Sort of like a literary Mornington Cresent?
Sheesh - he was worse than Ben Cartwight.
But the iPad doesn’t fit in my pocket, and I can’t just pull it out and read while I’m waiting in line.
As I recall, in “The 7% Solution,” Meyer also had some fun with Watson’s wandering wound.
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Baring-Gould had Watson married three times. Trevor Hall, in an essay in one his excellent books, makes it five.
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I was thinking of George Joseph Smith. Did Holmes ever look into the mystery of these multiple disappearing wives?
So then you have to buy a SCOTTEVEST. See how it works? It’s insidious, I tell you!
Well to be fair, one of them went by the name of Count Jim Moriarty so there wasn’t quite as much confusion as you’d think.
There’s a recent book out about Ronald Knox and the beginning of the Game. We covered it over on the Baker Street Blog last month: http://www.bakerstreetblog.com/2011/01/honourable-record-nava.html
You’re welcome to stop by and see what we’re covering in the world of Sherlock Holmes, either there or on I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.
Scott Monty, BSI
http://www.bakerstreetblog.com
Actually — although I can’t remember any instances — very occasionally, mainly in aristocratic families [ they being the only ones likely to have more than one forename, and their memories to be recorded ], christening living brothers with the same name was not unknown. One assumes the younger would be referred to by a middle name.
And, if a family name, a younger child could be named the same as an older sibling who had died in infancy; as with King Charles II.
Where it gets odd is when some father is so enamoured of himself that he names most of his children with a variant of his own christian name; as James may have five children: James, Jamie, Jamesina, Jamesetta and Jem…
What is even odder to a Scotsman is the habit of treating Jamie as a girl’s name.
I wouldn’t call the Strand particularly cheap: they paid better rates than most magazines of the time.
And he did have a large range of other interests, ranging from spiritualism, to the 2nd Boer War, to fighting for wrongfully convicted people, to medicine, to historical fiction, to campaigning against the Belgian Congo’s brutalities, to fairies. He perhaps begrudged the time to writing about Holmes.
Claverhouse writes:
> Actually — although I can’t remember any instances — very occasionally, mainly
> in aristocratic families [ they being the only ones likely to have more than one
> forename, and their memories to be recorded ], christening living brothers with
> the same name was not unknown.
One famous example of an aristocratic family with children all named the same is that of George Foreman:
He named all five of his sons George.
Does anyone else feel it was quite convenient for Holmes that his assistant was never distracted by a wife for too long?
But then, to kill five women and not have anyone get suspicious you’d have to be extremely knowledgeable about obscure things like undetectable poisons. And have the police believe everything you said. And, uhm, never mind.
I always figured that the ‘inconsistencies’ were placed into the stories on purpose to obfuscate the true identities of ‘Holmes’ and ‘Watson’…
From Sports Illustrated, January 31, 2011, p. 17
The Strand, BTW, might have been the premiere magazine in Britain at its time. When Doyle didn’t want to do another set of Holmes stories, he told them he wanted a thousand pounds for an additional dozen, thinking they would never pay such a ridiculous price, equivalent to a clerk’s annual salary apiece. They did. They paid even more for later stories.
Sure, “A Study in Scarlet” went to Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a nonentity. But that was the first Holmes story. Stephen King’s first book didn’t sell for much. Neither did J. K. Rowling’s. But that isn’t relevant to their careers.
Heh. As I remember the tale, Doyle set that absurdly high price and was quite taken aback when the editor said, “Done. When can we have the first story?”