Whatever the origin of Watson’s talent and interest, he pursued it diligently. A Study in Scarlet could only have brought him slight commercial reward;23 yet he followed this effort with The Sign of Four (1890), another report of a singular case of Holmes’s—especially memorable to Watson, for it occasioned the first meeting with his future wife, Mary Morstan. Mary Morstan entered Watson’s life as a client of Holmes’s, and Watson fell under her spell immediately: “In an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents,” Watson records, in recollecting his first sight of her, “I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature.”24 When the Agra treasure was recovered and Mary Morstan stood to become the richest woman in England, Watson despaired that a gulf had opened between them that he would be unable to cross. But the treasure sank to the bottom of the Thames, and Watson joyfully proposed. They were wed in a few months.
Watson naturally moved out of the Baker Street flat at that time, and Holmes lived there alone. Mary, however, revealed herself to be most supportive of Watson’s relationship with Holmes, and their friendship and association continued unabated. When Mary travelled out of town, Watson returned to the “digs” to stay with Holmes and to record Holmes’s adventures. While it is clear that Watson kept notes of numerous cases that took place between 1881 and 1891, surprisingly only two records were published during that period.25 Apparently Holmes was displeased by the publicity attendant upon Watson’s books, and it is understandable that Holmes may have believed that further publications would hamper his movements among the criminal classes. Also, Holmes may have been concerned about Watson’s ability to disguise the true names and events, for it would have been a severe breach of professional ethics for “doctor” Holmes to have disclosed his “patients’ ” confidences. In any event, Watson ceased publishing.
In 1891, two events appear to have ended Watson’s silence. First, as reported in certain newspapers in May 1891,26 Holmes died.27 Second, Watson’s beloved Mary became fatally ill, perhaps with tuberculosis. Perhaps out of grief for Holmes, perhaps out of an effort to create an enduring record, Watson wrote his first series of short stories recounting his adventures with Holmes. The first published was “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and it appeared in the Strand Magazine to great acclaim. This was quickly followed by seven more stories of Holmes.28 Mary died in 1892, and Watson’s writing, now fuelled by a double bereavement, gave him solace. Ten more stories of Holmes29 were published in 1893, and Watson’s fame as a writer soared.
Then, in December 1893, he was moved by a series of letters to the press, written by Colonel James Moriarty, brother of the late Professor Moriarty, attacking Sherlock Holmes, to write one more report. “In an incoherent and, as I deeply feel, an entirely inadequate fashion,” he wrote,
I have endeavoured to give some account of my strange experiences in . . . [the] company [of Sherlock Holmes] from the chance which first brought us together at the period of the “Study in Scarlet,” up to the time of his interference in the matter of the “Naval Treaty”—an interference which had the unquestionable effect of preventing a serious international complication. It was my intention to have stopped there, and to have said nothing of that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill.
What followed was the painful account of the death of Sherlock Holmes and Watson’s paean to “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.”
In 1894 an event occurred that caused Watson to faint for the first and only time in his life: the return of Sherlock Holmes. Cruelly deceived by Holmes, Watson had mourned for three years for his friend but now embraced him upon his “resurrection.” Without a selfish thought (for Watson clearly had ample notes of pre-1891 cases to write up), Watson sold his practice and returned to Baker Street to live with Holmes. Then began another “Great Hiatus”—the temporary cessation of Watson’s career as a writer. While Holmes continued to jibe at Watson regarding his writing (see Holmes’s remarks in “The Abbey Grange” and “Wisteria Lodge,” both definitely post-1891 cases), he apparently forbade Watson to publish anything further. Holmes did not relent until 1901, when Watson was permitted to publish the first instalment of The Hound of the Baskervilles, a report of an astonishing case that evidently took place before Holmes’s disappearance in 1891. This case is all the more remarkable because it was published while Holmes was in active practice in London.30
Clearly, after 1894 Holmes made no secret of his return to active practice. Clients continued to turn up on the steps of 221 Baker Street with pleasant regularity, and Holmes’s career flourished. Why, then, did Holmes impose a ban on publication, which was not to relent until Holmes’s retirement in 1903? In part, the ban appears to have been a matter of Holmes’s ego: “Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise,” he remarks to Watson, “has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy, in order to dwell upon sensational details which may excite, but cannot possibly instruct, the reader.”31 Perhaps Holmes wished to save the recounting of his cases for his Whole Art of Detection, where he could present the cases as he wished. Then too, Holmes may have had quite legitimate concerns regarding client confidentiality. For example, one may read “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” with horror at Watson’s naivete (or crass commercialism), when, after presumably disguising the names and places involved in the appalling crime, and after Holmes’s efforts to keep the matter from the public, Watson writes, “there is every prospect that the son and daughter may come to live happily together in ignorance of the black cloud which rests upon their past.” While Watson may have concealed the clients’ names and the locales from the public, did he think that those involved would not learn of his report and so dispel their “ignorance of the black cloud”?
