Holmes and Watson (9 page)

Lestrade, he continued, was a well-known detective whom he, Holmes, was helping over a forgery case and his
visitors were clients seeking his professional assistance. It was by employing his powers of observation at their first meeting at Bart’s, Holmes added, that he had been able to deduce Watson’s recent career as an army doctor serving in Afghanistan.

Despite some scepticism, Watson was impressed enough to compare Holmes to two of his favourite fictional detectives, Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and Emile Gaboriau’s Lecoq, and was considerably annoyed when Holmes dismissed them contemptuously. Holmes, Watson concluded, and not without some justification, was bumptious.

He was further exasperated when, in order to change the subject, he drew Holmes’ attention to a man walking along the other side of Baker Street, carrying a large blue envelope in his hand and looking anxiously at the numbers of the houses. Joining Watson at the window, Holmes immediately pronounced him to be a sergeant of Marines, an assertion which Watson silently dismissed as mere ‘brag and bounce’.

When, a few minutes later, the man arrived in their sitting-room to deliver the letter to Holmes, Watson, with a touch of excusable malice, seized on the opportunity to take Holmes down a peg or two by asking the man what his trade was. To his discomfiture, he discovered that Holmes was correct and that the man, though now a commissionaire, had indeed once served as a sergeant in the Royal Marine Light Infantry. Although Watson was impressed, a lurking suspicion remained that the episode
had been pre-arranged in order to ‘dazzle’ him, a doubt which was not expelled until Holmes explained step by step the method by which he had arrived at his conclusions regarding the man. Watson was totally won over and from that moment on was to remain a loyal admirer and exponent of Holmes’ unique skills as a private consulting detective, an attitude which was to form the bedrock of their friendship.

The events of that morning of 4th March were also significant for Holmes, for they showed him that Watson, far from being the gullible fool he had at first imagined, possessed not only a good deal of intelligence and healthy scepticism but was prepared to stand up for himself and express his opinions in a forthright manner. At the same time, he was gratified by the doctor’s genuine admiration for his deductive skills. As Watson was later to discover, Holmes was as susceptible to flattery of his professional abilities as any young woman of her beauty.

Watson might be worth cultivating after all, and Holmes was tempted to prove to Watson just how far those skills extended by inviting him to join him as an observer on the Study in Scarlet murder inquiry, for which Inspector Gregson had requested Holmes’ assistance in the letter delivered by the former sergeant of Marines. It would also be entertaining to have Watson as a witness to the inevitable discomfiture of the official police when Holmes eventually proved them wrong, as he had every confidence of doing.

At the same time, Holmes could not resist squeezing
the last few drops of humour out of the situation by pretending indifference to the case, knowing only too well that Watson, with his newly-acquired enthusiasm, would be further astonished and would urge him to accept. It was a subtle game, the artfulness of which Watson did not entirely appreciate, although, once they had arrived at number 3 Lauriston Gardens, Brixton, where Drebber’s body had been discovered, he was not completely taken in by the little act which Holmes put on for his benefit. It occurred to Watson that Holmes’ show of nonchalance, the lounging manner in which he sauntered up and down the pavement or gazed vacantly about him, bordered on affectation, a conclusion which was not far from the truth. For although Holmes’ methods on this occasion were similar to those he often employed on other investigations, he undoubtedly exaggerated the unhurried nature of his preliminary examination of the scene-of-crime in order to impress his companion.

Once the inquiry was under way and the second murder, that of Joseph Stangerson, had been committed, he abandoned these prima-donnaish pretensions and threw himself into solving the case with his usual enthusiastic energy, applying those precepts of scientific analysis and deduction to such dazzling effect that any vestige of Watson’s earlier scepticism was finally swept away. Indeed, the doctor was so impressed by Holmes’ professional expertise that, once the case was completed and the murderer of Drebber and Stangerson was
arrested and had made a full confession, Watson was determined that Holmes’ merits as a consulting detective should be made public, especially as an account in the evening newspaper,
The Echo
, gave all the credit for the successful conclusion of the case to the two Scotland Yard inspectors Lestrade and Gregson, just as Holmes had predicted.

It was this sense of justice and fair play as well as his admiration that persuaded Watson to declare that, if Holmes would not publish an account of the case, then he himself would do so on Holmes’ behalf. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision which Watson was not to regret over the years he acted as self-appointed chronicler of Holmes’ many exploits.

In this role, he has come in for much criticism from commentators. However, it should be remembered that Watson had no formal training either as a secretary or as a recorder of events, although his experience both at Bart’s and at Netley as a student would have accustomed him to taking lecture notes and he was therefore used to scribbling down the more important facts, relying on his memory when he came to expanding those notes into a more coherent and detailed form.

And despite his notorious carelessness over dates and other facts and figures, he was on the whole blessed with a good memory, particularly for conversations and for the details of his physical surroundings as well as the people he was to encounter, especially women. His accounts are full of vivid descriptions of interiors
and landscapes, whether of London streets or of the countryside as, for example, this picture of Dartmoor in autumn, ‘the slanting rays of the sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of woodlands.’

He uses this same talent to describe people as diverse as Miss Violet Hunter with ‘her bright, quick face, freckled like a plover’s egg’, or Charles Augustus Milverton with ‘his large, intellectual head’ and ‘perpetual frozen smile.’
*

Holmes, too, is captured again and again in his many moods, sitting cross-legged, for example, on a pile of cushions, ‘his old briar pipe between his lips’ as, ‘in the dim light of the lamp’, he ponders the problem of the disappearance of Neville St Clair in
The Man with the Twisted Lip
, or smashing the plaster bust of Napoleon with his hunting crop and, ‘with a shout of triumph’, retrieving the black Borgia pearl from among its fragments in
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
.

