In accordance with government guidelines on social distancing and to keep the member of The Shingle of Southsea safe from the possibility of infecting himself with COVID-19, there will be no June meeting of The Shingle of Southsea.
Instead we will share the following essay written by "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)
Watson Is Full Of Crap
by Paul Thomas Miller
As any student of The Great Detective knows, Dr John H. Watson is an untrustworthy blackguard. The indications of this are manifold but I select two now to make my point:
- There are no records of a John H. Watson graduating from the University of London in 1878, as he tells us he did.
- Further, there is no record of him joining the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, as he claimed he did, either.
If he must be doubted on the basic details of his own biography, the doubt must extend to all his doings. Unfortunately, the dissimulating doctor is the principal source we have for examining Sherlock Holmes. By examining the veracity of Watson’s accounts, I shall endeavour to discover how much of our knowledge of Mr. Holmes is trustworthy.
Once we acknowledge the mendacious nature of Watson, it is important to examine all of The Canon to find out which of his tales we may trust. If any story should contain an iota of deception, we much ignore the whole, for one falsehood casts doubt over the entire tale.
In the collection of stories known to Holmesians as The Canon, fifty-six stories are explicitly written by Dr Watson. Two are written in the third person; I have argued elsewhere (see my reasonably priced, invaluable, excellent book Watson Does Not Lie, available now on Amazon) that these were written by Watson. He chooses to write in the third person because he is writing up events which he was not wholly present for. The remaining two stories appear to have been written by Sherlock Holmes himself. Although the style of prose is remarkably similar to Watson's and I have my suspicions about the true author, for the sake of argument, I take the authorship at face value. As such I will deal with these two stories separately at the end of this essay.
There follows, then, an examination of all sixty stories and whether we can trust them. I shall only look for one mistruth for each story and if one is discovered, the entire story shall be cast out without need for further examination.
(The reader may find that they have spotted extra errors in the stories which I do not discuss. Good for the reader. Well done, you.)
(I should take this opportunity to apologise for the many unoriginal points I am sure I must make in the course of this discussion. These stories have been available for over one hundred years, so I am certain I am not the first to have spotted or commented on these difficulties. An awful lot of these notions were inspired by or lifted from D. Martin Dakin’s “A Sherlock Holmes Commentary”.)
A Study In Scarlet (and some further notes on how we shall proceed):
I shall not discuss the discrepancy of location of Watson’s wound, caused by a Jezail bullet. Here he is shot in the shoulder, elsewhere in the Canon in a limb, still elsewhere through a leg. It serves no use to us as there is no way of knowing which story (if any) is true and which is a lie. This same argument applies for most inconsistencies between different stories.
There is something more solid to be found at the start of chapter two.
“We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221b, Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting.”
In the 1880s, when this tale takes place, Baker Street did not go as high as 221. It was not until 1930, when it was extended to include Upper Baker Street that the number went high enough to include a 221.
That said, the deception about an address may simply to have been to protect Watson and Holmes’s privacy, so it needn’t cast excessive doubt upon the story.
What might raise suspicion, however, is the following, which arrives in a letter from Lestrade at the beginning of chapter three:
“There has been a bad business during the night at 3, Lauriston Gardens, off the Brixton Road.”
There is, nor ever has been, a Lauriston Gardens in London. Lauriston Gardens are, in fact, in Edinburgh, some five hundred and thirty-seven miles away from the Brixton Road.
But, again, addresses may have been changed to protect privacy of current occupants and to prevent sightseers harassing them. Going forward then, the evidence of false addresses will not be considered as a problem. The same argument goes for the many names of people in The Canon, which can be shown never to have existed.
We will play devil’s advocate from this point forward. Errors in names of places and people will generally be considered permissible. Also, differences in facts between stories will be overlooked. Unless they are without decent explanation, we shall not raise these subjects again. Instead we shall concentrate on the substantial red-flags we encounter.