Watson must have been convinced by Holmes, for he refrained from any further publication until Holmes retired. In 1902, Watson remarried.32 This wife is never named. The couple moved to rooms in Queen Anne Street. There Watson took up the practice of medicine again, but fortunately, notwithstanding his remarks in September 1902 on the demands of his practice,33 he must not have been very engaged. Perhaps with the encouragement of the new Mrs. Watson, perhaps from a feeling of uselessness resulting from Holmes’s retirement, another flood of stories burst forth in 1903, and, apparently with Holmes’s permission, Watson was able to acknowledge publicly his elation at Holmes’s return. He may also have sought subtle revenge against Holmes for Holmes’s cruel treatment of Watson, for though Holmes utters no unkind words in “The Empty House,” he comes across as cold and unfeeling, utterly heedless of the emotional pain caused by his years of hiding.
Watson published fifteen more stories between 1904 and 1913, and then, in 1914, came the call he had subconsciously awaited for so long: Holmes needed his assistance with a case. Watson’s rôle in the capture of Von Bork, the German spy, was a small one compared to Holmes’s, but the two old friends had an opportunity to chat intimately and recall the days of the past. “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age,” remarked Holmes. Watson continued to write and publish, producing a long tale of Holmes detecting murder in Sussex (The Valley of Fear, 1915, which probably occurred in 1888) and additional short reports through 1927, recording pre-1904 cases. Curiously, he allowed the last batch of short stories to be collected as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927), with an introduction by Arthur Conan Doyle, rather than by himself (as in the case of His Last Bow, 1917).
The date of Watson’s death is unknown, and those who dream of an immortal Sherlock Holmes long for Watson to remain by his side. Without Holmes’s aid, however, the “old campaigner,” as he styled himself in 1891, must have passed over those Reichenbach Falls in the sky not long after his friend and colleague Arthur Conan Doyle. “Mediocrity knows nothing high
er than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius,” Watson wrote of Inspector Macdonald in The Valley of Fear, but he might well have said the same of himself. Without the talents of John H. Watson, Holmes may well have laboured in obscurity.
THE PUBLIC LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES AND JOHN H. WATSON
OBSCURITY has surely not been the fate of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, nor of John H. Watson. Holmes’s “public life,” as film historian Michael Pointer put it in his ground-breaking study The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes (1975), began in 1893. In that year a production of “Under the Clock,” a parody of Sherlock Holmes written by and starring C.H.E. Brookfield and Seymour Hicks, ran on the stage of the Royal Court Theatre in London for 92 performances. This was followed by a five-act play in 1894 by Charles Rogers. In 1899, William Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes,” nominally co-authored by Conan Doyle, began its remarkable record of performances, and in 1900 Holmes made his debut on the screen, in Sherlock Holmes Baffled, a 49-second-long peep-show (mutascope). In 1905, Vitagraph made The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, shown in England as “Held for a Ransom,” based loosely on The Sign of Four. Most scholars credit Maurice Costello as starring in this film, and if this is correct, Costello was the first identifiable filmed Sherlock Holmes.
