Sherlock Holmes (novel)/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Why does Watson write this stuff for publication?

  • The example that springs most immediately to mind is in "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", but also applies to any other story in which Holmes undertakes illegal behavior. It amounts to a public confession. "And then we broke into the guy's house, hid behind the curtain while some lady came in and shot him, burned all his papers, and then kept the entire escapade a secret -- hey, wait a second..."
    • Not to mention the numerous occasions when they let criminals go free. I realise that in many cases (as with the above) all the principals are dead, but surely you can still be found culpable for an offence years after? Another niggle -- all the unflattering descriptions of people's habits and/or appearances. You'd expect a good many of the clients to sue for the rude way they're described. And do people really want the Great British Public to know about their drug problems? Jacking up in the living room is one thing, but one character (can't remember the story now) is explicitly portrayed as an opium addict, seen as a real social evil of the time. This attitude would be understandable if he was a villain -- but this guy is one of Watson's friends!
      • Well, Watson just needs to say "That was an embellishment" and what does the prosecution do? Sherlock Holmes is a legend and more than that he counts most of the governments of Europe as "people who owe him a favour" as well as His Holiness the Pope as a character witness. Plus can you imagine being the man who "imprisons the greatest foe of crime of all time"?
      • "Surely you can still be found culpable for an offence years after"... yes, but there is a limit. Statute of limitations. I don't know what it was in 19th Century England, but in 21st Century US it's often 5 years or so for burglary or stuff like that.
        • In European civil law countries, prescription limits the time in which a lawsuit can be filed to a number of years equal to the longest punishment for the said crime. The only crimes which are never prescribed are murder and crimes against humanity.
        • Indeed, many of the stories are stated to have been withheld until they became less sensitive (usually in the case of misbehaving Nobility and Royalty.)
        • We're talking about a man who is owed favors by the Queen of England and at least two Prime Ministers, not to mention has personally and repeatedly saved the careers of every single one of Scotland Yard's top inspectors. Short of committing regicide on the Palace lawn at high noon during a parade, the mind boggles at anything Holmes could do to get himself put in jail.
        • Watson says as much at the end of the story The Illustrious Client:

Sherlock Holmes was threatened with a prosecution for burglary, but when an object is good and a client is sufficiently illustrious, even the rigid British law becomes human and elastic.

