The Dynamics of an Asteroid

A book whose only reported quality is that it cannot be talked about by the people qualified to talk about it. That is not a plot. That is a calling card.

Doyle needs Moriarty, in a hurry, to be Holmes’s equal. He does not have a chapter to spend on a criminal’s interior. He has a title. The Dynamics of an Asteroid does the work that a later writer would waste on childhood trauma and a wall of equations: it says, this man thinks at an altitude where the rest of the profession cannot even enter a disagreement. The binomial theorem got him the chair. The asteroid is what he did with the chair.

We will never read it, and Holmes has no interest in reading it. The book exists to be cited in a drawing room, once, as you would cite a weapon. Among the thin entries in this library it is one of the ones that should stay thin. Filling it in would be missing the point, which is that some books are more eloquent as a rumour of difficulty than as a difficulty.

On the readability rating. A title, an author, a reputation, and Holmes’s sentence. No extract. The scientific press, as reported, could not have supplied one either.