Holmes: The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted

/ Alex Good

The backstory here is more interesting than the case itself. Arthur Whitaker was a contemporary of Conan Doyle’s who sent the (typewritten) manuscript of the story to Doyle in 1911 to be published as a collaboration between the two authors. Doyle apparently sat on it and it stayed in a chest of family documents until 1948, when Doyle’s son Adrian agreed to have it published and credited as having been written by Doyle. Whitaker, however, was still alive and after threatening legal action was acknowledged as the sole author.

There’s a whole science of stylometrics that looks to be able to identify authors through a close analysis of patterns in their writing. In what is probably the most best-known example, scholars lean on it heavily when it comes to identifying what parts of other, non-canonical plays Shakespeare might have had a hand in writing. As it turned out, Whitaker had kept a carbon copy of the manuscript for this story that made his case, but without that I wonder how many people would have felt that this wasn’t the real deal. It didn’t feel authentic to me, but that was only a very subtle sense I had on a first reading. “Proving” it wasn’t written by Doyle would involve a lot more work.

This introduces a more contemporary issue. What if you wanted a pastiche of a Holmes story and gave the task to an AI, asking it to write it in the style of Doyle? Presumably the program would be able to pass a stylometric test. And given the pedestrian nature of the plot here (hinted at in the bland title) I doubt the AI could do much worse. The mystery itself is mostly solved off-stage, when Holmes has managed to ditch Watson. That’s a device employed often enough by Doyle, so the results apparently satisfied most fans, who weren’t too disappointed. And they’d been the ones clamoring for the story’s publication in the first place. But you have to wonder. If AI is going to take over anywhere it’s going to be in the writing of formulaic genre fiction with an established voice, and that’s the Holmes canon to a T. So watch this space.

Holmes index

15 thoughts on “Holmes: The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted”

  2. I have a bad feeling a lot of books coming down the pipeline will be complete and utter derivative garbage with not on spark of originality and whats more, that most people will be fine with that.

    I never thought I’d see this day, when books, the sanctum sanctorum of humanities mental genius, was turned into a soft serve vanilla icecream place 😦

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  3. “Our multi-phase workflow explores the capabilities of 15 Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract, synthesize, and validate distinctive investigative traits of fictional detectives. This approach was tested on a diverse set of seven iconic detectives – Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, William Murdoch, Columbo, Father Brown, Miss Marple, and Auguste Dupin – capturing the distinctive investigative styles that define each character. The identified traits were validated against existing literary analyses and further tested in a reverse identification phase, achieving an overall accuracy of 91.43%, demonstrating the method’s effectiveness in capturing the distinctive investigative approaches of each detective. This work contributes to the broader field of computational narratology by providing a scalable framework for character analysis, with potential applications in AI-driven interactive storytelling and automated narrative generation.” – from Characterizing the Investigative Methods of Fictional Detectives with Large Language Models

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