Op-Ed: Speaker Packard’s Sherlock Holmes Dog in the Night Problem

As I was reviewing what we know of the timeline of the Merner Affair and the Speaker’s improbable version of events, an admonition from Sherlock Holmes came to mind – the absence of an event can be as important as the occurrence of one. Investigating the theft of a racehorse in a story titled “Silver Blaze,” the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes notes “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”