"He created a kind of brilliant fantasy, which still holds us in its
thrall. The fantasy is that a) a crime is solvable and b) it is
solvable by intellectual deduction. The fantasy is that if a man--given
three small clues--can sit in a room on Baker Street with merely the
help of his violin and a syringe full of cocaine, he can solve any
heinous crime."--Julian Barnes on why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock
Holmes stories are still popular, in yesterday's New York Times Magazine.
