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conclusion.
     Thus all the solutions to Holmes’s cases are open to suspicion.
    Besides the cases left uncertain by Holmes’s mistakes, there are also a certain number that remain simply unsolved, either
     partially or completely. Far from embracing an unequivocal solution, they leave open multiple hypotheses. They are un-decidable.
     At the end of “The Musgrave Ritual,” for instance, Holmes acknowledges that one important detail will never be able to be
     clarified. Likewise, at the end of “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” the detectives turn out to be incapable of explaining
     an essential clue; in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” doubt persists about who fired the gun; and in “The Adventure of
     the Six Napoleons,” the method by which a thief came into possession of the jewel remains obscure.
    In other texts, undecidability does not afflict one detail or another of Holmes’s hypothesis; instead, the hypothesis itself,
     satisfying as it may be, fails to preclude the coexistence of alternative explanations. In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,”
     Holmes himself points out that half a dozen theories would fit the facts. In “The Adventure of Black Peter,” similarly, he
     studies several different hypotheses, toying with them happily before settling on one. *

    There is actually nothing surprising about the uncertainty of Holmes’s solutions. In fact, the famous detective’s method contains
     within it three basic elements that, taken together, open up the range of possible conclusions much more broadly than the
     detective allows.
    The first of these is the way the clues are collected. In the Holmes method, clues are not indisputably obvious things on
     which the deductive process is exercised after the fact; rather, they arise largely through an act of creation. For there
     to be a clue, there must first occur a selection within the infinite field of potential clues that a given scene presents.
     Clues present themselves only after a twofold process of choice and nomination.
    A clear example is the main “clue” that Dr. Mortimer brings Holmes during their first meeting: the footprints of a giant hound,
     a bit of evidence neglected by the police.
    I confess at these words a shudder passed through me. There was a thrill in the doctor’s voice which showed that he was himself
     deeply moved by that which he told us. Holmes leaned forward in his excitement and his eyes had the hard, dry glitter which
     shot from them when he was keenly interested.
      “You saw this?”
      “As clearly as I see you.”
      “And you said nothing?”
      “What was the use?”
      “How was it that no one else saw it?”
      “The marks were some twenty yards from the body and no one gave them a thought. I don’t suppose I should have done so had
     I not known this legend.” 28
    The investigators did indeed see the dog’s footprints, but paid them no mind. What constitutes a clue for one person may be
     meaningless to another. And a clue is named as such only when it serves as part of a more general story—of an overall construct
     at the disposal of the person who has decided to grant it the status of a clue.
    If a clue is a choice, it follows that a number of elements of the book’s reality must form “virtual clues,” ones that the
     chosen hypothesis ignores. Thus we can suppose that the investigators ignored a multitude of signs that could have become
     clues but that do not figure in the text, since they weren’t transmitted by Dr. Mortimer. What’s more, even confining ourselves
     to the signs we know about,we’ll see that the text delivers a whole series of signs that are not officially granted the status
     of clues—and whose correct interpretation can significantly change the overall solution.

    When a clue is a matter of choice, it is also a matter of interpretation; hence the plurality of possible meanings. The second
     flaw in the Holmes method stems from the