      • They not only overlook the burglary charge, but also the fact that Holmes was accessory to a rather nasty assault in which vitriol (sulphuric acid) is thrown in somebody's face - "I didn't know she was going to do it" being a fairly shaky legal defence under the circumstances, which would be aggravated burglary. And the "good object"? To prevent an unsuitable marriage...
      • For the "Illustrious Client" case, the marriage by itself was not the problem, but the fact that all the girls that the Baron intangles with tends to get ruined or die in odd circumstances (while somehow leaving the Baron all their money). The vitrol throwing was done in revenge by a ruined ex-lover, which everyone thought was justified. And to cap it all off, the titular client was implied to be King Edward VII, so I would think that it would be rather easy for Holmes to avoid jail time.
    • Lets not forget that the stories are set in the Victorian time, and Sherlock Holmes is a gentleman of good pedigree. In this time it was strongly believed that criminal behaviour was a hereditary condition, and typical to the lower classes. A man like Holmes could get away with murder if he didn't involve people from his own station or above, and any people who might complain about his wrongdoings who had the influence to do so are in jail for the crimes that Holmes caught them doing.
    • Some of the stories end with Holmes and Watson promising to keep the facts secret, so the murderer's innocent young daughter (or whoever) will never know the awful truth. Except, hang on, Watson's now published the facts in a book. If the innocent young daughter isn't going to learn the truth from that, it can only mean that she's died between the events of the story and Watson going public.
      • In one case, this is exactly what happened; Watson opens with an explanation that, due to the untimely death of the last innocent person connected with the case, he is no longer bound to secrecy.
      • He openly admits to changing names and locations in at least one of the later stories.
    • There is a moment in the fantastic Holmes movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes which addresses this concern; in it, Holmes all but accuses Watson of embellishing "The Red-Headed League" in order to make the story more exciting for the readers. Watson's an Unreliable Narrator -- there's no guarantee that Watson doesn't fictionalize his cases, mixing and matching details and changing names just in order to keep an exciting narrative without getting him and Holmes sued from here to doomsday and losing business for being indiscreet about clients. Those scenes where someone asks them to keep it quiet or Holmes intones that the world is not ready for this story are just Watson's little nods to his reader that the whole thing is Ripped from the Headlines.
    • Maybe Watson only publishes accounts that bad-mouth the client, or relatives or friends of same, if the client in question refuses to pay Holmes his consulting fee....
      • Holmes actually confronts Watson about his style of writing several times. Watson's concerned with writing a good story, and while Sherlockians/Holmesians prefer to believe what he recorded was accurate there's no reason why he wouldn't have embellished. The accounts Holmes crafts himself are much more scientific and instructional.
      • Are we ever told when his accounts are released? He could give it to the publisher with strict instructions not to release it until a certain date/until a client is dead/until he and/or Holmes is dead/etc. He could also, as someone suggested, change the names in order to make sure no descendants face the embarrassment of their ancestor's issues.
      • One or two clients mentions having read Watson's accounts, so at least some of them were published during Holmes' career.
    • Aside from airing the clients' dirty laundry, which is excusable if he changes names, Watson's also given away spoilers for several of Holmes' methods of deceiving criminals. You'd think every crook in London would know better than to answer a cryptic agony-column message, without verifying it's not one of his Batman Gambit set-ups, by now!
      • But he can also put in as much misinformation as he wants, and exaggerate Holmes' deductive capabilities and make the criminal underworld even more terrified of him.
      • In fact, in "Memoirs..." Sherlock tells Watson that in his writtings he appears to be infallible, when in practice he is much more prone to error, as holes in the evidence can mislead him as much as anyone. Only when in possession of all the facts he can achieve an accurate deduction, otherwise he has to rely on inference.
  • This troper is fairly certain he's solved this question. Recently, he (a pathetic Holmes fanboy) took it upon himself to plot all the cases, and major events in the character's lives, on a timeline, as far as logically possible. Satisfied as to the result, he then took the extra step of comparing the timeline against Sir Arthur's publication dates. Surprising discovery: Nearly every story was published during periods when Holmes would have been thought dead, or was close to retiring/already retired. Doyle, the Magnificent Bastard, apparently kept track of what cases would've happened when, and kept their situations consistent. Most of Adventures and most of Memoirs were published after Holmes had presumably died. We then remember that in The Final Problem, we learn that certain people (read: the late Moriarty's gang?) were trying to sully Holmes' name post-humously (perhaps to bolster their defenses at their trials?) Watson's counter to this gross injustice? Publish the records and defend Holmes' name (and, therefore, his credibility). Hound of the Baskervilles, if I remember, would've actually been in the middle of serialization when Holmes reappeared.
    The main exception? The first story, A Study In Scarlet... which was published the Christmas before (or during) Watson's marriage (as I plotted it). Fridge Logic: Watson, aware of how Holmes was hurt by him leaving, decided his parting gift was to give the man who'd made his life so interesting the recognition that Watson, by then, was well aware he was due. Furthermore, sale of his little story probably gave the then-jobless Watson a little much-needed jingle in his pocket for his forthcoming marriage. Since Holmes would've had to give consent, this was probably his return gift to Watson. How neat. The rest started coming out around 1904... the year of Holmes' final retirement, and shortly after Watson's second marriage. Looks like Watson based his entire retirement on Holmes' permission to publish his cases.
  • One question that has not been raised above is the troubles that would ensue when Watson reveals(through his stories) the many instances where police officers have taken credit for Holmes' work. Wouldn't this ruin their reputations and result in many a demotion or dismissal?
    • This can also be explained through Unreliable Narrator / Ripped from the Headlines; to take one example, presumably there's no real Inspector Lestrade, but Watson has based him on a real detective (or a composite of real detectives) he and Watson worked with during the cases and uses him as a little nod to the reader that Holmes had more to do with solving the case than the official authorities were willing to concede.
    • Alternatively: To be fair to Lestrade and Gregson it was only the papers that exaggerated their contribution to the solving of the cases (perhaps out of a Victorian respect for authority and their refusal to believe that a talented amateur could outperform the professional police). Gregson & Lestrade were scrupulous in telling their superiors exactly what happened. It's clear from The Six Napoleons that the official police eventually come to respect Holmes.

