An Opening Disclaimer :
Attention School Children and Students of All Ages!

While there is much fact in the paper that follows, you are advised to use none of it in anything you are going to give to a teacher.  This party will not be held responsible for any detentions, expulsions, failing grades, or general mockery that one might receive for not doing one’s own research into Dr. Watson and Conan Doyle. 

That said, the lecture you are about to hear is true. Only the facts have been hypothetically arranged to protect the innocent. Which is me. Don’t believe anybody who tells you otherwise.

            “Dear sir,
            “In reply to your letter of yesterday’s date we regret to say that we shall be unable to allow you to retain a percentage on the sale of your work as it might give rise to some confusion. The tale may have to be inserted together with some other in one of our annuals, therefore we must adhere to our original offer of twenty-five pounds for the complete copyright.
            “We are, dear Sir,
            “Yours truly,
            “Ward, Lock & Co.”

            While Conan Doyle saw his work as a stand-alone that entitled him to a share of the Beeton’s Christmas Annual’s total sales, Ward, Lock & Company obviously had other ideas. From the final result, one might assume they involved Dr. Watson. But since Dr. Watson’s papers all wound up in that tin dispatch box that a bank called Cox and Company must have misplaced at some point, we have only Conan Doyle’s side of the arrangement to follow in figuring out just what took place.
            “The tale may have to be inserted together with some other,” Ward,  Lock and the boys told Conan Doyle. When Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 hit the newsstands and book stalls,  it featured A Study in Scarlet,  a double novel with two tales “inserted” together as one. 
            How could a publisher  conceivably take two different submissions from two different authors and just jam them together as one?  Well, let’s take it from Ward, Lock and company’s point of view.  From their eventual product,  which featured the novel A Study in Scarlet and the play Food for Powder, we can see their vision of a novel and a play in common wrappers.  What they had in their submissions pile originally, one might guess, was a biographical work by John H. Watson  and a play that would eventually be found in the papers of Conan Doyle called “Angels of Darkness.” Both held features of interest, but neither was publishable as-is in their Christmas annual.  So in a bold move,  someone at Ward, Lock, and Company decided to push Dr. Watson and Dr. Doyle together to see if they could help each other improve  their separate submissions. Watson could supply the realism that Doyle’s play lacked, and Doyle, one might hypothesize, could add the drama Watson’s work may have been missing.
            From Watson’s later writing of a yearning for “the shingle of Southsea,” I think we can be certain that it was Dr. Watson who went to see Conan Doyle after that Ward-Lock introduction. Watson has no recorded cases with Sherlock Holmes in the late spring and early summer of 1886, so we know that his schedule was open. As a single man without “kith or kin” in England, Watson could also travel to Doyle’s turf much more easily than a struggling young husband and doctor like Doyle could come up to London for an extended period.   It may seem a small enough matter that Watson came to Doyle and not vice versa, but considering Doyle’s later dominance in their working relationship,   one could see how it may have all begun with those little politenesses and concessions that Watson, the guest, would allow Doyle, the host.
            In any case,  Doyle and Watson began to work together on making their works more publishable.  Doyle’s papers show us evidence that he may have tried convincing Watson to fictionalize part of his memoirs as a detective tale, changing the true names of the players to “Sherrinford Holmes” and “Ormond Sacker.” Doyle also tried inserting Watson into his play. On Watson’s side,  we might suppose that he  fictionalized a name or two – changing his killer American’s name to “Jefferson Hope,” the name of a character in Doyle’s Mormon play, and the names of the victims likewise.
            While it is not too hard to envision two writers like Doyle and Watson working together on a sort of double novel like A Study in Scarlet,  one would expect a common by-line on the cover, something like “by A. Conan Doyle and John H. Watson.” Why wasn’t this the case? Well, here again,  it looks like Ward, Lock & Company has much to answer for. If you look at the final product,  you’ll see Conan Doyle getting credit without Watson on the outside cover and the title page.  But if you look on the index page and the first page of the novel, you’ll see Watson getting credit without Conan Doyle.  Apparently,  several someones in the production line of Beeton’s Christmas Annual  didn’t quite understand what was meant by “give them both credit.” Sure, they both got credit . . . on separate pages.
            This Ward, Lock and Company screw-up would haunt Doyle and Watson’s relationship until the bitter end.
