Conan Doyle is particularly fascinating because we know, through his writing, that he was perfectly aware of the laws of logical deduction. Indeed, he started to dabble in spiritualism at the same time that he first created Sherlock Holmes:4 he was dreaming up literature’s greatest scientific mind during the day, but failed to apply those skills of deduction at night. If anything, his intelligence seems to have only allowed him to come up with increasingly creative arguments to dismiss the sceptics and justify his beliefs; he was bound more tightly than Houdini in his chains.