Watson records conversations with the same lively immediacy and has a keen ear for differentiating between, for example, the Cockney speech of Mr Sherman, the taxidermist from Pinchen Lane, the Scots accent of Inspector MacDonald, and the pompous language of Lord St Simon.

Watson also possesses great skills as a narrator. His accounts never flag but are driven forward with enormous energy and gusto, especially in those passages where the action is all important, as in this passage from
The Sign of Four
, which with its short, staccato sentences captures the speed and excitement of the night-time pursuit up the Thames by a police boat of the steam launch
Aurora
.

‘We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. Voices hailed us out of the darkness, but still the
Aurora
thundered on, and still we thundered close upon her track.’

He is also adept at using other narrative devices to forward the action or to convey information: quotations from newspaper accounts, for example, or direct conversation, either in brief exchanges or in longer passages in which Holmes’ clients explain their problems or Holmes himself expounds his theories. On occasions, Watson uses his role as narrator to address the reader personally or, in order to heighten the mystery and tension, expresses his thoughts and feelings in such an open and disarming manner that the reader easily identifies with him.

His methods of recording his material are made clear in
A Study in Scarlet
. Presumably he made use of much the same system in subsequent cases. He kept a journal. He also read newspaper accounts of the case as it progressed, using them as sources of additional information before cutting them out and pasting them into a scrap book,
a form of reference which he may have copied from Holmes, who was in the habit of keeping similar records. In addition, he had access to Inspector Lestrade’s notes on the murderer’s confession, probably not in their original shorthand version but in the extended longhand reports which Lestrade would have had to submit to his superior officers at Scotland Yard.

Apart from these written or printed records, Watson was in daily contact with Holmes, with whom he discussed the cases and from whom he could draw any additional material or information should it be needed.

In the Drebber-Stangerson murder inquiry, he was also given permission to hold a lengthy interview with Jefferson Hope, his notes of which Watson was later to expand and transcribe into five retrospective chapters which form the larger section of Part Two of
A Study in Scarlet
.

His limitations are seen in his negligence over some of the facts of the cases, especially in the matter of dates, over which at times he was infuriatingly imprecise. Watson clearly belonged to that group of people, often but not exclusively male, who are congenially incapable of remembering dates, even their children’s and spouse’s birthdays or their own wedding anniversary.

However, it should be pointed out in Watson’s defence that it was not the chronological aspect of Holmes’ career which particularly interested him. He was not a historian; he was not even a biographer in the accepted sense of the term, even though he claimed to be both in ‘The
Adventure of the Resident Patient’. He was a chronicler of events in which he himself participated and his point of view was therefore subjective. He was, moreover, far more concerned with conveying to his readers an awareness and appreciation of Holmes’ skill as a consulting detective and the exciting as well as the baffling aspects of the cases he investigated than in recording the precise dates on which they occurred.

His own reading tastes almost certainly influenced his style. He enjoyed a good yarn, as can be seen in his appreciation of the nautical adventures of the American novelist William Clark Russell, while his admiration for the detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Emile Gaboriau, despite Holmes’ contempt for their fictional investigators, would have persuaded him to concentrate on the thrill and mystery of Holmes’ inquiries. Significantly, out of the four novel-length chronicles and the fifty-six shorter accounts, Watson has chosen to preface the titles of forty-six of them, nearly four-fifths, with the words ‘The Adventure of …’

In further mitigation, it should also be pointed out that Watson was working from brief, handwritten notes, on some occasions months or even years after they were first scribbled down. It was easy enough for him to misread his own handwriting and to mistake a badly formed figure seven, say, for a nine or a scrawled three for an eight.

Other mistakes, particularly over dating, could have occurred when his handwritten manuscripts were
copied by a typist, if he employed one, or alternatively by the typesetter. In addition, some could be printer’s errors which were uncorrected at the proof stage, either by Watson himself or by the publisher’s reader, or by both. It is easily done, as I know from experience. One of my own books contains the description of a character sitting with his ‘things’ rather than his ‘thighs’ wide apart.

During the 1880s, Watson was further handicapped in his task of chronicling Holmes’ exploits by the loss of his papers, as he reports in ‘The Adventure of the Resident Patient’ when it was first published in
The Strand
in August 1893. ‘I cannot be sure of the exact date,’ he writes, ‘for some of my memoranda on the matter have been mislaid, but it must have been towards the end of the first year during which Holmes and I shared chambers in Baker Street.’ When the account was reprinted in
The Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes
the following year, this sentence was omitted.

On other occasions, Watson deliberately withheld dates and other information in order to protect the identities of those involved in some of the inquiries, or for reasons of national security, as he was to do in ‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’, a notorious blackmailing case, or in ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’, ‘the most important case’ Holmes ever handled, an account of which he gave Watson permission to publish only if its contents were ‘carefully guarded’.

Nevertheless, it would have made the task easier for
later commentators on the canon if Watson had shown a little more care over certain of the facts, while at the same time depriving them of a great deal of pleasurable diversion in speculating on possible interpretations.

This lack of precision is, however, far outweighed by Watson’s other and more important skills as an author, as the continuing and world-wide popularity of his accounts has proved.