What happens to Watson's wife?

  • In The Final Problem Watson is married and in active practice. In the stories compiled as "The return of Sherlock Holmes" he gives up private practice and goes back to live with Sherlock. So, um, where is his wife now that he is living his old bachelor life again?
    • She died.
    • Yep, there's very little song and dance about it but he does mention his bereavement in passing. And later (if you don't believe they're all cover stories and the detective and the doctor were romantically involved), he marries someone else. Which Holmes describes as the one selfish thing he ever did.
    • This troper prefers to think everything after The Final Problem were just stories set before it and written after. Forget those niggling details...
      • Even The Adventure of the Empty House? Anyway, I've seen versions of Holmes continuity where Watson has three wives, who all die. He does mention the death of one wife in The Empty House (The return of Holmes), which apparently happened while Holmes was missing and gives Watson an excuse to move back in with Holmes.
    • This is what has been agreed upon by several BS Is and editors: Watson had three wives. The first was a woman from America (possibly named Constance) who was with Watson during several of the earliest Adventures. She died, leaving Watson a widower. When he married Mary Morstan at the end of The Sign of Four, it's postulated he edited the stories he'd already written so that she would see her name in print when he published them. She died shortly before Holmes's return. Watson married again, but this woman was not fond of Sherlock and tried to keep them apart. (Mary in the books had no trouble with Holmes - he helped her solve the mystery of her father)
  • This troper read an essay that came to the conclusion that Doyle killed Mary off because he hated his mother for being Irish.
    • Balderdash and piffle. Doyle loved his mother. It's firmly supported in his biographies. There's a special place in Hell for essayists who try to guess and hint at the secret thoughts and private hangups of dead famous people. They put you right next to child molesters and people who talk in the theatre.

Why did Holmes have to fake his death?