“After this,” Pointer writes, “scarcely a year passed without Sherlock Holmes appearing on the screen somewhere in the world, even if only in the title.” While well over one hundred Sherlock Holmes films have been made, three actors dominate the public’s vision of Holmes: William Gillette, star of the stage play and later silent film; Basil Rathbone, appearing as Holmes in a series of 14 films in the 1940s; and Jeremy Brett, cast as Holmes in 44 television episodes. One’s Holmes of choice seems to be almost a matter of generation rather than taste, for each of these three actors dominated his era’s portrayals.
William Gillette (from a contemporary cigar label).
Among silent films, the most notable are the Nordisk Film Company series from 1908 to 1911 starring Viggo Larsen (13 films), the Franco-British Film Company series of 1912 starring George Treville (8 films), the 1916 film production of Gillette’s stage play (starring Gillette himself), and the remarkable Stoll Picture Productions from 1921 to 1923 starring Eille Norwood and Hubert Willis (45 films). Sadly, most of the silent films are lost or viewable only in museums, but public domain reproductions of some of the Norwood films are widely available. Conan Doyle applauded Norwood’s performances, calling them “extraordinary clever personations”; the views of Holmes and Watson are unknown. Certainly the actor had a magnetic and masterful appearance as the detective.
Sound was introduced to the Holmes films in 1929 (Clive Brook’s Return of Sherlock Holmes).34 Raymond Massey (The Speckled Band, 1931), the splendid actor known to later generations as “Dr. Gillespie” on television’s “Dr. Kildare,” Robert Rendel (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1932), and Reginald Owen (A Study in Scarlet, 1933) all had single film appearances as Holmes. The first great series of Holmes performances of the sound era were those of Arthur Wontner, who took on the rôle of Holmes in a quintet of films made from 1930 to 1936.35 Wontner’s performance as Holmes was magnificent—“Sherlock Holmes come to life,” in the words of one critic. He was age sixty-two in his last appearance, however, and with his retirement from the rôle, he soon came to be overshadowed.
The year 1939 saw the fortunate convergence of man and rôle, in the casting of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, in the first Holmes film to be set in the Victorian period, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Curiously, every previous Holmes film had been set in the contemporary scene of the 1910s and 1920s. This highly successful Twentieth Century Fox production, which electrified a generation, was quickly followed by The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. When Fox lost interest in the series, it was taken up by Universal Pictures in 1942, with the first of twelve more films starring Rathbone and Bruce.36 Sadly, these were set in contemporary times and showed Holmes battling Nazis and other villains in contemporary dress. Nevertheless, Rathbone captured perfectly the nervous energy and dominating personality of Holmes, and while Bruce’s buffoonish portrait of Watson would shame the memory of the “trusty comrade” and “man of action,” as the real Holmes characterized him, the public adored both actors, and neither found he could leave the rôle behind.
The series lapsed in 1946, and it was not until 1959 that another theatrical feature brought Holmes to the Victorian age—Peter Cushing’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first Holmes film in colour. Over a dozen more films have appeared since then, including most recently Without a Clue (1988), a comedy disclosing that Watson was the real investigator, with Holmes merely an actor hired to handle the public aspects of Watson’s investigations. Michael Caine starred as Holmes, and Ben Kingsley as Watson. None of these recent versions has risen to the heights of perfection, but many point to the 1965 A Study in Terror (known as Fog in England), starring John Neville and Donald Houston, as the most literate script and high-quality production ever combined in a Sherlock Holmes film. The first film to depict Holmes dealing with Jack the Ripper, it broke new ground in its theory of the Ripper and showed a warm and believable relationship between Holmes and a highly competent Dr. Watson.
Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce (publicity photo).
