I’m currently working my way through The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which I downloaded to my iPhone.[sup]1[/sup] I figured I should read the original stories after watching Sherlock on Masterpiece and the Guy Ritchie movie. I’ve just completed the first collection, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and will shortly start on The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve noticed some continuity errors.
[ul]
[li]Watson’s wound moves from his shoulder in A Study in Scarlet to his leg in The Sign of the Four.[/li]
[li]Watson gets engaged to Mary at the end of The Sign of the Four, and has moved out of 221B Baker Street in the first couple of stories of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. However the final story in that collection, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” has Watson living with Holmes. This, by itself doesn’t bother me, since a couple of the stories in this collection occur before The Sign of the Four, but in the Narrative, Holmes refers to several cases that occur when Watson was married as if they had occurred in the past.[/ul][/li]
How are these inconsistencies explained in The Game?[sup]2[/sup]
1 - Ah Nook app - how did I live without you? Now I always have something to read.
2 - The correct answer is, of course, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, just wrote stories, and didn’t really pay attention to continuity. After all, who would pay that much attention to these trivial details?[sup]3[/sup]
You may already have read it, and it doesn’t really answer your questions, but it seems appropriate to link here to the Staff Report Did Sherlock Holmes really exist?
There are many inconsistencies in the Holmes stories. You are to be congratulated on finding some already. The simple truth is that Doyle simply forgot details, and even names. Sherlockians – the original Trekkies, I’m convinced – have tried to come up with ways to explain
1.) Watson’s moving Jezail bullet wound
2.) How many wives Watson had, and when
3.) Why in one story the landlady isn’t named “Mrs. Hudson”
4.) The Disappearance of Billy the Page Boy
5.) Why Watson’s wife calls him “James” on one occasion (The winner: His middle name is “Hamish”, Scottish for “James”)
6.) How Professor Moriarty fits into the chronology (“The Final Problem” is inconsistent with “The Valley of Fear”)
7.) Holmes’ disappearing cocaine addiction (Nicholas Meyer, of course, based an entire book on this, but there are other, more sinister explanations)
The questions of his wounds and his wives have never been resolved, and never will be. Conan Doyle was not, as you say, terribly concerned about continuity, so Holmesians debate these things over and over and over again. Much as I enjoy the Holmes stories, these debates long ago crossed the line, for me, into tedium.
Cal, a good summary, but you left out, why are both Prof. Moriarty and his brother named “James”?
The whole idea of Sherlock Holmes scholarship (or The Game as you call it) is rather silly, since the fact is that Doyle didn’t think his books through carefully and didn’t really care whether they were consistent. In any case, the difference in where the wound was is often explained by there supposedly being several wounds. It’s very common to explain the apparent appearance and disappearance of Watson’s wife by saying that he was married two or three times and was thus widowed once or twice.
It ain’t meant to be exhaustive. There are plenty of other questions (like why Watson calls The Priory School something completely different in another adventure, or why The Adventure of the Second Stain as related is inconsistent with its earlier description) But this was just off the top of my head. And if I were to list all of the Sherlockian questions, we’d be here all day.
I’ve also noticed that they’ve had at least two different landladies so far.
The inconsistencies are not really bugging me; I just find it amusing that Holmes repeatedly admonishes Watson for not paying enough attention to small, seemingly trivial details, but Doyle really let a lot of details slide.
I look at it the same way I look at Trekkers’ attempts to force consistency to The Original Series. It’s fun for some to do, fun for me to watch (or read), and ultimately hopeless.
It’s not like he wrote these as chapters in a book. They were stories for cheep publications, that he knocked out. He did try to get out of the series, but came back to it because of demand. I can see why as you proceed through the stories inconsistencies occur.
Sherlock Holmes is a man who figured out one particular case by observing the depth to which the parley sank into the butter on a hot day. If he wasn’t bothered by the location of his best friend’s war wound or how often he was married, then it doesn’t bother me, either.
Just as I say in post #4.
I don’t know of any other series or fictional character prior to Sherlock Holmes that people got so obsessed with, and so concerned about consistency. The only earlier thing of this sort I know of is Apollodorus’ obsession with consistency in the whole corpus of Greek Mythology, as shown by the way he handles things in his Library.
In the 1930’s or so Sherlock Holmes fans had raised money to put a commenorative bronze plaque at the location in London that most closely corrosponded to the fictional address of 221 B Baker Street.