In this instance, the substantial red-flag comes at the end of chapter five:
“This is a queer old book I picked up at a stall yesterday--De Jure inter Gentes--published in Latin at Liege in the Lowlands, in 1642”
There is no such book. Nor is there any good reason for Watson to make up this book. It is an aside, not intrinsic to the plot. He made it up for the sake of it. And we must, therefore, question the validity of all else in this story. A Study in Scarlet must be struck from our Trustworthty Canon.
The Sign of the Four:
Tonga, the Andamanese side kick of Jonathan Small presents the major problem in this story. Tonga uses his traditional Andamanese blow-pipe and poison darts to execute Bartholomew Sholto and to attack Holmes and Watson towards the end of the story. Unfortunately, the Andamanese exclusively use bow and arrows as a weapon. They also do not use poisons. This tale must also be assumed to be utter bunk.
A Scandal in Bohemia:
“Now for the 'Eg.' Let us glance at our Continental Gazetteer."
Early on in the story Holmes and Watson consult the Continental Gazetteer – another non-existent book. We must strike this story from the Trustworthy Canon.
The Red-Headed League:
There is plenty of room for doubt in this tale, but I shall restrict myself to one of the first lies Watson reports:
"It is The Morning Chronicle of April 27, 1890. Just two months ago."
The Morning Chronicle ceased publication in 1865. This tale must be considered fraudulent.
A Case of Identity:
A serious error appears in the dénouement of this case:
"It--it's not actionable," he stammered.
"I am very much afraid that it is not.”
The case would at the very least be actionable as a breach of promise to marry (an offence in the U.K. until 1970). There is likely a case of fraud to made too. Holmes would have known this and would have said as much. Clearly Watson is making things up and this case must be treated as boondoggle.
The Boscombe Valley Mystery:
Lestrade’s role in this story is enough to suggest falsehood in the entire report. He, a Scotland Yard inspector, is hired privately to disprove the police’s own case. I doubt this would be tolerated by his superiors. Even if this were permissible, he appears to set out from the first to do the opposite for his private client. The whole set up stinks and thus, The Boscombe Valley Mystery can be discounted from any Trustworthy Canon.
The Five Orange Pips:
A lesser Holmesian may be tempted to take issue with Watson’s suggestion that Clark Russell's sea-stories were “fine”. I shall not. There is no accounting for taste, even Watson’s.
It is the involvement of a disbanded KKK in England in 1887 which bothers me. It makes no sense for a disbanded organisation to care about a box of their paperwork which is hidden away on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, I can find no reference to the KKK sending seeds to people as a threat in any other literature.
The basis of this story makes little sense and for that reason it must, as a whole, be considered poppycock.
The Man with the Twisted Lip:
In disguise, Neville St Clair is incarcerated for a total of five days. The make-up employed by St Clair to turn himself into Hugh Boone simply would not have lasted so long. (It might be suggested that he used some previously unheard off, super-durable make-up. But we would have to dismiss such a claim: it took one wipe of Holmes’s damp sponge to remove the entire disguise.) It simply does not make sense. Another story must be struck from the Trustworthy Canon.
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle:
“The bird gave a gulp, and I felt the stone pass along its gullet and down into its crop.”
Geese do not have the crops this story so heavily relies on. The story is hokum.
The Adventure of the Speckled Band:
The snake itself in this story should be enough to write the whole thing off. The Indian swamp adder does not exist. Snakes do not like drinking milk – they are reptiles, it makes them ill. They would struggle to hear a whistle given that they have no ears. Very few snakes can climb ropes, and those that can cannot do it at any great speed. Certainly no creature I know of can survive long in a small airtight safe. However, this is old ground. And there are (very tenuous) arguments against these objections.
So I will support those objections with the account of Helen Stoner’s mother’s death:
“my mother died--she was killed eight years ago in a railway accident near Crewe.”
This statement was made, we are told, in April 1883. A quick check of any railway history will reveal that there were no railway accidents in Cheshire in 1875.