            In August of 1889, Conan Doyle was invited to London to dine with an American editior who was seeking new British talent.  Dr. Watson was not invited, and why should he have been?  Ward, Lock, and Company had compounded their mistake a year after they originally made it, publishing a stand-alone edition of A Study in Scarlet with not only Doyle’s name on the cover, but Doyle’s father illustrating the book.  If an American editor was looking for a new Sherlock Holmes novel, why would he go to anyone but  Doyle? 
            It is interesting to note, however, that when Conan Doyle had finished dining with the American editor, he had merely agreed to produce a new story for him. It wasn’t until a few days later that Conan Doyle wrote to say it would be a Sherlock Holmes story. He had to check with Dr. Watson first, of course.  Once the agreement was done,  Doyle had a second Sherlock Holmes novel back to Stoddart  in under a month – not that hard to do, when he just had to pick up Watson’s account of The Sign of the Four and just tidy it up a bit for publication.
            At this point, however,  one has to wonder why Dr. Watson wasn’t demanding full cover credit, a fix to the earlier mistake. One also has to wonder why Conan Doyle would agree to serve as a literary agent who put his own byline on another’s work. 
            In the summer of 1889 when the deal was about to be done,  John H. Watson was a newly married man with a steadily increasing practice.  His partnership with Sherlock Holmes in criminal investigation was at its peak.  Watson,  a man who was said to have a rather limited imagination,   was actively involved in two careers at that point.   When approached with the idea of taking up a third career as an author,  Watson, at this point in time,  was sure to say “no.” How could producing mere entertainments compare with directly helping people as both of his other vocations did?
            In that same summer of 1889, however, Conan Doyle was on a different path, and was a man of seemingly unlimited imagination.  He had spent all summer  reading historical works and was on a direct  course for writing The White Company.  He really didn’t want to spend  much  time on something else for some American magazine.  And Conan Doyle, above all else,  was a creative thinker in every aspect of his life, including his investments and eye for some new way to make a profit. Polishing up Dr. Watson’s write-up of the Sholto matter  and giving it to Joseph Stoddardt  could be a quick payday for both Conan Doyle and Watson. Leaving Doyle’s name on the cover, as A Study in Scarlet had accidentally had,  kept Watson free from authorial celebrity or hounding by publishers for more,  and since the work was being commissioned by an American,  well,  Doyle had his eye on proper British publishers for his historical novels – who cared if his name was attached to something in America where British authors seemed to have no rights anyway?
            With the American deal done, Conan Doyle could get back to The White Company and Dr. Watson could head to Dartmoor to chase down the hound of the Baskervilles, both with a few extra pounds in their pockets.
            It is interesting to note that after The Sign of the Four came out in 1890 and was very successful,  Conan Doyle seemed to realize that having a literary agent, as he so oddly served for Dr. Watson, was a very good thing. Later that year when it came time to sell The White Company, Doyle would hire his own literary agent,  a fellow named A. P. Watt. The irony of Conan Doyle agenting a man named Watson and being agented by a man named Watt has not been lost on Sherlockians, you can be sure.
            But hiring his own agent was a sure sign that Doyle considered himself done with the weird Watson arrangement and his own little turn as a literary agent.  He was soon off to Vienna to study opthamalogy,   while Watson settled into married life and medical practice and Sherlock Holmes . . . well, Sherlock Holmes was about to throw both men’s lives for a loop.
            While Conan Doyle was in Vienna,  in addition to his studies, he was still writing fiction, and his agent back in London was selling Doyle’s work  to such periodicals as the brand new Strand Magazine. Doyle’s first story, “The Voice of Science,” appeared in  The Strand Magazine’s third issue in March of 1891. Was Watson reading Doyle in the new magazine? Hard to say. One thing we do know about that much is that the geographical distance between the two men shortened by a whole lot that month.
            Conan Doyle came back to England, finding a place in London for his family to live at 23 Montague Street. Dr. Watson, at that time, was living along Mortimer Street on the other side of the British Museum,  just about a mile from Doyle’s new place (You can find this out by doing a Mapquest “Get Directions” going from Watson’s house to Doyle’s house . . . a very surreal thing to do, let me tell you). 
            They could have met again any number of ways: Doyle could have been looking up local doctors to see if they could send any eye work his way and encountered his fellow writer once more.  They could have run into each other at the apothecary or tobacconist’s shop.  Or the two could also have become reacquainted for a much sadder reason.
