In A Study in Scarlet a man was killed in an unoccupied house. In the room in which the body was found there were five letters written in blood on the wall:
Rache
In this case we have a clue that is hard for anyone to miss. Of course, what it means is quite a different matter.
But not all clues jump out at us in this fashion. In cracking the Dancing Men Cipher, to find out which Dancing Man stands for the letter E Sherlock Holmes had to do a little statistical analysis.
The elliptical orbits of the planets around the sun was an important clue for Newton. It took astronomers centuries to extract this particular clue from the large body of observational data that had been collected. Part of the reason for this, as we all know, was that for the longest time they thought the data supported the view that the planets moved in circles around the earth.
Sometimes a clue is in open view and yet not noticed. Sherlock Holmes's professional colleagues from Scotland Yard often miss clues that Sherlock Holmes detects. The same clues are there for everybody to see but because they don't have the same background knowledge as Sherlock Holmes, they don't notice them. Sherlock Holmes can estimate the height of a person from the footprints that person leaves behind. Other detectives, not knowing there is a relation between a person's stride and that person's height, pay no attention to footprints.
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