Reading Sherlock Holmes at West Point

From a piece in the New Republic...

Many students do not rate their knowledge very highly; they divorce their private or extracurricular expertise from knowledge they acquire in a formal academic context. They don’t yet know how to value what they know, and they can’t imagine that what they know has anything to do with what I know, or with what they might discover while reading Shakespeare or Ovid or Thomas Hardy or Dashiell Hammett or any of the authors we might encounter in class. Moreover, divorcing mind and body, they often doubt the possibility of mastering both pen and sword.

A problem like this one, I realized not long ago, demands some special assistance. Thus, with all the earnest discretion of a Victorian lady in distress, I have appealed to none other than Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Although it involves no blackmail, missing persons, or stolen jewels, my case poses no difficulty: Holmes is nothing if not adaptable. Indeed, he is one of fiction’s most versatile figures. I’m referring not simply to his penchant for disguise but also to his remarkable afterlife in literature, television, and especially the movies: fighting Nazis in a series of films from the 1940s and, only last year, foiling a nineteenth-century plot involving a rather twenty-first-century weapon of mass destruction in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. In his review of Ritchie’s movie, New York Times critic A. O. Scott called Holmes “a proto-superhero, amenable to all kinds of elaboration and variation.”

Arthur Conan Doyle’s mastermind endures because, as he informs an astonished thief in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” “It is my business to know what other people don’t know.” And I’ve taken to visiting 221B Baker Street on the first day of class because I can’t think of anyone who leverages knowledge more effectively.