Both the major and minor details of this case are flim-flam. The story should be discounted.
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb:
The use of a room sized hydraulic press for forging coins seems unlikely enough to me, but I am not an expert on such matters, so I shall reserve judgement.
I shall instead confine my attentions to the fate of Hatherley’s thumb.
“The firemen had been much perturbed… by discovering a newly severed human thumb upon a window-sill of the second floor. “
Can we seriously suppose that a severed thumb still remained on the windowsill of Dr. Becher’s house? Even in ordinary circumstances, this would be improbable. An errant gust of wind at the very least would cause it to fall. But this is a house which was reduced to ruins by a fire. The roof had caved in, the contents were destroyed. It took firemen from early morning until sunset to put the blaze out. Such a blaze would have caused walls to crumble and windows to smash. But we are supposed to believe that there, on a second story window sill, despite all the chaos surrounding it, the thumb remained unmoved by creature, calamity or climate. I think not. The entire story is balderdash.
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor:
“Lady St. Simon said something about 'jumping a claim.' She was accustomed to use slang of the kind. I have no idea what she meant.”
During their preliminary discussion Sherlock Holmes and Lord Robert St. Simon both repeatedly refer to the missing bride as “Lady St. Simon”. Even if we can excuse Sherlock Holmes not knowing she should be called “Lady Robert”, toffee-nosed ponce, Lord Robert, would certainly have known. He would most certainly have taken the opportunity to correct Holmes and would never have made the mistake himself.
Clearly Lord Robert along with this entire tale, cannot be kept in a Trustworthy Canon.
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet:
The very basis of this story contains so many improbabilities that we should be confident in our dismissal of it. An illustrious gentlemen with access to the crown jewels “borrows” a small crown and uses it to secure a loan. Unlikely… but let us proceed. The bank owner decides that this crown would not be safe in the vault of a bank. Instead he thinks it would be safer in a desk with a broken lock in his own home. This is even more implausible. Taken together these two incidents should be enough to discredit the whole affair.
However, we shall proceed to the moment when events become impossible rather than improbable. We are told that during a struggle between Sir George Burnwell and Arthur Holder, the coronet “snapped” with “a noise like a pistol shot”. This is solid gold coronet. It would be impossible for two mere mortals to snap a solid gold anything with their bare hands. And the suggestion that a soft metal such as gold simply snapped with a loud bang is preposterous. Again, this whole story must be taken as a crude fabrication.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches:
“And here comes the country surgeon and Mrs. Rucastle, so I think, Watson, that we had best escort Miss Hunter back to Winchester, as it seems to me that our locus standi now is rather a questionable one.”
This story ends with Holmes, Hunter and Watson deciding to leg it before Mrs. Ruscastle returns, to avoid getting in trouble. This doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Mrs. Ruscatle already knew Violet Hunter was there. And Mr. Ruscastle (who survived being mauled by his own dog) knew that Holmes and Watson were there too (although he may not have known who they were).
But even if their flight to London was successful in evading the attentions of the police, surely the very act of publishing this story would have left them open to prosecution.
Nope. It doesn’t add up. This is another one to be barred from our Trustworthy Canon.
Silver Blaze:
The inconsistencies between the behaviour of Holmes and the accepted rules of the turf are so damning that they write the story off at a stroke. Principally, running a horse in make-up would have seen the horse disqualified. Rather than being congratulated, Holmes, Watson and Ross would all have been berated, escorted from the course, and banned from the turf forever. This whole story is pure fantasy.
The Yellow Face:
Effie is supposed to have married John Hebron in Georgia, US sometime in the 1870s. In an act of supreme racism, this state banned interracial marriage from 1750 all the way up to 1972. There is no way Effie and her husband would have remained unmolested in these circumstances. Certainly, even if they did survive at the hands of racist locals and a racist legal system, there is no way Effie – a loving mother – would abandon her black child in such a place for three years.
It is possible that I have misunderstood the law at that time, but for me the whole story stinks. This is another story to ban from our Trustworthy Canon.
