Eliminare l’impossibile: Darwin, Winwood Reade e l’adagio di Sherlock Holmes

Abstract

This essay looks at the origin and success of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous maxim: “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. Arthur Conan Doyle’s repeated use of the phrase in numerous Sherlock Holmes stories published between 1892 and 1927 shows that the author was fully aware of the rhetorical power of the expression. But what ended up as a motto for the detective’s methods of investigation was initially the expression of a Darwinian discourse in The Sign of Four, the novel in which the adage was first formulated.