            That very same March that Doyle moved to London, Sherlock Holmes was completely hampering the plans of one Professor Moriarty, and Moriarty didn’t like being hampered.  In fact, Moriarty didn’t like being hampered so much that Sherlock Holmes would be dead a month later  . . . at least in the eyes of Dr. Watson,  Conan Doyle, and everyone else in England whose name wasn’t “Mycroft Holmes.”
            Doyle’s first visit to Watson after coming to London could well have been a condolence call.
            But however they renewed their acquaintance, we know for a fact that Arthur Conan Doyle and John H. Watson were back together again soon after Sherlock Holmes’s death. Two months after said death, in July of 1891, The Strand Magazine would start publishing Dr. Watson’s shorter accounts of his late friend.  Plainly the product of Doyle’s relationship with Strand and Watson’s accumulated  case records,  no better tribute to the late consulting detective could be asked for.
            From “A Scandal in Bohemia” in that July to “A Final Problem” two years later,  Strand Magazine ran twenty-two  of Watson’s chronicles of Sherlock Holmes.  It’s interesting to note that one of the stories, “The Cardboard Box,” could be seen as pulled from book collections of those twenty-two as a further tribute -- so that the collected tales of Sherlock Holmes would be two novels and twenty-one stories: 221 just like his famous address. Was Doyle’s name still on the byline of each tale? Of course – at this point, editors and typographers would probably have automatically changed any “by John H. Watson” they saw in the text to “by A. Conan Doyle”  --  Doyle was the fellow collecting the checks, after all.
            Dr. Watson’s “2-21” tribute to his late friend Sherlock Holmes ended with the publication of “The Final Problem” in December 1893. And that was a good thing, because only a few months later, in the spring of 1894, Sherlock Holmes turned out to be alive.
            Sherlock Holmes returned to London and renewed his friendship with Dr. Watson in the first days of April of 1894. Conan Doyle, who had been in Switzerland for some time, returned to England later that same month.  While there may be more mundane reasons to offer for Doyle’s sudden return, the timing  seems awfully coincidental.  And consider this: Conan Doyle had no reason to ever meet Sherlock Holmes before the man’s supposed death at Reichenbach Falls. 
            With such wonderful news, Dr. Watson had to be crowing to every friend and associate he had about  Holmes’s miraculous return from the dead. Doyle was sure to have been one of them,  promptly getting a letter in Switzerland.  And the amazing successes of the Adventures and Memoirs  case write-ups, combined with that  return from the dead,  gave Doyle ample motivation to want to finally meet this curious fellow named Holmes. But might he have had even more reason than that?
            Think about this for a moment:  Conan Doyle is known to have visited Reichenbach Falls in one of his hiking expeditions, the site of Sherlock Holmes’s supposed death, not all that long before.  He even referred to Reichenbach at one point  as “a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock.” And then, when Doyle hears Holmes is alive, he quickly comes  back to London for some reason.
            Did Doyle see something at Reichenbach Falls?  Something that made him rush back to London when he heard  the astounding news that Sherlock Holmes was somehow alive?  Could that same something have been responsible for another change in Doyle’s life that took place at that time, pushing Doyle even further into a role as a paranormal  investigator, investigating any possibility of  life beyond death?
            Doyle was interested in the paranormal before 1894, don’t get me wrong. But after his return to London that year,  Doyle’s work in the field took on a whole new dimension that a merely literary study of Doyle might pass over. By June of that year, Doyle was  doing things like accompanying Podmore and Scott from the Society for Psychical Research up to Dorset to look into a poltergeist matter.  If it were the modern day and not 1894, Conan Doyle would have been appearing on one of those SciFi Channel television shows like Ghost Hunters and Paranormal U. Something in the days after Sherlock Holmes’s return to the living seemed to be giving him fresh motivation as a ghost hunter.
            But for Doyle’s former literary client Dr. Watson, life was going the opposite direction. Watson was back at 221B Baker Street, and things were returning to normal . Sherlock Holmes was back on the job, and all was right with the world.  As Sherlock Holmes himself would later say,  “What have we to do with walking corpses?  . . . This Agency stands flat footed upon the ground and there it shall remain. ” Things were just as normal as normal could be at 221B, however it was Holmes got back from the Other Side. But that’s just Watson.
