The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

and immediately after:

Every couple of years, the world as a collective likes to ruminate and come up with a new adaptation of the stories of Sherlock Holmes, every single new one promising to be either "The Ultimate Adaptation" or "Holmes for the New Era", there is no in-between. And it is understandable, this amazement and awe we hold for the beloved mysteries, they are classics for a reason.

And despite that, time and again I see creators of tv shows, pastiches, and movies, neglect the most important aspect in every single Sherlock Holmes' story: the immovable presence of John Watson. Some even going as far as turning Watson into a villain, a caricature of himself, or even erasing him completely from the narrative. "After all, the important one is Holmes, isn't he? He is the genius, and Watson is there just his biographer."

That is the capital omission to me when it comes to any of the adaptations, because it ignores the vital part that Watson plays in Holmes' life. Watson is the companion, he is the bridge between the "normal" world and the genius that is Holmes' deductive brain. He is, for a lack of a better descriptor, the translator between what jumps in judgement and reasoning Holmes' brilliant mind comes up with, and the layman's language.

There is a reason why we as readers come up with the idea that Holmes is smart beyond his quirks and his drug addiction, beyond his ignorance of anything and everything that in his opinion doesn't help him solve the cases that distract him from the boredom of normal life... and that reason is that John Watson is the person narrating the whole thing. We are not introduced to Holmes through an omnipresent, anonymous narrator which is the case with other books. We are thrown in the middle of a mystery from the start the same way that Watson is unexpectedly thrown in 221b.

What we think of Holmes, what we feel for him, it is all because Watson wishes us to experience. The stories themselves carry with them one of the best storytelling devices graciously blended into the narrative, which is the fact that Watson is an incredibly good writer, so much that the public gazes into the spotlight where Holmes is and in most cases ignores that the one shining it down is Watson himself.

Creators who like to ignore Watson and his function in the narrative tend to see Holmes as their own self-insert: a super smart man whose genius cannot compare with the mediocre world population and who can barely tolerate their stupidity, basically a gift to men from god and who has to be worshipped for it... When the reality is that every single thing we perceive from Holmes is because of how Watson sees him.

Watson is our unreliable narrator, his descriptions and impressions of Holmes are the ones that are weaved into the story; even goes as far as giving us a glimpse of Holmes' opinion about it through the way the consultant detective sometimes accuses Watson of adding too many embellishments to his narrations. If we see Holmes as an incredible genius, as someone whose intelligence is above the rest of the world, it is because Watson says so. With every passing story, we come across different characters that every once in a while whose first impression of Holmes has been influenced by what they themselves read in Watson's stories... All in all, the in-universe characters falling under the same influence we, as readers, are.

John Watson's love for Holmes is one of the main plot points in the story, we see its evolution the same way as one normally goes through different stages of falling in love. We see Watson's first infatuation, his interest in what makes Holmes what he is, first in a superficial way and later on with every new story. We see them have misunderstandings, which most of the time end up in a deeper appreciation of Holmes as a person.

All culminating in the incredible rendition of The Final Problem, which could easily be seen, without little effort, as Holmes' planning his own death. By what means we are never completely sure, to be honest, since we can only see it through Watson's deep grief. It is true that Arthur Conan Doyle's plans were to end Holmes' adventures with the short story, but even with the author's motivations being the main recourse behind its inception, there is no doubt when reading the story that the focus of the narrative is Holmes' spending his last moments with Watson.

The subsequent creation of The Empty House and further adventures after that, diluted partially the importance of the whole ordeal, but gave us a different insight of Holmes and Watson's relationship. Through that lens, we as readers witness the evolution of it, the toll that Holmes' fake death had in both his biographer and his own author, adding depth through the strain put by the facade.

E. W. Hornung made one of my favorite homages to Holmes and Watson through his stories of The Gentleman Thief, and put a greater emphasis on the strained relationship between the two characters after the fake death. He gave his besotted narrator another source of turmoil: the fact that while Raffles (our stand-in Holmes) was away living life and even having a romantic interest, Bunny (his Watson) ends up falling in disgrace after being sent to jail.

A.J. Raffles' stories lean on the importance of the unreliable, uselessly enamored narrator, to the point that Hornung didn't shy away from having Bunny refer to Raffles as handsome and attractive in many different instances. He understood how there is no Holmes without a Watson to appreciate him, how their dynamic is the fuel behind the success of the whole series.

“I am nothing without my Boswell.”

One of the finest and most beloved Watsons ever to grace the screen has passed away. David Burke was 91 years old, just shy of his 92nd birthday, and he is survived by his wife Anna Calder-Marshall and his son Tom Burke.