Television has produced an equally large number of Sherlock Holmes stories. One of the very first television broadcasts was an NBC field test dramatization of “The Three Garridebs,” in 1937. In 1953, a series of 39 episodes were produced for the series called The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Ronald Howard and Howard Marion Crawford. The series is notable for its poor production quality and rushed scripts, but in “The Case of the Cunningham Heritage,” it presented the first filmed version of the meeting of Holmes and Watson. Peter Cushing returned to his film rôle as Holmes, opposite Nigel Stock as Watson, in a series of 17 stories for BBC television, aired in 1968. In 1980, a Polish television series of 24 episodes was filmed, using the “New Adventures” scripts but starring English actors Geoffrey Whitehead and Donald Pickering, which received limited release in Germany and the U.S. in dubbed versions. Two splendid films were made for television in 1983, of The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Ian Richardson as Holmes and David Healy (in the former) and Donald Churchill (in the latter) as Watson. Then, commencing in 1984, another fortunate combination of man and rôle occurred, when the U.K.’s Granada Television cast Jeremy Brett as Holmes in a magnificent series of 44 episodes, beginning with the series entitled “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” David Burke played Watson splendidly in the first 13 episodes and was replaced in later episodes by the equally superb Edward Hardwicke. The stories are by and large excellent interpretations of the Canon, and while Brett is not the Holmes of everyone’s imagination, his larger-than-life characterisation will certainly stand for a generation as the screen Sherlock Holmes. Even more importantly, Burke’s and Hardwicke’s portrayals of Watson finally do justice to the “old campaigner” as a man of courage, intelligence, and compassion. Most recently, Matt Frewer and Kenneth Welsh have appeared in a series of Canadian productions of original Sherlock Holmes stories.
Jeremy Brett and David Burke (publicity photo).
Other media have also provided venues for portrayals of Holmes and Watson. There are over 750 radio shows in the English language alone, with such brilliant actors as Rathbone and Bruce (in an American series that ran from 1939 to 1950, with a few cast changes along the way), Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson, Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley, and most recently Clive Merrison and Michael Williams. The latter pair had the honour of being the first team ever to perform all sixty tales of Sherlock Holmes. Comic strip versions of the Sherlock Holmes stories appeared in newspapers as early as the 1930s, and there are hundreds of appearances of Holmes (or an iconic version of the Great Detective) in comic books. Animated cartoon portrayals of Sherlock Holmes are plentiful as well, both serious adaptations of the stories and comed
ic gems such as Daffy Duck’s “Deduce, You Say!” by Chuck Jones. There are hundreds of board games, puzzles, and toys incorporating the figure of Sherlock Holmes and the stories. Holmes has even penetrated the world of computers, starring in several computer games.
IMITATIVE WRITINGS
“THERE are probably more imitations of Sherlock Holmes than of any other character from literature,” writes Paul D. Herbert, introducing his masterful historical survey of parodies, pastiches, and other imitative writings of Sherlock Holmes, The Sincerest Form of Flattery (1983).37 The “flattery” of Dr. Watson began quite early in Watson’s literary career. The earliest parody found, “My Evening with Sherlock Holmes,” appeared in The Speaker, an English magazine, in its November 28, 1891, issue, only four months after the first Holmes story appeared in the Strand Magazine. Through 1979, over nine hundred imitative stories had been tabulated. In the 1995 bibliography prepared by Ronald B. DeWaal, over two thousand were listed. Some are “pastiches,” fictional adventures written in the style of Dr. Watson. The first group of these reports the unpublished cases of Dr. Watson actually mentioned in the Canon, including such tantalizing references as the “giant rat of Sumatra,” the “red leech,” the “remarkable worm,” and a dozen more. Even Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Adrian joined in this pursuit, collaborating with mystery doyen John Dickson Carr to pen the “Exploits of Sherlock Holmes,” collected in book form in 1954. Other “tributes” are wholly invented and supplement the Canon. These purport to report Holmes’s activities in some very unlikely places, including Minnesota, New York, the Vatican, and South America. Some include other historical figures, such as Karl Marx, W. S. Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan, Harry Houdini, Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud, Annie Oakley, Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Harry Flashman, Count Dracula, Jack the Ripper (of course), and even Arthur Conan Doyle! Some pastiches are science fictional, placing Holmes in time machines or spaceships or transporting him to distant galaxies.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 5