            Conan Doyle, on the other hand,  suddenly doesn’t  seem exactly comfortable with being in a London that held Mr. Sherlock Holmes. We find Doyle soon taking a tour of the United States . . . then Egypt . . . .then building a house in Hindhead,  waaaaaay out in southwest Surrey, a goodly distance from London .
            So for the whole rest of the 1890s – the better part of a decade -- Dr. Watson was satisfied to be working with Holmes again and Conan Doyle was perfectly happy staying as far away as he could from the both of them.
            Until the Boer War.
            In 1900, Conan Doyle went to South Africa to serve his country at a field hospital during that war, a hellish time and place where disease was as deadly to the soldiers as enemy bullets.  Facing death itself on a daily basis,  Doyle was tested,  finding that resolve within himself to keep going when others turned away or drank themselves numb.  In a war that broke many men, as wars do,  Conan Doyle eventually returned home with the strength to do something he hadn’t planned:  deal with  Sherlock Holmes again.
            Whether it was something he learned in the war, or something he heard from Fletcher Robinson on the boat back,  Doyle returned to England with the first inkling of a plan involving Mr. Sherlock Holmes.  As with so much of history, we can never truly see the inner workings of such a plan, just the effects. And the effects we can see are these:
            Conan Doyle called upon Dr. Watson for another  long segment of his reminiscences, one involving a case from the days before Holmes was thought dead, and one that Doyle and Watson had certainly discussed in selecting the shorter cases from Watson’s papeers for Adventures and Memoirs.
            The case Conan Doyle apparently asked Watson for was very different from any Holmes case published before that date . . . it dealt with the supernatural, a family curse, and a man who gave his soul over to the devil to accomplish his desires.  Doyle got the tale to the publisher, and very soon,  in August of 1901, The Hound of the Baskervilles  began to appear in The Strand Magazine.  It was instantly popular, bringing Conan Doyle  back into the limelight.  And during that immense popularity of The Hound of the Baskervilles,  Conan Doyle tells anyone who asks one thing: Sherlock Holmes is still dead at the foot of Reichenbach Falls.
            Of all people, Doyle should know that Holmes is still alive.  He came back to England when Holmes did. He has obviously talked to Dr. Watson many times. So why is paranormal investigator Conan Doyle running around telling  everyone that Holmes is still dead?
            Well, let’s switch over and look at what starts to happen with Sherlock Holmes.
            The month the fourth chapter  of The Hound of the Baskervilles comes out,  he takes Watson to Sussex to investigate a vampire, all the while telling Watson over and over what a crock vampires are.
            And not so long after the last chapter  of the book comes out,  Sherlock Holmes himself is leaving London and retiring. To Sussex.  The place with the phoney-baloney vampire scare.
            As soon as Sherlock Holmes is out of London, we also find Conan Doyle taking a renewed interest in Dr. Watson’s papers again.  Sure, it may seem on the surface that Doyle is just reviewing them,  picking out the good adventures for publication in The Strand Magazine,  but how does that over-used saying go?  “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” How much closer could one get to a man  -- while staying as far away from him as possible – than buddying up to his biographer and poring over the detailed records of Watson and Holmes’s time together?
            As a result, the world saw the publication of the thirteen (note the omnious number) stories of The Return of Sherlock Holmes as a glorious celebration of the great detective.  Underneath the surface, however,   a canny observer might see it for something much darker . . . a determined paranormal investigator’s  research into  a man who had once been dead and was now, to all appearances,  alive again.
            While on the surface, Conan Doyle’s life may have seemed focussed on a great deal of things other than Sherlock Holmes and the paranormal – racing motor cars, boxing, investing, etc. – it’s not hard to see that Holmes was never far from Doyle’s thoughts. In August of 1914, Sherlock Holmes returns to England after an undercover stint as an Irish radical.  A month later, Conan Doyle has one of Watson’s cases published involving Irish radicals, The Valley of Fear.  It’s almost as if Doyle was saying to Sherlock Holmes, “I’m keeping my eye on you.”
            In that same decade, Doyle publishes “The Dying Detective” and the “in-a coffin-yet-still-alive” tale of Lady Frances Carfax.  What message is he trying to send to Sherlock Holmes,  who is suddenly nowhere to be seen?
