Holy Clues : The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes [Hardcover]

Stephen Kendrick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 1999

An unlikely yet utterly engaging new take on Sherlock Holmes: as a spiritual guide and master of a Zen-like approach to observation who can provide insight for the modern, skeptical searcher.

Taking inspiration from Holmes's comment to Dr. Watson-- "You see but you do not observe"--Stephen Kendrick examines the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle for the religious and metaphysical lessons they offer. He maintains that detective fiction can be read as religious parable, and that the methods of investigation--particularly that of careful observation, what Buddhism calls "Bare Attention"--used in solving crime are the same methods that yield religious insight when applied to the world and the human heart. the lessons of detection--nothing is insignificant, notice what you see, the bizarre is not always mysterious, never presume anything--are also instructions in how to become attuned to the mystery of life and God.

Wide-ranging and eclectic in its approach, this is a perceptive and entertaining look at a cultural icon, at the most profound issues of life and death, and at what one has to teach us about the other.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Perhaps we are drawn to detective stories because they represent our hunger to solve the ultimate spiritual mysteries of humankind. "After all, if the sleuth can discover the darkest and most guarded and protected stories within the human heart, can that of God's inscrutable will be far behind?" suggests parish minister and author Stephen Kendrick. In this ambitious yet highly successful book, author Kendrick explains how Sherlock Holmes's crime-solving methods of attention and observation can indeed help us solve and understand our own spiritual mysteries.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer who created Sherlock Holmes, certainly appreciated these parallels. Doyle himself had a strong interest in metaphysical and spiritual studies and inserted many of these references into his stories. Kendrick catches them all--from Holmes's Zen-Buddhist gleanings to the detective's painful bouts of soul-doubting despair. Kendrick also shows how Holmes's five basic detective principles can be applied to spiritual sleuthing: nothing is irrelevant; notice what we see; beware the deceptiveness of the ordinary; the bizarre is not necessarily the mysterious; and never presume anything. With his insightful and engaging writing style, Kendrick will gratify mystery fans and mystics alike. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly

Arthur Conan Doyle's inimitable detective Sherlock Holmes once remarked to his erstwhile assistant, Dr. Watson, "you see, but you do not observe." Kendrick, the parish minister of the Universalist Church of West Hartford, Conn., contends that Holmes's remark functions much like a Zen koan, generating insights into the realm beyond reason. Kendrick engages in a close reading of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories to demonstrate that detective fiction erects a method of discovering truth that requires much of the same engagement that various religions require to discover spiritual insight. Holmes's inquisitiveness and his attention to the details of the case resemble, the author says, what Buddhism calls "bare attention." Following his analysis of the Holmesian "gospel," Kendrick comes to several conclusions: "Our vision is sound; we have to train our hearts and minds to notice what we see"; "Nothing is little; our lives are more significant than we can know; it is often through our pain and guilt that we encounter the hidden God"; "Religion is found not only in the spectacular but in the simple, the ordinary, the plain and everyday, and all this is aglow with the mystery of awe." Kendrick's lively readings of the Sherlock Holmes stories combine a deep sense of how attentiveness to the details of ordinary life can yield extraordinary insights into the life of the spirit. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (May 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375403663
• ISBN-13: 978-0375403668
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,416,259 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Charming, delightful, and very wise, November 27, 1999

By A Customer

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This review is from: Holy Clues : The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars See and observe, August 21, 1999

By 

Travis Bradburn - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holy Clues : The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes (Hardcover)

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!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Key to the Mysteries, July 19, 2005

By 

John T. Farrell (Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes (Vintage) (Paperback)

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."