Sherlock Holmes and the Art of Noticing
There is something rather dangerous about Sherlock Holmes.
Not the revolver, the disguises, or even the occasional tendency to be spectacularly irritating.
It’s the noticing.
A footprint that doesn’t quite belong. A thread caught on a sleeve. A word that seems unimportant until, suddenly, it isn’t.
Holmes understood something that writers eventually learn too: the interesting things are often hiding in plain sight.
Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to him – and why Louise Greenwood owes him more than she’d ever admit.
She’d deny the comparison, of course. Too pleased with himself, she’d say. But strip away the coat and the confidence and what’s left is the same discipline: watch longer than is comfortable, and trust the detail nobody else thought worth mentioning.
It’s a harder trick than it sounds. Most people walk past a thousand small wrongnesses a day and call it not noticing. Louise calls it a choice – to keep looking after everyone else has decided they’ve seen enough. A door that’s been locked from the wrong side. A silence that goes on half a beat too long. The kind of detail that only means something once you already suspect the story you’re being told isn’t the whole one.
In York, where every stone seems to have a story, there’s no shortage of things to notice.
The trick – hers, and mine – is knowing which ones matter.
— Tessa
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