The Stock-Broker's Clerk:
It would be a cheap shot to question the likelihood of anyone going to live in Birmingham willingly, so I shall avoid making such observations. Instead, as I sit here having my cake and eating it, I note that Hall Pycroft receives a book at one point in the story:
“For answer, he took a big red book out of a drawer. ‘This is a directory of Paris,’ said he…”
The Paris Directory and Anglo-American Traveller's Guide was published by Donald Downie, Paris. It is a small blue book, not a big red one.
The next nearest thing I can find to this is the “Annuaire-Almanach du Commerce, de l'Industrie”. It was essentially an old version of The Yellow Pages. Like The Yellow Pages it was printed on cheap paper which is a pale yellow. The cover too, was a yellowy white.
There is no potential candidate for the Paris Directory which was big and red. This story must be considered yet more hogwash.
The “Gloria Scott”:
In this story we are told the The Gloria Scott sank at N. Lat. 15° 20', W. Long. 25° 14'. But we are also told that just before it sank:
“the Cape de Verds were about five hundred miles to the north of us, and the African coast about seven hundred to the east”
It is a shame then that travelling to N. Lat. 15° 20', W. Long. 25° 14' would place us more or less in the middle of the Cape Verde islands. Certainly within sight of all the islands, leaving no room to think you were actually five hundred miles away from them.
This tale must be discounted.
The Musgrave Ritual:
This story revolves around the discovery of Charles I’s crown beneath Musgrave Manor. Unfortunately, Charles I’s crown was The Tudor Crown, which was commissioned by Henry VIII. Once Oliver Cromwell abolished the monarchy and executed Charles I in 1649, the crown was destroyed and the components sold off separately. It was never seen again. The crown was never buried in anyone’s house. This story is nonsense.
The Reigate Squires:
"Tut, man, look at their faces!" cried Holmes, curtly…
"I have no alternative, Mr. Cunningham," said he. "I trust that this may all prove to be an absurd mistake.
At the end of this story, Inspector Forrester shows great reluctance in arresting the Cunninghams but claims he has no other choice. Why? Because Holmes has pointed out the expressions on their faces are a bit evil. I seriously doubt a policeman who thought these squires were innocent would be compelled to arrest them anyway based on their expressions. The story must be considered moonshine.
The Crooked Man:
It is unfortunate for this story that Barclay and Wood’s regiment is very specifically claimed to be The Royal Munsters: “one of the most famous Irish regiments in the British army.” The Munsters did not exist until 1881, twenty-four years after the Indian Rebellion Barclay and Wood were caught up in.
The tenacious Holmesian may wish to point out that it is stated in the story that The Munsters were formed out of the old 117th foot. This does not help us; the 117th foot disbanded in 1796, sixty-one years too early to be of use to us.
The Munsters were, in fact, formed out of the 101st Regiment of Foot (Royal Bengal Fusiliers) who, in 1857, were too busy besieging rebels in Delhi to be besieged themselves in Bhurtee .
The details of the regiment make no sense. This story must be struck from our Trustworthy Canon.
The Resident Patient:
The story wraps up with the fate of the criminals who executed Beddington:
"...it is surmised at Scotland Yard that they were among the passengers of the ill-fated steamer Norah Creina, which was lost some years ago with all hands upon the Portuguese coast..."
Sadly, the Norah Creina was a paddle steamship, built in 1878. She only ever travelled between Liverpool and Ireland. She never went near Portugal. And she was never lost; she was eventually sold for scrap in 1912.
Another story must be considered bunk.
The Greek Interpreter:
This is the story in which we are introduced to Mycroft; Sherlock Holmes’s smarter older brother. Holmes goes to great lengths to explain the vastly superior knowledge of his brother. But then we are confronted with his actions.
