Silver Blaze hadn’t been missing for long when Inspector Gregory and Colonel Ross identified the stranger who had sneaked into the stable and stolen the prize racehorse. But as usual, Sherlock Holmes was one step ahead of the police. The colonel turned to the great detective:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”


That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

It seems that a dog lived in the stable, that both the stable hands had slept through the theft, and that these two facts had allowed Holmes to make one of his indubitably shrewd deductions. As he later explained;

“I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog ….. A dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though some one had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously, the mid-night visitor was some one whom the dog knew well.”

Although the inspector and the colonel were aware of what had happened, only Holmes was aware of what hadn’t happened: The dog hadn’t barked, which meant that the thief was not the stranger whom the police had identified. By paying careful attention to the absence of an event, Sherlock Holmes further distinguished himself from the rest of humankind. As we are about to see, when the rest of humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed – and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize. ~ Page 96/97