            Also nowhere to be seen is Dr. John H. Watson, whose last recorded presence on Earth was in August of 1914. Sherlock Holmes mentions that Watson is “joining us with his old service,” a phrase most immediately assume has to do with the coming war.
            Sherlock Holmes also speaks at that time of “God’s own wind” blowing upon them, and how “a good many of us may wither before its blast.” Again, most assume he’s talking about the war, but why should Holmes talk of withering before the pure wind of God? It’s not like the Ark of the Covenant had been found yet and he was a Nazi.
            In any matter, the case known as “His Last Bow” is the last record of the existence  of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson upon this Earth. 
            We do know that Conan Doyle had one more contact with Dr. Watson, however, for three years later,  Doyle has a letter from Dr. Watson to his readers to include in the book publication of His Last Bow.  Doyle, at the time was looking into spirit photography.
            “The friends of Sherlock Holmes,” Dr. Watson wrote in his letter,  “will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well, though somewhat crippled up by occasional attacks of rheumatism. He has for many years, lived on a small farm upon the downs five miles from Eastbourne, where his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture.”
            What could seem more normal?  Just another harmless old man taking it easy. Dr. Watson makes no mention of what he himself if doing, or where he lives.  But if you are paying attention to details here, you’ll find one very important one . . . in this very harmless letter of a very harmless old man, Dr. Watson basically gives Sherlock Holmes’s address. And who was he giving it to, first and foremost?
            Conan Doyle.
            The paranormal investigator.
            Three very interesting things happened in 1917. First, Dr. Watson has sent a letter to Conan Doyle that tells him where Sherlock Holmes was living.  Second,  Conan Doyle takes an interest in photographing the dead, something he has previously maintained that Sherlock Holmes was.  And third,  two little girls in Cottingley took their first photos of fairies.
            Conan Doyle championed the cause of the fairy-photographing girls,  with articles in The Strand Magazine,  and later a book. He was convinced that supernatural creatures could be photographed,  and  accepted the girls at their word.  What does all this have to do with Sherlock Holmes?
            Remember what Conan Doyle said on film in 1927?
            “The curious thing is how many people around the world are perfectly convinced that  he (meaning Sherlock Holmes) is a living human being. “
            By 1927,  Conan Doyle was as deep into the research and study of that line between life and death as any man.  He had seen and spoken to many a person who was no longer “a living human being.” His experiences tended to involve ghosts,  but as we saw with the Cottingley fairies, he did not limit himself to them.  That same year, describing Sherlock Holmes in his introduction to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote eerily of “that pale, clear-cut face and loose limbed figure” as if Holmes were some sort of spectre.  Later in that same introduction,  Doyle announces “Farewell to Sherlock Holmes forever!” with a certainty and  an air of triumph, as though he has at last put a haunting spirit to rest.
            There is a very interesting thing missing in Conan Doyle’s rambling eulogy to Sherlock Holmes at the beginning of Case Book,  a very interesting and important detail that most of us would expect to be there:  Dr. Watson is not mentioned at all.
            “Farewell to Sherlock Holmes forever!” Doyle wrote. Not “Farewell to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson forever!”
            Watson apparently got  to live a little longer.
            Was that thanks to Conan Doyle?
            Remember what else Doyle said in that interview on the movie screen:
            “I get letters addressed to his rather stupid friend, Watson.”
            He doesn’t imply that Watson isn’t a living human being in that interview, the way he does with Holmes.  He just calls Watson “rather stupid,” the same way you would talk of a good friend who was under the evil influence of a life-sucking spouse for too many years. It’s a comment born of loving frustration, not of gauging intelligence. 
            Conan Doyle is getting Watson’s mail, too. If Watson was still alive, that could be taken to mean that Watson was living with Doyle for a time after Doyle got him away from Sherlock Holmes.
            But this is all hypothesis. What we do know is that on Monday, July 7, 1930, Arthur Conan Doyle died in his bed at home. We have no such information about Dr. Watson, though one must assume he, too, passed on at some point, but in July of 1930, their literary partnership was definitely over. We would like to think that both men were the better for having known the other.
            But as to Sherlock Holmes . . . well, there are those who still say that Sherlock Holmes will live forever.
            And that, my friends, is something that should keep you awake at night.

Other Sherlock Holmes Historical Bits

Blondin and Niagara

Norman-Neruda