  • Technically speaking, Holmes faking his death is a side effect of what he's really doing, as the people he's running from already knew he was still alive. What Holmes was doing was living off the grid and under a succession of aliases to keep Moran from killing him, knowing that after months or years of fruitless pursuit Moran would run out of funds and have to go back to England and resume his criminal career to pay the bills. Holmes could then, after Moran has abandoned the offensive (and thus yielded the tactical initiative to Holmes), set a trap for Moran by reappearing in London and baiting Moran to try and kill him at his house. As to why Holmes feared Moran so much: the man was one of the best rifle shots in the world, a master of stealth, absolutely obsessed, and while no Moriarty-level genius, he wasn't stupid either. (We're talking about a guy who crawled down a sewer drain after a wounded man-eating tiger and won, after all.) Holmes simply could not try to go about a normal life knowing that Moran only needed to get somewhere within rifle range of him once to splatter him. For God's sake, in The Adventure of the Empty House Moran killed a guy using an air rifle, firing a revolver bullet, with a perfect headshot through a barely-opened window. If a man like that was on my ass like the Terminator, I'd spend months hiding out under another identity too.
  • Its specifically mentioned in the story that Holmes suddenly reappearing in London immediately after Moran had committed another murder (with the obvious intent of investigating it, and thus getting Moran sent to jail) is the only thing that made Moran desperate enough to rush and try and kill Holmes at Holmes' own house. Under less pressing circumstances, Moran was patient enough to have waited for an opportunity to kill Holmes somewhere he was more vulnerable and less able to rig traps ahead of time.
    • Okay but why couldn't he let Watson know that? Why not head straight back to London and set up the wax dummy, instead of waiting three years?
    • Reread the above example. It took three years for Moran to give up on chasing Holmes across Europe, return to London, and then finally commit another crime that Holmes could pin on him (thus rendering Moran vulnerable enough to be desperate). Without any of the above factors, Moran would never have risked attacking Holmes on his home ground, but would instead have simply patiently waited until he could rig a foolproof trap. As for not telling Watson, this is because while Watson has many valuable talents, being able to lie convincingly is not one of them. The only way his reactions would be genuine enough to fool Moran is if he didn't know what was going on. (Note also that leaving any sign that Watson was 'in the know' and helping Holmes would almost certainly have resulted in a rifle bullet through Watson's head.) Note that Holmes did let someone in London know he was still alive and secretly kept in touch with him -- Mycroft. But Mycroft was someone Moriarty's organization knew much less about, and given his position in the British government, had access to much better protection if he needed it.
    • He explicitly tells Watson this - Watson's hurt that Holmes didn't trust him, and Holmes had to reassure him it wasn't a trust issue.
  • Also, Watson was Holmes's chronicler. It was absolutely essential everyone else believe Sherlock died, if only to ensure that Moran would have trouble convincing people otherwise. If people believed Holmes dead, they wouldn't be looking for him. And it's not hard to imagine he may have had other enemies who would be more than willing to take a pot shot at him when Moran's back was turned.
  • Possibly I'm being incredibly stupid, but here goes: Watson's not in hiding, so why didn't Moran just grab him and send out some sort of message to Holmes, saying, "Come back to London and face me directly or I'll shoot him, and don't you dare bring along Scotland Yard"? Is it Honour Before Reason? Even Evil Has Standards? Would Mycroft's agents interfere?
    • Possibly a little of All Of The Above; among other things, Holmes would no doubt ask Mycroft to keep an eye on Watson to make sure all was well in his absence, and this was the Victorian era, age of gentlemanly conduct, and if you had a disagreement with another gentlemen you settled it between yourselves. Furthermore, the whole point of Holmes faking his death was to keep Watson out of the loop and convince the world at large that he was dead; there's no point in holding Watson to ransom or to find out what he knows because he doesn't know anything, and Holmes is in deep cover so Moran has to find him first before he can send him threatening messages.
      • I somehow doubt Moriarty's most ruthless associates would take such great pains upon themselves for moral reasons, and as for getting the message to Holmes, they would just have to put an ad in any public news source that he'd be likely to be following. It's mostly something readers have to accept for the sake of Sherlock Holmes returning from death and continuing his adventures.
      • Fair point about the ruthless associates (although it's worth noting that in "The Empty House", it's revealed that Moriarty's second-in-command Moran has pretensions towards high-society acceptability, so might have adopted a veneer of 'gentleman's conduct' as part of this) but unfortunately, the whole 'deep cover' thing isn't so easily solved; the whole point of sending someone a ransom note is that you know for certain the other person will receive and act on it. Holmes was traveling around the world incognito, remember, so if they're resorting to putting ransom ads in the news agencies then they presumably have no clue where he actually is (if they even know which news sources he's following -- and if they don't even know where the guy is, how are they supposed to know what newspapers he's following or where to send a telegram?), which means that for all they know Holmes is Deep in Darkest Africa (metaphorically speaking at least), away from any kind of news source -- and remember, this is the Victorian era, and news did not travel around the world as quickly as it does today. He could even be dead for all they know. Meaning it could be months or even years before he manages to get their message, if he even gets it at all -- which thus renders the whole thing pointless from the start, since they're hardly going to keep Watson hidden as a hostage for all that time, and if they do kill him before Holmes gets their message they've lost their only bargaining chip. Presumably they were keeping an eye on him to see if Holmes did get in touch, but once it's clear he doesn't know anything there's no point in doing anything more until they have something more concrete on where Holmes is, and if they have that then they might as well deal with Holmes directly.

Wait, so Moriarty and his brother are both named James?

