A Certain Slant of Light

Although the Sherlocks Holmes novels are not included in Letters from Watson, I decided to read them roughly where they show up in William S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes chronology, so I polished off The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles last week.

I read The Sign of Four years ago, when I was studying abroad in England, and promptly forgot everything about it except the fact that Watson got engaged at the end, so I’ve been considering this chronology in baffled amazement, as many of the pre-Sign of Four stories include references to “my wife.” Apparently, Baring-Gould concluded that Watson was married three times, the first and last wife to remain nameless, both the first and the second wife dying off the page with nary a mention of their deaths from Watson.

Now I realize that Sherlock Holmes chronology is a mystery that would puzzle Mr. Holmes himself, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t give a flip about it and apparently contradicted himself merrily. But it seems to me that surely “Watson lost two wives and just forgot to mention it” can’t possibly be the most expeditious solution.

(I would read the hell out of a book about the dueling Sherlock Holmes chronologies, or indeed just a hundred years of Sherlock Holmes fandom drama.)

Anyway! Onward to Hound of the Baskervilles! I may have read this book before, or perhaps listened to an abridged version on tape, or maybe just watched the Wishbone episode? Anyway, I remembered the broad outlines of the story, but not the details, and I quite enjoyed it! Tense, pacy, delightful. Watson spends much of the book scuttling about all “I bet Holmes will be proud of my excellent detective work” - it’s the most “senpai notice me!” characterization in the stories so far, and perhaps responsible for the fact that this seems to be such a prominent Watson characterization in certain adaptations.