Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Asimov

[Bick]

This may be a well-worn furrow, I'm not sure, but it was an interesting aside I came across yesterday and so I thought I would share. It may be new to some. I was reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Sign of Four" last night and came across the following text, in comments made by Holmes to Watson:

"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician".

Sound familiar? Asimov, we know, loved murder mysteries more than any other literature, and he must have read his Doyle. This must have been the seed for the Foundation stories, I think. Perhaps this is well known, but it was a new idea for me.

Something else occurred to me while I was looking at connections between the two authors: perhaps the most famous short story of Doyle's, in which Holmes dies, is "The Final Problem". Asimov's own favourite short story was "The Final Question". This may be pure coincidence, however.

Winwood Reade sounds fascinating incidentally - anyone read him?

 

[steve12553]

As well read as Isaac Asimov was purported to be, I suspect when he read Conan Doyle he already knew who Winwood Reade was. He also, like every other thinker before him, built on the ideas of his predacessors.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Asimov was very much a Sherlockian. He wrote an article for the Baker Street Irregulars in which he "deduced" what the subject matter of Moriarty's famous article "On the Dynamics of an Asteroid" must have been. (Asimov theorizes that it was an article which dealt with a method of destroying a planet.)

 

[J-Sun]

That's very true and I hate to be otherwise contrary but I remember being struck by Asimov's section on the Baker Street Irregulars (Holmes fan club) in I. Asimov and... well, I'll let him speak for himself - but keep in mind that this is by-the-by and not an attack piece on Doyle/Holmes but a discussion of the club. (I have no idea if his comments are accurate or not - if I've actually read any Holmes stories, I don't recall - though I intend to give them a try.)

Conan Doyle was a slapdash and sloppy writer.... the stories are loaded with contradictions among themselves.... [When proposed for membership in the club by a well-meaning associate in 1973 and being required to submit a paper on Holmes] I couldn't do it because I didn't know the Holmes stories well enough and had no intention of doing the necessary research. The requirement was apparently waived in my case.... I am not really a Holmes enthusiast.... I wrote (by request) a critique of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Five Orange Pips" and pointed out the gaping holes in its logic, which led me to think Conan Doyle had written it while asleep.

It's not that Asimov generally avoids bluntness or anything but it just doesn't seem to come up much so I was probably struck by the negativity here. But, as I say, this is in the context of being a part of the BSI - Asimov loved clubs and being a part of social things and did end up being more involved in Holmesian things if only to give toasts and write things and so on. He seems to have enjoyed the BSI quite a bit, except for their smoking in honor of Holmes, to which Asimov asked why they didn't also do cocaine. (Asimov being famously abstemious.) Eventually, though, after certain folks died, he stopped attending. The next section is on the Gilbert and Sullivan Society and he was crazy about Gilbert and Sullivan.