detective fiction parallel to that described by Aristotle for the audience of tragedy, we must also establish that the hero must somehow be flawed if the reader is to contemplate its own limitations under a tragic eye when seeing an individual of superior powers failing miserably. This effect of achieving the tragedy of the reader, as done by Doyle in The Speckled Band, is what gives an enormous appeal to flawed Holmes stories as privileged instances for the study of the reader reactions to certain narrative effects.
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