When Mr. Melas fears for his life, and those of Paul and Sophy Kratides, Mycroft goes out of his way to alert the criminals by placing an advert in all the papers:
“Anybody supplying any information as to the whereabouts of a Greek gentleman named Paul Kratides, from Athens, who is unable to speak English, will be rewarded. A similar reward paid to any one giving information about a Greek lady whose first name is Sophy. X 2473.”
Any fool could see this would lead to dire repercussions for Melas and the Kratideses. Certainly Mycroft The Genius should have been able to foresee it. And yet he does not.
The whole story is, therefore, highly suspect.
The Naval Treaty:
The plot of this one revolves around a treaty between England and Italy which was written in… French.
Why? No reasonable explanation can be found. I call “poppycock” and move on.
The Final Problem:
Moriarty - an unscrupulous, evil genius - chases Sherlock Holmes – Moriarty’s deadliest enemy – across Europe. When he finally catches up with Holmes, despite having a perfect opportunity to shoot Holmes in the face, Moriarty allows Holmes to write a note to Watson and then they have a cliff top wrestle instead.
With very little research Moriarty would have known Holmes was an accomplished boxer, single stick player etc. etc.
It makes no sense for him to try to eliminate Holmes in this way. He would have shot Holmes and then dumped him over the edge of the falls to get rid of the evidence.
Bunk.
The Adventure of the Empty House:
We are told in this story that Sebastian Moran knows Holmes is alive because he saw Holmes survive at the Reichenbach Falls. We are also told that Holmes knew this.
We are told in this story that Holmes pretended to be dead for three years so that Moriarty’s henchmen would not know Holmes was alive.
We are told in this story that Sebastian Moran was one of Moriarty’s henchmen.
This story is obviously purest fiction. It can be struck off of our Trustworthy Canon with a touch more than the usual vehemence.
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder:
The very notion that a qualified solicitor such as John Hector McFarlane would even consider being sole witness to a will made entirely to his own benefit is preposterous. This story must be denounced as ineffable twaddle.
The Adventure of the Dancing Men:
This story draws to its close with Elsie Cubitt choosing to commit suicide and shooting herself in the head.
Not only does she survive this injury, we are told “she recovered entirely”.
How? We know she did not miss her own head as her wounds are evident. Did she miss her brain? Was it that tiny?
No. As seems increasingly the case, this story must be treated as untrue.
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist:
"On referring to my note-book for the year 1895 I find that it was upon Saturday, the 23rd of April, that we first heard of Miss Violet Smith."
So begins the second paragraph of this story. And that is where we can stop reading it.
April 23rd 1895 was very much Tuesday. Not Saturday. Only a fool would give credence to such a poorly conceived lie (See my book Watson Does Not Lie.) The story must be immediately expunged from our Trustworthy Canon.
The Adventure of the Priory School:
(I know that I am not the first person to make the following observation. Just about every other Holmesian has done so. I apologise for being so very repetitive and dull. I also know that the literary agent once tried to prove it could be done, but his argument was far from convincing.)
“This track, as you perceive, was made by a rider who was going from the direction of the school.”
“Or towards it?”
“No, no, my dear Watson. The more deeply sunk impression is, of course, the hind wheel, upon which the weight rests.”
Regardless of whether you can tell which tyre track is produced by the front or rear wheel of a bicycle, such information would not provide you with the direction of travel of a bicycle.
These days, the tyre tread pattern might give such information, but it would not have done back then.
The story is untrustworthy tosh.
The Adventure of Black Peter:
There is no record of a whaling ship called The Sea Unicorn sailing out of Dundee in the 1800s. If Black Peter’s ship did not exist, it seems unlikely that the rescue and murder of Neligan could have taken place upon it. All in all, the story is too suspicious to be accepted into our Trustworthy Canon.
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton:
This story ends with Holmes and Watson breaking in to a private home, witnessing a murder and then running away and pretending nothing happened.
If this story were true, the police would have read it in The Strand in 1904, arrested Holmes and Watson and then prosecuted them. That Watson kept publishing stories is proof enough that the story must be false.
