Columns | June 11, 2012 23:06  The perfect detective story  The
Sherlockian on Sardinia  I am spending many an evening of my
summer holiday on the beautiful island Sardinia, Italy, re-
reading detective stories I devoured as a teenager (Sherlock
Holmes and Father Brown, mostly) and not thinking a lot about
chess.  Because I didn't have internet access for some days, I
even missed the rapid climax of the Word Championship match in
Moscow – this hadn't happened to me since 1986. But whilst
missing out on the exciting grand finale, I often felt,
especially during some of G.K. Chesterton's ingenious stories,
that a detective story is somewhat like a chess study, in which
everything fits together as if by magic.  Surely this is not a
very spectacular insight, and I'm sure it has been made before.
But it took a rather more recent detective story, Graham Moore's
The Sherlockian (2010), to grasp the true meaning of this not
just for chess studies, but for chess in general.  In The
Sherlockian, set in modern-day Americ