  • Unless the brother's given name is actually Colonel, that is? Did this actually happen in Victorian England?
    • I don't know about men, but the first name "Mary" was very common for multiple daughters, mostly among Catholic families. In the Chalet School books from around fifty years later, one mother names her triplet daughters Mary Helena, Mary Constance and Mary Margaret and this isn't considered wildly unusual.
      • Mary Saintsname O'Something is quite a common name choice for daughters in Catholic families. And James Thurber once had a made whose mother had named all her daughters with variations on Juanita. (Juanemma, etc.)
    • This Troper has two Great-great-great-uncles who had the Christian names Richard Johnathan and Augustus Richard. But the letters we know that from mentuon that Augustus hated the names and everyone called him Richard. A similar thing maybe happening here.
  • In John Gardner's alternate continuity novels about Moriarty, He gives a possible explaination both Moriarty's changing appearance and his first name being the same as his brother's: There were three Moriarty brothers, all named James by their insane father. He gave them the middle names Edgar, Edmund, and Edward. The oldest became a professor, the middle one was a train conductor, and the youngest became a criminal. The youngest learned the art of makeup and acting, Killed both of his brothers, and impersonated his eldest brother, Leading to Moriarty being thought of as an older professor when he was actually a young gangster. Of course, Your Mileage May Vary on whether you accept this one or not.
    • Which one entered the military in this scenario?
    • Except Colonel James Moriarty was still alive after the Reichenbach incident, specifically said as publicly defending his dead brother the Professor's reputation. So if Moriarty was impersonating his murdered brother the Colonel, he'd have to have survived the fall and made it back to England to resume his double life. He can't be in two places at once and Holmes is certain Moriarty didn't survive his tumble down Reichenbach. I buy the "all named James by their insane dad" idea, but not the "Moriarty murdered and impersonated his brothers" one.
  • Or "James Moriarty" could be a compound surname.
    • Like everyone assumes "Conan Doyle" is, you mean?

Jefferson Hope lets himself get caught

  • Holmes tries to bait Hope with the wedding ring at Baker's Street through an ad. Hope sees through it and sends a confederate posing as an old lady to recover the ring [actually a fake]. After he kills two people, some kid shows up at the cab company where he works and ask for him by name and wants him to go to the very same room from the ad, 221b Baker's steet. Why he tries to throw himself out a closed window once he is there? I don't know, for drama? The alternative is a massive plot hole. Holmes must have deduced the man who's life mission is over would not fight to preserve that life which is coming to an end.
    • Jefferson Hope is described as a man of average intelligence, fanatical persistence, and extremely quick reflexes, but never as a guy who was unusually swift on the uptake mentally. And once before, he was almost at the close of his quest when he was arrested by the police, and had to start over again after years of delay. So his immediate reflex upon having handcuffs suddenly snapped upon him is to fight; it isn't until after he's subdued and his adrenaline's worn off that he remembers, 'Hey, I don't need to fight anymore; I've already killed the men I'm after. Hah, silly me!'
    • Plus, he probably fights because while he might have completed his quest, he doesn't necessarily want to go to the gallows for murder; it's instinct, but it wears off once he realizes that the game's well and truly up. As for why he went, he probably didn't expect to be arrested immediately upon arresting and thought he'd be able to bluff his way out of it; over-confidence, in other words.

Why is Irene Adler considered Holmes' equal?

  • She didn't win on the basis of being abnormally clever. The only reason she escaped was because Holmes' massive intellect inexplicably decided to take the night off. If had sent for the king immediately, or at the very least had his irregulars watch her, he would have gotten the picture just fine.
    • It's not that she's his intellectual equal, it's more that Holmes' misogynistic attitude caused him to underestimate her, and she just changed his perception of women.
    • Tut, tut, you are underestimating The Woman; while is true that fans overrate her as a Holmes equal, is truth that she a)Recognized the maneuver of distraction and her error, b)Devised and executed instantly a perfect counterplan and c) Closed the execution with a little tease/mock of her own, the leter and the costumed salute (not far that Holmes himself would have done). All that when Holmes had previously assumed that women were sentimental, not intellectual beings. Is not surprising then that this is the closest he comes to romantic infatuation...

McMurdo

  • At the end of The Sign of the Four, Holmes states that Jonathan Small's inside man must have been the Indian butler. Why did he rule out the former prize-fighter, McMurdo?
    • Holmes knows that whoever the spy is they had been there for Sholto's entire tenure in the house, and McMurdo hasn't been there that long. The butler is the only staff member who has been consistently present the entire time.
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