(It occurred to me after about the third time I'd issued that indirect poke that I had very possibly asked for a larger and more complicated favor than I'd really meant to, or should have done in quite that fashion. Suffice to say that I am fairly sure I now owe you a batch of cookies, socially-distant-enabled delivery issues to be addressed later. First I need to have a look at the baking-ingredient shelf.)
Meanwhile: This is why I was never a math major; you do a good job of covering the issues for us mortals, but you've clearly got a better grasp of some of the larger issues than I did. [I remain curious as to how or whether a test like this could be used to compare a half dozen known pastiches to Holmesian canon for "consistency of Watsonian style", but that's clearly a different proposition than the authorship question Allen raises.]
OTOH, this was more or less what I both hoped and expected to hear: namely, that there is at least some merit in the underlying science but that there's room to argue about the specific implementation in the present example. Given that Allen's complete case for Louise as Holmes' creator rests on several factors beyond the stylometrics, my overall reaction to Shadow Woman remains more or less intact: the author makes a serious case but not a fully proven one, and the issue is one that very much should merit further investigation.
What worries me a little, in that context, is that there's not been much activity on the authorial Web site in quite some time, when he'd mentioned plans for several more novels in his series about Louise (I now need to go scoop up the one of those that's actually online). I caught a mention of his wife's LinkedIn profile in passing during one of my Google runs in the course of this adventure, but a two-year literary silence is...concerning.
That said, I think I may drop a note to the Left Coast Sherlock folks, because if John Allen is still available and interested, I would very much like to watch a (virtual) roomful of open-minded Sherlockians react to this theory....
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Because you asked...
Date: 2020-07-26 08:12 am (UTC)(It occurred to me after about the third time I'd issued that indirect poke that I had very possibly asked for a larger and more complicated favor than I'd really meant to, or should have done in quite that fashion. Suffice to say that I am fairly sure I now owe you a batch of cookies, socially-distant-enabled delivery issues to be addressed later. First I need to have a look at the baking-ingredient shelf.)
Meanwhile: This is why I was never a math major; you do a good job of covering the issues for us mortals, but you've clearly got a better grasp of some of the larger issues than I did. [I remain curious as to how or whether a test like this could be used to compare a half dozen known pastiches to Holmesian canon for "consistency of Watsonian style", but that's clearly a different proposition than the authorship question Allen raises.]
OTOH, this was more or less what I both hoped and expected to hear: namely, that there is at least some merit in the underlying science but that there's room to argue about the specific implementation in the present example. Given that Allen's complete case for Louise as Holmes' creator rests on several factors beyond the stylometrics, my overall reaction to Shadow Woman remains more or less intact: the author makes a serious case but not a fully proven one, and the issue is one that very much should merit further investigation.
What worries me a little, in that context, is that there's not been much activity on the authorial Web site in quite some time, when he'd mentioned plans for several more novels in his series about Louise (I now need to go scoop up the one of those that's actually online). I caught a mention of his wife's LinkedIn profile in passing during one of my Google runs in the course of this adventure, but a two-year literary silence is...concerning.
That said, I think I may drop a note to the Left Coast Sherlock folks, because if John Allen is still available and interested, I would very much like to watch a (virtual) roomful of open-minded Sherlockians react to this theory....