My soapbox about Sherlock. He's a superhero. He satisfies an inner desire to overcome weaknesses that leave us vulnerable, the way superman is invulnerable to bullets, Holmes is never wrong. He can not be deceived, except by that one chick who really wasn't all that smart, she just wore a disguise. Those who have been betrayed can take comfort in his infallibility. I've read them all. Including the one where Watson learns "the trick", something Doyle wrote because he hated writing Holmes. 1/?
3/3 So good it's inspired a genre of superheroes with the same superpower. You know that show Lie to Me? The dude who that was based on is indeed very skilled at sniffing out deception. He's able to tell when someone lies half the time, better than our usual 30%.
50% is a coin toss though. Not infallible, except in fiction. And it does the same thing Doyle hated. The public eats it up, believes in it, including those who go into law enforcement. It's a dangerous pleasure.
@tippitiwichet I had read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories just before I got into the police department. I was always alert for the icepick made out of ice when I went to murder scenes. In real life, killers are not clever. They kill and they leave. One guy rolled up his victim's corpse in a tarp and carried it under the house. Then cleaned up all the blood and even crudely stitched the victim's stab wounds. We caught him when he landed home to a foreign country.
@tirebiter73 Yup. So many things in fiction are written that way because it works really well in fiction, not because that's how reality works.
@tirebiter73 I took my most observant friend to see that movie, curious if she would figure it out, and it was right after he met the kid, took her all of a minute. I have to keep my mouth shut when watching shows because I'm good at figuring it out myself, but she made my jaw drop.
@tippitiwichet late Wife was a real mystery fan. When we'd go to movies, we'd try to be first to figure out who the murderer or twist to the story was. The kids used to get mad at us when we watched movies at home. When I figured out that Bruce Willis was dead in that movie The 6th Sense, it blew her mind. My greatest feat.