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons:
“Until then I should like to keep this photograph found in the dead man's pocket.”
A key piece of evidence is found upon a murder victim and the official police force let Sherlock Holmes – a member of the public – wander off with it. I think not. The entire story is untrustworthy.
The Adventure of the Three Students:
There are two different indications of Sir Jabez Gilchrist’s character in this story. The first from Mr. Hilton Soames, the tutor:
“His father was the notorious Sir Jabez Gilchrist, who ruined himself on the turf.”
The second from the ex-Gilchrist family butler. Bannister is in the process of explaining why he treated young Gilchrist so tenderly:
“I should try to speak to him as his dead father would have done”
So, Bannister seems to think Jabez was of exemplary character and worth modelling oneself upon. Whereas Hilton claims he was of such disreputable character that he ruined himself.
The basic facts of this case seem so at odds with themselves that we must abandon all faith in it.
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez:
“Pray take a cigarette. And you, sir? I can recommend them, for I have them especially prepared by Ionides of Alexandria. He sends me a thousand at a time, and I grieve to say that I have to arrange for a fresh supply every fortnight.”
The rate of cigarette consumption by Professor Coram is worthy of investigation. One thousand per fortnight is about seventy-one per day.
The infirm Coram must sleep at least eight hours a night. We can also assume he spends at least two hours a day performing ablutions, eating meals and so forth. This leaves him fourteen hours a day to consume his seventy-one cigarettes. It works out as him lighting a new cigarette every twelve minutes.
Such a rate wouldn’t make much sense in an average man. But the bed-ridden, elderly Coram would have died of tobacco poisoning long ago if he genuinely smoked at such a rate.
Clearly the habits of this man are a fabrication. If his habits, why not the whole man? If the whole man, why not the whole story? This tale cannot be trusted.
The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter:
“…on a gloomy February morning…”
The events of this story revolve around the annual rugby match between Oxford and Cambridge Universities. This match is always played upon the second Tuesday of December. It is surprising, then, that Watson is very clear about the month being February.
This story cannot be relied upon.
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange:
Once again, as with Charles Augustus Milverton, this story sees Holmes and Watson allowing a murderer to escape and then withholding evidence from the police. Again, if this story were true, our heroes would never have escaped legal action once it was published.
The Adventure of the Second Stain:
“Holmes wrote a name upon a slip of paper and handed it to the Premier.”
Rather than just name “a certain foreign potentate” who penned a dangerous letter, Holmes chooses to write the name on a piece of paper and show it to the Premier.
Why? Everyone in the room knew what was going on and could be trusted.
The only explanation seems to be that Watson includes this moment for dramatic effect. If he is doctoring stories for dramatic effect we cannot trust any of the story.
The Hound of the Baskervilles:
How are we to reconcile the following description of The Hound:
"A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame."
With the prosaic explanation for this effect:
"I placed my hand upon the glowing muzzle, and as I held them up my own fingers smouldered and gleamed in the darkness.
"Phosphorus," I said."
Phosphorus simply does not produce such a dramatic effect. We must doubt either the appearance of the dog, the methods used to produce the appearance of the dog or both. Whichever we choose, the very basis of the story is so compromised that we can no longer trust this tale.
The Valley Of Fear:
There is a serious dating error in the account of Birdy Edwards’ exploits in the Vermissa Valley. Watson invites us
“to journey back some twenty years in time”
and then Edwards’ tale starts with the clear statement that
“It was the fourth of February in the year 1875”
This means Watson and Holmes must have had their adventure in Birlstone Manor around 1895. However Watson began the entire story with a clear statement that these:
“were the early days at the end of the '80's”
There is a discrepancy of at least six years here which must cast doubt over the entire testimony.
The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge:
(I will not place too much emphasis on this case taking place during the period we are supposed to believe he was dead at The Reichenbach Falls. I have already demonstrated that The Final Problem and The Empty House are to be doubted, so for all we know Holmes may have been around in 1892.)
