Chapter 4: Holmes's Notebook and the Circled Name

The first morning, Watson made a list.

It was not a method Holmes would have recognised — or rather, Holmes would have recognised it and said nothing, which was the closest he came to tact. Watson had watched him work for twenty years and understood, in the abstract, the shape of the process: the gathering, the cross-referencing, the moment of ignition when accumulated detail became sudden pattern. What he had not understood, until now, was how much of that process had been rendered invisible by the speed at which Holmes performed it. The thinking had happened somewhere Watson could not follow. What remained visible was only the conclusion, delivered with the timing of a stage conjuror and approximately the same consideration for his audience's comprehension.

Watson could not work that way. He was not built for it. So he made a list.