By all accounts, he was a gentleman and a wonderful human being. He could have stayed on to play Watson much longer, which would have made many of us very happy, but he chose to leave the show to be nearer to his family, especially since Tom was very young at the time.

His was not the first intelligent and competent Watson, but this version marked a turning point in mainstream depictions, from comedic sidekick to a hero in his own right.

RIP, dear sir. You will be missed. Thank you for everything.

~*~

I have regrettably finished all of Granada and so as an excuse to rewatch it immediately, I decided to make a painted collage of different scenes from A Scandal in Bohemia.

The Creeping Man

To the modern reader, the story of Professor Presbury’s transformation is pure fiction. It is not scientifically possible for someone to inherit the characteristics of an animal by absorbing part of it, and injecting someone with what is conceptually a form of hormone therapy will most likely do what hormone therapy does best. Which is not to turn an ageing man into a monkey, no matter how strong the testis extract is. 

We are quick to dismiss the tale as somewhat unworthy of our standard Holmes fare, but the events of this strange turn-of-the-century adventure are clearly referencing Brown-Séquard’s earlier dubious experiments in regaining ‘male vigour’ and has deep roots in both the contemporary fascination with ‘eternal youth’ treatments and the emergence of endocrinology. In the decade it was (finally) published in, huge advances had been made in our understanding of hormones, leading notably to the isolation and synthetisation of testosterone in 1935.

The story of Profesor Presbury is not so much an outlier as a startling story that might, not implausibly, have been taken from the headlines. In July of 1923 -- four months after the publication of Dr. Watson's account -- Time magazine had this to say:

Serge Voronoff, the Russian surgeon of Paris who leaped into notoriety about three years ago with his gland transplantation experiments, came into his own at the International Congress of Surgeons in London last week, when 700 of the world's leading surgeons applauded the success of his work in the " rejuvenation " of old men. The sensational claims and misleading publicity which attend the work of seekers after the elixir of youth have obscured Voronoff's careful experimental basis and have made him suspect with conservative scientific men. But professional opinion is growing more lenient as increasing numbers of surgeons in various countries are experimenting with these methods. In America, Dr. G. Frank Lydston, the eminent Chicago specialist who died last winter, was a pioneer in gland implantation. Voronoff's book, Life, in which he set forth some of his theories, appeared in English in 1920, and his scientific papers in French journals have been well received.

Right on the cutting edge! And, as has been examined in a recent monograph, interwar Britain saw anti-aging pursued in various ways, all of them notably gendered:

So, in many ways, what's most interesting to me about how "The Creeping Man" fits into its context is how Professor Presbury's conduct and correspondence, as associated with his experiments, are framed as "sinister and unexpected." Even in 1903 (when the story is set), these experiments could have been framed as an ill-fated but intelligible scientific endeavor, rather than as a departure from what Holmes terms "the straight road of destiny." Moreover, the suspicion of just what the professor might be doing -- or at least why -- appears never to have occurred to Bennett, despite the fact that he has a medical degree more recently awarded than Watson's. It is Holmes who is left to point the moral, that experiments in reverse-aging would achieve something like the opposite of the stated goals of eugenicist movements:

Others may find a better way. There is danger there — a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit.

Oh damn, I’ve almost missed celebrating May 4, Reichenbach Falls Day!

So many years, so many different Reichenbach headcanons, some of them mutually incompatible. For instance, long before I actually wrote H/W I had it firmly fixed in mind that during the Hiatus, Watson traveled to Reichenbach every May and spent the 4th hiking to the falls and crying into them. 

Here’s a list with links to most of the stuff I’ve written about Reichenbach over the past…25-odd years. Enjoy.

ACD CANON

H/W

O Paradis  Alone in a deteriorating hotel in Florence, Holmes commits to paper the true story of what really happened at Reichenbach and how he and Watson lost each other.

Meta:

The Man on the Tor: The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Hiatus.  In which I argue that for emotional purposes, the post-Reichenbach reunion actually happens in Hound of the Baskervilles and not in “The Empty House.”

The Perennial Problem  Review of the Granada Holmes “Final Problem.”

This Is Indeed Like The Old Days Review of Granada Holmes “Empty House”

Death is Always With Us  In which I look at the Granada Holmes “Devil’s Foot” as a way of excavating and working through the Reichenbach trauma

SHERLOCK

Johnlock:

Empty Houses  My post-Reichenbach reunion fic, written during the S2-S3 gap.

Meta:

It’s All True: Rereading “The Reichenbach Fall”

The Reichenbach Retcon

Faints and Feints: the Granada “Empty House” vs. Sherlock’s “The Empty Hearse”