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2.2 Worldview of the detective

One of the world’s most popular forms of fiction is the detective novel , particularly the murder mystery. There are all kinds of detectives found in this genre . There are police professionals, private detectives, and avocational dabblers in detection. There are modern detectives and detectives from historical settings, all the way back to ancient Rome. Literary critics believe that the appeal of the murder mystery is the combination of the clear delineation of right and wrong and the intellectual challenge of identifying a villain.

What does all of this have to do with finding software defects? We can make an analogy between the murder mystery and the search for a software defect. The defect is considered a crime, and the programmer is the detective. A detective who wants to solve a crime needs answers to the following questions:

Who did it?
How did the culprit do it?
When did the culprit do it?
Why did the culprit do it?

Here, we’re interested in observing the thought processes and methodologies of these literary detectives.

2.3 Detective fiction

Most famous detective fiction is useless for the purpose of understanding ways to debug software. The world’s most popular writer of detective fiction is Agatha Christie. She wrote dozens of highly entertaining novels and dozens more short stories as well.

Her characters , however, aren’t helpful in teaching us about the process of detecting. Miss Marple is an acute observer of human behavior and a cunning eavesdropper, but her methods of mental association are baffling. Hercule Poirot is always talking about how he uses “the little gray cells ” to solve crimes, but he never tells us how those gray cells operate .

Other writers of detective fiction pose similar problems. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett wrote beautiful prose , but their detectives find the villain mostly by beating up and shooting people. While some may find this entertaining, few will find it educational. To find wisdom for debugging software, we focus on two erudite fictional detectives. These two detectives not only solve baffling mysteries, but they also often explain how they do it in the process.

2.4 The character of Sherlock Holmes

We begin our study of the way of the detective by investigating the career and philosophies of the greatest of all detectives in literature, Sherlock Holmes.

2.4.1 The life of Sherlock Holmes

Let’s start by considering what we know about Sherlock Holmes the character. He was born in January 1854 and entered Oxford or Cambridge in 1872. He moved to London to start a career as the world’s first consulting detective in 1877. He shared a suite of rooms with Dr. John Watson, who had retired from the army, starting in 1881. Holmes was believed to have died in a fight with his archenemy, Dr. Moriarity, in 1891. After three years in seclusion, he returned to detection in 1894. He finally retired to farming in 1903. All of these facts can be gleaned from reading the Holmes corpus or consulting any of several Holmes encyclopedias.

2.4.2 The literature about Sherlock Holmes

What books do we use as sources in understanding the methods of Sherlock Holmes? The following books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle document his cases:

A Study in Scarlet —1888
The Sign of the Four —1890
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes —1892—anthology
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes —1893—anthology
The Hound of the Baskervilles —1902
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The Return of Sherlock Holmes —1905—anthology
The Valley of Fear —1915
His Last Bow —1917—anthology
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes —1927—anthology

The books noted as anthologies contain a total of fifty-six short stories. The other works are complete novels . If you want a scholarly edition of these works, complete with explanatory notes, you will appreciate the nine-volume edition The Oxford Sherlock Holmes .

Jeremy Brett starred in the definitive video rendition of many of Holmes’s adventures. They originally aired in the United Kingdom and subsequently in the United States on PBS’s Mystery! series and later on the A&E cable network. They are available on videocassette.

2.4.3 The author behind Sherlock Holmes

It is just as important to consider the life of Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. He received a Jesuit education from 1868 to 1876. He attended medical school in Edinburgh from 1877 to 1880. Doyle served as a ship’s surgeon from 1880 to 1882. After that, he started a medical practice in Southern England. He married Louise Hawkins in 1885. She died several years later, and in 1907 he married Jean Leckie. Doyle served as a volunteer doctor in the Boer War in South Africa from 1900 to 1903, and he died in 1930. Besides his Holmes stories, he wrote twenty-four other books of fiction and ten other books of military history, medical studies, and other nonfiction.

There are a couple of important points to observe about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was an educated man, he was a man of science, and he was an historian . In these respects, the detective that he created was made in his own image.