I take issue in this story with the treatment of Miss Burnet. Henderson and Lucas kill Garcia and dispose of the body. They know that Miss Burnet was in league with Garcia and that they must silence her.
Surely, the next logical step would be to murder her and dispose of her body too. Then flee.
Instead, Henderson and Lucas risk everything by drugging her, and trying to flee with her in tow.
The reason we are given is that they decided it was too dangerous to kill her, but it would not have been any more dangerous than the murder they had already committed.
The story does not add up and as such must be stricken from our Trustworthy Canon.
The Adventure of the Cardboard Box:
Jim Browner must have known his wife had two sisters. He must, too have known that Sarah and Susan were living together: when Sarah moved out of his home and went to live with Susan, she left a forwarding address – after all Jim knew where to send his macabre gift.
Why then would he address the parcel with the confusingly vague “Miss S. Cushing”?
He wouldn’t. He didn’t. We cannot trust this story.
The Adventure of the Red Circle:
“A single flash--that is A, surely. Now, then. How many did you make it? Twenty. Do did In. That should mean T.”
The discrepancy between the code used in this story and the Italian alphabet is well documented already. I will treat it briefly here. The is no K in the Italian alphabet. This means that the code as recited in this story would not work. For example: twenty flashes should produce U.
Clearly this is a nonsense story.
The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans:
“As to Holmes, he returned refreshed to his monograph upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus, which has since been printed for private circulation, and is said by experts to be the last word upon the subject.”
Exhaustive researches into literature about Orlande de Lassus reveal no such monograph nor any reference to it.
This story is not to be accepted.
The Adventure of the Dying Detective:
“What do you know, pray, of Tapanuli fever? What do you know of the black Formosa corruption?”
It seems highly implausible to me that a trained medical man would not recognise two made up diseases when he heard them. Something stinks here and we must reject the entire story.
The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax:
How on earth would nobody – Holmes included at first – notice that the massive coffin for a tiny old lady was big enough to hold two bodies? And how did Lady Frances Carfax survive being doused in chloroform for such a long period of time? It makes no sense and the story must be discounted,
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot:
For the third time, Holmes and Watson let off a murderer and withhold evidence from the police. For a third time I insist that publishing this case if it were true would have caused the duo no end of bother. In the wise words of M.C. Hammer: “You can’t trust this.”
His Last Bow:
The story kicks off with a description of a private conversation between Baron Von Herling and Von Bork. There is no one present to hear this conversation, so there is no way Watson (or whoever the author is) could have known what was said.
This section must have been made up and therefore, we cannot trust any of this story.
The Illustrious Client:
At the end of this tale immediately after Gruner is attacked, Watson materialises “a hypodermic of morphia” from nowhere and administers it to his nefarious patient. It seems a strange thing for him to have brought with him to a meeting about pottery and I find it dubious enough to cast doubt upon the entire tale.
The Adventure Of The Mazarin Stone:
I can find no unreasonable or inexplicable deviations from known fact in this tale. Others find fault with how the gramophone in Holmes’s room managed to keep playing for so long. For myself, I can well imagine the scientific mind of Sherlock devising any number of methods to keep the record playing longer than was normal at the time. Perhaps a super-sized record or a player that resets itself each time it finishes the disc.
This then, is a tale which we may assuredly trust. Every last detail of it. Perhaps this is why Watson marked it out for the rare “third-person” treatment.
The Adventure of the Three Gables:
A horrible story which makes no sense.
In short, if Isadora Klein was as evil as we are led to believe, she would have no compunctions about hiring someone to subdue Mrs. Maberley and ransack all her belongings in search of the book. She certainly wouldn’t have gone through this highly suspicious rigmarole of buying the house and all its contents.
This story is a big pile of disgusting racist bovine manure.
The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire:
This story opens with the claim that Mr. Robert Ferguson wrote to a firm which specializes entirely upon the assessment of machinery to ask about vampires.
