Silver Blaze is considered one of the greatest examples of Sherlock Holmes' power of deduction;Do you agree and why?

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English Coursework:Silver Blaze is considered one of the greatest examples of Sherlock Holmes’ power of deduction;Do you agree and why?

In Silver Blaze, the crime/mystery is the murder of the horse trainer John Straker and the theft of the prize wining horse, Silver Blaze.Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr.Watson are called in to investigate the case. His methods may appear extraordinary to others but to Sherlock Holmes himself they are very simple.

Silver Blaze is regarded as one of Sherlock Holmes’ greatest demonstrations of his powers of deduction by the amount of information he gathers through simple actions that would be uninterpretable to others.

   The first hint that this story is going to be based purely around Sherlock Holmes’ powers of deduction is the paragraph early on in the story when Holmes and Watson are travelling down to Dartmoor on the train. Holmes says “That it one of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of the details than for the acquiring of fresh evidence.”  This intimates that the mystery will be solved purely by the exercise of deduction rather than by finding the missing piece of the jigsaw.

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Also during the scene on the train Holmes gives us a display of his incredible dedutive powers and great intellect, thus hinting that this mystery will indeed be solved by powers of deduction alone.

“Our rate at present is fifty three and a half miles an hour.” “I have not observed the quarter-mile posts,” said I. “Nor have I but the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards apart, and the calculation is a simple one.

The main clues that add up to the final conclusion at the end of the story seem to be almost completely irrelevant at ...

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