"53.5?"

As a student of the methods of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one tends to look at Holmes as the ideal reasoner a bit too exclusively at times. Holmes was as ideal a reasoner as we are apt to find. His deductions are skillful, his experiments innovative, and it is easy to admire him as such. The trouble comes when we forget that was not all he was.

Had Holmes been only the ideal reasoner, the great scientific detective, his fame might never have hit the high mark it did. There was another part of him, one just as pronounced as his coldly logical side, that was also crucial to his popularity -- his love of the dramatic. Dressing up his brainwork with a touch of the theatrical, he seems to love setting the stage for his final flourish as much as he loves the detective work itself.

Every now and then, I think, we forget to consider Holmes's showboat side. I was reminded of that this week halfway through reading Travels by Michael Crichton.

In Travels, Crichton has gathered a series of essays on his life and travels that is not entirely without some interest to the Sherlockian. In the chapter "London Psychics," Crichton spends some time talking about Conan Doyle and spiritualism, as he tends to identify with Doyle a bit. And there are a few comparisons to be made: both are authors whose medical training influenced their writing, and both became interested in matters beyond science.

But the chapter I found of most interest was "Ireland," in which Crichton spins a few anecdotes of his time directing The Great Train Robbery in that country. one tale in particular especially caught my Sherlockian eye.

As would be expected in the filming of The Great Train Robbery, a lot of time was spent on a train. Sean Connery, the star of the movie, was doing his own stunts, which meant spending much time running around on top of the moving train.

The train was moving at a relatively safe speed of 35 miles per hour, but at one point in the filming, Connery came down from the top of the train extremely agitated.

"It's bloody dangerous up there!" he told Crichton. "This bloody train is not going bloody thirty-five miles an hour!”

Crichton told him, no, the train was going thirty-five, and a walkie-talkie call to the locomotive confirmed that. The train was going thirty-five. Connery was unconvinced. He grabbed the walkie-talkie from Crichton and called up to the engine.

"How do you know it was thirty-five miles per hour?"

"We count telegraph poles," came the reply. The engine was an actual 1863 model, and had no speed gauge.

The helicopter that was filming the whole scene did, however, have a speedometer. Crichton called the helicopter and asked its crew how fast the train was going in the last shot.

"Fifty-five miles an hour," the copter crew answered. "We thought Mr. Connery was bloody crazy to be up there."

Does this little story remind anybody of "Silver Blaze?"

If it doesn't, shame on you. The scene in the opening of that story, in which Holmes calculates the speed of the train he and Watson are riding in, is one Sherlockian scholars have been puzzling over for decades.

"Our rate at present is fifty-three and a half miles an hour," says Holmes.

"I have not observed the quarter mile posts," Watson replies.

"Nor have I," returns Holmes. "But the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards apart, and the calculation is a simple one." Holmes then changes the subject.

We have no way of knowing whether or not Holmes's accuracy was any better than that of the engineer on Crichton's train, and I think Holmes liked it that way. If the calculation was so simple, why not explain it like he did his usual simple deductions? Maybe because it was more of an artistic flourish than a real scientific calculation. For shame, Holmes.

(This column appeared in the May 1992 issue of Plugs & Dottles.)