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Conned Again, Watson! Cautionary tales of logic, math, and probability,
by Colin Bruce, Perseus, £19.50, ISBN 0738203459

NEED a painless lesson in law? Just dip into a John Grisham thriller. And you
can hone your knowledge of history by curling up with a hefty novel by James
Michener. But can we mine fiction for the facts on maths?

Any writer wanting to pull off that trick faces a challenge: maths just
doesn’t form part of the fabric of everyday life in the way history and law do.
But that’s not to say that the discipline is irrelevant. As any mathematician
will tell you, it lies behind most things in modern society. But, as I’ve found,
it’s practically impossible to make the connection clear without resorting to a
mini-lecture.

Accepting this, a writer’s only obvious strategy is to find a hero who can
deliver a mathematics lesson, or even a lecture, without killing the reader’s
enthusiasm. And who better for the task than Sherlock Holmes? After all, he’s
always explaining everything, at length, to Dr Watson.

In Conned Again, Watson!, Colin Bruce creates scenarios in which
Holmes can pontificate on topics in quantitative, statistical and logical
literacy. He manages to capture Conan Doyle’s style successfully.

But the enterprise doesn’t quite work as a whole. Although I admire Bruce’s
style and think the idea behind these stories is superb, they’re far too thin,
and all too obviously math lessons in disguise. This means, I fear, that it will
appeal only to readers looking for dressed-up maths.