How Sherlock Pulled the Trick

“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

Brian McCuskey is Associate Professor of English at Utah State University.