Beginning in December of 1892 and continuing monthly into the following year, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published short stories in The Strand Magazine featuring Sherlock Holmes, his wildly popular detective character. Already a smashing commercial success, Doyle’s spellbinding tales of detective work highlighted Holmes’ capacity for lateral thinking, pattern matching, deductive reasoning, and inversion.

     The first of these stories, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” tells the tale of a missing racehorse and the murder of its trainer, John Straker, on the eve of an important race. Suspicion initially falls on a bookmaker, but Holmes systematically rules him out as the culprit through careful evaluation of the evidence. The case turns instead on the type of observation that made the Holmes character so popular: While interviewing numerous witnesses, Holmes finds it curious that none mentioned hearing the guard dog bark when the murder allegedly went down, something it surely would have done had a stranger committed the crime. This narrows the suspect list significantly, and the story takes several unexpected twists from there.

     That the absence of evidence is itself a form of evidence was popularized by that story, and the phrase “dog that didn’t bark” remains firmly entrenched in the Western lexicon more than 130 years later, a testament to the power of literature to influence culture.