Heated arguments ensued with the club split into 2 camps, each favoring one or another real-life location.
After no compromise was reached one disgruntled member, sitting at the bar, was heard to mutter “A plaque on both your houses!”
In this famous 1911 essay, Reverend Ronald Knox suggests that Watson was driven to drink by the death of both Holmes and his own wife. Here’s the key paragraph:
“Surely we may reconstruct the facts thus. Watson has been a bit of a gad-about. He is a spendthrift: so much we know from the beginning of the Study in Scarlet. His brother, so Holmes finds out by examining the scratches on the keyhole of his watch, was a confirmed drunkard. He himself, as a bachelor, haunts the Criterion Bar: in the Sign of Four he admits having had too much Beaune for lunch, behaves strangely at lunch, speaks of firing off a double-barreled tiger-cub at a musket, and cautions his future wife against taking more than two drops of castor-oil, while recommending strychnine in large doses as a sedative. What happens? His Elijah is taken away from him: his wife, as we know dies: he slips back into the grip of his old enemy; his practice, already diminished by continued neglect, vanishes away; he is forced to earn a livelihood by patching together clumsy travesties of the wonderful incidents of which he was once the faithful recorder.”
The drunker Watson gets, the more careless he becomes, and the result is the many inconsistencies you mention.
It’s worth remembering that Knox meant this essay as a satire on those who applied an equally convoluted logic to ironing out inconsistencies in the Bible. He was very embarrassed when the essay was taken seriously and hailed as the foundation stone for all the Sherlock Studies that followed.
The Game is considered to have been started by Ronald Knox.
The true target of the satire in the essay is the Higher Criticism:
The works of the Higher Criticism were largely Germanic, tendentious, tedious, nit-picky, and blustery, making them a perfect target for undergrad spoofing. Applying the same pull-each-sentence-apart technique to something as lightweight as Sherlock Holmes made the joke even funnier. That’s also why the basic set of Holmes original stories are known as the Canon.
The essay holds up pretty well on its own today, which means it must have had them rolling in the aisles at Oxford. It made Knox’s reputation, in much the same way that writing Bored of the Ring as Harvard undergrads did for Doug Kenney and Henry Beard. Most of what we recognize today as Holmesian issues and contradictions can be found here, although he must have been writing it from memory because his quotes are never quite right.
Doyle was still writing Holmes in 1927. But he died in 1930. The English publisher Murray put out a two-volume Complete Sherlock Holmes in 1928-29 and Doubleday copied it in America in 1930. This was like the King James Bible, the definitive edition that everybody could cite chapter and verse so that everybody could follow along. The Golden Age of Holmesian scholarship ensued. Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library reprinted the major books in paperback in the 1990s, so they’re all relatively findable and cheap. (Originals cost hundreds on the used book market.)
Not only that, but Christopher Morley started the Baker Street Irregulars in 1934, which spawned the Baker Street Journal in 1946 to publish more essays about every conceivable aspect of Holmes. The British had an equivalent organization with publication, and most countries in the world have their own variants. Other journals and magazines have sprung up and died off over the decades.
All this is a long-winded attempt at context to show why there are no good answers to the OP. The Game is at heart a game. (Except that some people are truly unhinged: think of it as a pre-Internet SDMB.) The point of each explanation of each contradiction was to one-up the last writer, not to agree with anything that was said. There are at least a half-dozen full-length books on the Chronological Problem alone. You are admired for your detailed research, your cleverness at putting facts and clues together, and your twisted ability to fashion a brand new answer from material that appears to be thoroughly picked over. Anything you can imagine about Holmes has been chewed over a dozen times. There are bibliographies of articles that run into thousands of entries and those are a generation old by now.
The classic books are fun and cover almost everything you care about, so I’d start there. William S. Baring-Gould, one of the unhinged, wrote both the “biography” Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and the first Annotated Sherlock Holmes, both to bolster his far-out even by the standards of the Game theories. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, by Leslie Klinger, is more sober and therefore less fun in my eyes. Baring-Gould was obsessed with chronology, because his was so different from everybody else’s. But he played fair and gave the reasoning behind all his major rivals. Klinger doesn’t get into it and for me that makes all the difference.
I don’t worry too much about the chronology, but I do have definite opinions about Watson’s marriages. I’m a fundamentalist: Watson was married once, to the charming Mary Morstan, whom he met in The Sign of Four and whom he amused with stories about double-barrelled tiger-cubs.
