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Monday
Lacking the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein—files in which Trump’s name reportedly appears hundreds of times—the public is left with files released by the Epstein estate. Of the thousands of pages available, one containing a Sherlock Holmes reference is drawing particular attention. In 2011 Epstein emailed confederate Ghislaine Maxwell, “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [named redacted] spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief etc. im 75% there. ” To which Maxwell replied, “I have been thinking about that…”
The key tidbit here, of course, is that (according to Epstein) Trump spent hours with an underaged and trafficked girl. But what’s the significance of the Sherlock Holmes reference?
Let’s first look at the story. The non-barking dog appears in “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” (not The Hound of the Baskervilles), which is about horse trainer Straker attempting to hobble his own horse, who is a prohibitive favorite in an upcoming race. In desperate need of cash, Straker figures that if he subtly nicks one of Blaze’s tendons so that no one can see and then bets against him, he will replenish his coffers. He therefore drugs the stable boy, leads the horse outside, and attempts the deed. The horse, however, panics and kills him by kicking him in the head (although we don’t discover this until the end of the tale).
Holmes is puzzled that no one hears the dog barking when the horse is taken:
“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.
He goes on to explain:
Before deciding that question I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others. The Simpson incident had shown me that 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 midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.
Demonstrating a Trump-like ability to distract us from the original crime, Arthur Conan Doyle presents us with a further plot complication: the horse disappears. It turns out that the manager of an adjoining estate, who is also betting against Silver Blaze, discovers him wandering on the heath, leads him to his own stables, and disguises him by painting over his silver blaze. At this point an innocent bookmaker (Simpson), who is in the area checking on the horses, is accused of having killed Straker. Holmes finds the horse and gets him to the racetrack on time, where he comes in first.
We could wish for such a happy ending in our own Epstein affair but let’s figure what the pedophile meant in his email:
First of all, the dog that didn’t bark has become a common enough expression that Epstein wasn’t necessarily referring directly to the story. Even if he wasn’t, however, let’s apply it to the situation. Trump would be Straker, the crooked horse trainer alone with his intended victim. That no one has barked out his name—not his victim, not the police—is what confuses Epstein and Maxwell. It’s as though they are in the early part of the mystery, possessing a significant clue but aren’t yet clear what it means. Or rather, the mystery for them is not a whodunit since they already know that Straker is guilty. They just can’t figure out why the police are failing to finger the culprit.
Of course, they are far from the only people that Trump has baffled with his ability to avoid accountability. Ultimately, it’s going to take more than Sherlock Holmes to solve that conundrum. Holmes can make connections that everyone else misses, but what does a literary detective do with someone who crimes in the open and even boasts about it? Where’s the intricate plot solving that is key to the genre?
Given how Trump, in the most blatant ways possible, is signaling he wants the Epstein files to be buried, we need to shift to a different literary detective. The one I have in mind is one whom Holmes expresses contempt for. When Watson in their early days together compares Holmes to Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, Holmes rises, lights his pipe, and replies,
No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin. Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.
In “The Purloined Letter,” however, Dupin is able to solve a mystery whose solution is hiding in plain sight. After the police fail to locate a blackmail letter despite conducting an extraordinarily meticulous search of minister G___’s apartment, Dupin saunters in and finds it in the letter rack where it lies only slightly disguised. “Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,” Dupin observes to the police commissioner.
To invoke one final detective in this discussion, Erik Lönnrot in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass” is also befuddled by a mystery whose solution is staring him straight in the face. His criminal opponent, knowing how Lönnrot’s mind works, uses the detective’s preference for complex solutions to trap and kill him.
Before he dies, Lönnrot says, “I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too.” He is referring to Zeno’s paradox, but the straight line applies only too well to Donald Trump.
For decades there has been a straight line between Trump and Epstein, just as there has been a straight line between Trump and the January 6 coup attempt, a straight line between Trump and extortion, a straight line between Trump and money laundering, a straight line between Trump and bribery, a straight line between Trump and sexual assault, a straight line between Trump and countless other crimes. That single straight line has befuddled newspaper reporters and political opponents alike.
Understanding how Trump has evaded prison each and every time requires a different kind of mind than that possessed by Doyle’s famous detective.
