[tetris11]

It just sits a bit bitter when you used to look at him as an unconventional man who employed the scientific process of deduction to solve his cases.... only for you to later realise that he was applying abductive reasoning the whole time, whilst claiming otherwise and chasing down any lead like a mad dog. Holmes wasn't smart, just driven.

[krapp]

That's one of the problems with mystery writing - the protagonist can never be smarter than the author. The books can say Sherlock Holmes is a genius polymath intellect with brilliant deductive capabilities but he was written by a guy who believed the Cottingley Fairies were real, so...

[weeblewobble]

Holmes does use a scientific process. He forms hypotheses and tests them, and when they are proven wrong he synthesizes the new information and then repeats until he solves the case.

[emodendroket]

Wasn’t the whole concept of detective work fairly new when the books were being written? The earliest Holmes stories are quite indebted to Poe’s work with C. Auguste Dupin and he invented the form.