Ferguson is supposed to be a successful businessman, not a lunatic.
It doesn’t make sense and the story must be rejected.
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs:
Compare Watson’s statement that
“It was twilight of a lovely spring evening”
With his insistence that it
“was the latter end of June, 1902”
We find Watson cannot be trusted on when this story even took place, let alone any of the other details. This story must be removed from our Trustworthy Canon.
The Problem of Thor Bridge:
“No less remarkable is that of the cutter Alicia, which sailed one spring morning into a small patch of mist from where she never again emerged, nor was anything further ever heard of herself and her crew.”
As Philip Weller has previously noted, the Alicia was built in 1877 and wrecked in 1891 in known circumstances. If we cannot trust the minutiae of this yarn, we cannot trust any of it.
The Adventure of the Creeping Man:
This whole story balances on the quack notion that injecting monkey glands has any effect on human vigour or behaviour. As such theories have long since been debunked, the believability of this story has also collapsed.
The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger:
This story starts with a boast from Watson of how very much material he has about Sherlock Holmes and his cases. He goes on to say it is difficult to choose which one to write up because so many are exciting cases.
Then he writes up a story in which pretty much nothing happens and which is utterly tedious.
There is a strong suggestion of falsehood here and as such the entire case must be rejected from our Trustworthy Canon.
The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place:
In the course of this story we discover that Sir Robert Norberton
“horsewhipped Sam Brewer, the well-known Curzon Street money-lender”.
We then learn that he has since run up further debts with the same man.
“My chief creditor is, unhappily, my most bitter enemy--a rascally fellow, Sam Brewer”
And eventually that this “bitter enemy” assisted Sir Robert by holding “their hand until the race was over”.
It stretches credulity to imagine Sir Robert returning to borrow money from Brewer after such a public display of hatred.
It stretches it even further that Brewer would help Sir Robert by lending him more money or refraining on foreclosing.
We must reject this story’s trustworthiness on the basis that people just don’t behave like this.
The Adventure of the Retired Colourman:
We are led to believe that Dr. Ray Ernest, in his dying moments, used a pencil to write on the wall “We we” before dying.
He would have, presumably, have been holding the pencil as he died. So, either his corpse would have been holding it, or it would have fallen from his hand to rest somewhere nearby.
But the pencil is not found when the police, Barker and Holmes look over the room.
The only person who could conceivably have removed the pencil is Josiah Amberley as he cleaned up the crime scene and disposed of the bodies.
As he found the pencil, would he not have looked to see what it had been used to write? The purple writing would certainly have been easily spotted. And if Amberley spotted it he would have removed it.
The colourman who did nothing about the writing is curious enough to cast doubt upon the whole tale.
The Holmes Stories
We come then, to the two stories written by Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps we shall have more luck with them. As I have suggested already, it may be that these were written by a deceitful Watson penning Holmes's name to them erroneously, but that need not be important. And even if they are written by Holmes, how do we know that we may trust them? Our impression of Holmes as an honest sort of fellow relies on the testimony of Dr Watson, and we have already seen that he may not be trusted. We must, therefore, subject these tales to the same rigorous treatment as the previous fifty-eight tales.
The Blanched Soldier:
As Lord Donegall pointed out in 1965, it was not possible to get to Bedfordshire from Euston Station. Holmes’s claim that he did so rules out the trustworthiness of the entire tale.
The Adventure of the Lion's Mane:
I reject outright the very idea that anyone could become best friends with the person who maliciously through their pet dog through a window as did Murdoch to McPherson’s dog.
While some amount of reconciliation might be made, I find it hard to believe McPherson could trust Murdoch with his most secret confidences.
This story cannot be trusted.
CONCLUSION
Our detailed study of The Canon has shown that much of it is not to be trusted. Indeed, it seems that the only story we can place in our Trustworthy Canon is The Mazarin Stone. Therefore, we must henceforth regard The Mazarin Stone as the best, and indeed the only Sherlock Holmes story.
