Customer Reviews

Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes (Vintage)

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I found this book a very pleasant surprise. Sherlock Holmes on religion? Surely this could not be a serious book. Then I read a paragraph at random and was fascinated--and immediately bought a copy. Of course Stephen Kendrick edits his quotes from Holmes to show the detective's nobler sentiments; there is none of the negativity here (no reference to drugs or other evidence of the character's darker nature.) The book is very inspirational and is a real pleasure to read. I feel that there is no coincidence that early religious plays were called "Mystery Plays"--Mr. Kendrick argues that we are all detectives investigating the greatest mystery of all.

One should also remember that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was committed to the Spiritualist cause at about the same time he started writing the Holmes stories, and these tales paid for and possibly helped propagandize his own religious views. Kendrick has simply uncovered the message that Doyle wrote in the stories a hundred years ago. He has done a very capable job.

Stephen Kendrick has done a wonderful job. Holmes has always been fascinating to me. When I discovered a book that mixed one of my childhood heroes with the greatest mystery, I had to buy the book. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Sherlock Holmes or life's questions. In our information rich lives it is very easy to see and not observe. Kendrick reminds us that the true answers can be found in the smallest things. Buy the book!

Who better than a Unitarian clergyman to explore the spiritual values embedded in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes, the archetype of the coolly detached and relentlessly rational detective? Taking as his premise that detective stories should be read as modern mystery plays, the Reverend Stephen Kendrick argues that the sixty Holmes stories and novels are rooted in medieval fabliau, dealing with taboo subjects in a more human way than Scripture and liturgy with their overtly sacred subjects and explicit demarcation of good and evil. Drawing on the rationalistic and eclectic methods of his own religious tradition, Kendrick attempts to delineate the roots of Holmes' spirituality and finds them in Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, especially in its Zen expression.

His conclusions are threefold: First, he argues that Holmes' attention to detail, a key component of his character, is linked both to the Christian spiritual practice of attentiveness and the Zen practice of bare attention - seeing things as they exactly are. And both of these are inexorably linked to the pursuit of truth, the ultimate concern of all religion. Second, although to Holmes the skeptic God may often be comprehended only as a shadow, central to the stories is one clear and unambiguous aspect of the divine reality, a God of justice who rules a creation where right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness are understood in all clarity and truth. And third, Holmes the scientist proves himself again and again to be a person of vision, able to see "all united" in much the same way Christian mystics from Julian of Norwich to Matthew Fox have discerned the interconnectivity of all things and all people.

While no one would ever mistake Holmes the "thinking machine" as a man of religious sentiment, Kendrick proves quite satisfactorily that in Sherlock Holmes we can find a man with a great heart for whom religion was found in the details; for whom science taught that the more we know, the more we appreciate the mystery of creation; and for whom mercy and forgiveness were part and parcel of judgment and justice. After all, it was Sherlock Holmes who observed to Watson that "our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.... [a] rose is extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."

This little book is one of the most insightful books I have ever read. It makes a very convincing argument that Sherlock Holmes had a great understanding of the human spirit, and as a detective, brought both justice and mercy to bear in his cases. The author knows his Holmes literature very well and also pulls in a great deal of other literature from the mystery genre in a way that provokes a great deal of curiousity. I found myself reading and rereading a lot of mystery fiction after finishing this book.

This book will give you many insights into both Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle, along with other mystery literature. I have read the book through several times, and it has really deepened my appreciation of mystery literature and Holmes in general. I would put it into the "desert island" category of books.

I can hardly express the delight I felt in reading this book! It was a fresh, new take on Sherlock Holmes and smoothly connected it with religion, a tough feat. I sincerely recommend this to everyone even remotely interested in Holmes or religion. Sherlockians will surely take this endearing book to heart!

Stephen Kendrick has taken a lifelong fascination with Sherlock Holmes and illuminated it with a grounding in spirituality. We are guided through mystery and religious teaching to really see the world, appreciate simplicity, honor science and spirituality as partners, not enemies, and to look inside ourselves for that still small voice that is God. Moving deftly through the series of Sherlock Holmes novels, Kendrick leads us to see how this character embodies our desire for justice, judgment and for mercy and foregiveness in our World. I've been a mystery fan since I was 10 years old and read Harriet the Spy. Now I know why it's a genre that's called to me. Justice and mercy.

This was an engaging, clever book. It tied religion and mystery together so well I wondered why I hadn't been thinking of them like that before! It definitely deserves 5 stars and I recommend it to EVERYBODY!

A very entertaining way of looking at the questions of life, using the Sherlockian Canon as your guide.