Fictional Characters - Dr. John H. Watson

Doyle wrote the story in six weeks between March and April 1886. The working title was ‘A Tangled Skein’. Very soon ‘Ormond Sacker’ became John H. Watson. Doyle must have realised that Watson’s everyman status was better served by a more ordinary name and changed it. Holmes’s first first-name underwent a change too, from Sherrinford to Sherlock

The famous fiction writer Dorothy L. Sayers speculated the ‘H’ might be Hamish because of possible Scottish ancestry. Surprisingly it was never spelt out by Conan Doyle, just as Inspector G. Lestrade’s first name is not. Even the ‘John’ of Dr. John H. Watson is mentioned on only four occasions

Located on the Yarrowee River in the Grampians region of Victoria, Australia. As he wrote in ‘The Sign Of Four’, he stood hand-in-hand with Miss Mary Morstan, his wife-to-be, in the grounds of Pondicherry Lodge, 'like two children'. His childhood came back to him. ‘I have,’ he remarked, ‘seen something of the sort on the side of a hill near Ballarat, where the prospectors had been at work'

Regarding the real but short-lived Junior Naval & Military Club, there is no indication Holmes ever served in the Army or Navy and he would therefore not be eligible for membership in any of the famous London clubs with military connections

Taken there by his former surgical dresser Stamford, Watson finds Holmes experimenting with a reagent, seeking a test to detect human haemoglobin. Holmes explains the significance of bloodstains as evidence in criminal trials.

Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts consider this meeting an event in fiction as momentous as the real-life encounter ten years earlier between the explorer Henry M. Stanley and the famed missionary Dr. David Livingstone in the middle of Africa

Later, Holmes explains: "I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran: ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardships and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan’.”

Tattoos are mentioned elsewhere in Watson’s chronicles but they didn’t become a practice in Afghanistan until the US-led NATO intervention in 2001

Watson listed Holmes’s Knowledge of both Literature and Astronomy as ‘Nil’ and Knowledge of Politics as ‘Feeble’.

In October 2002, Britain’s eminent Royal Society of Chemistry bestowed an Extraordinary Honorary Fellowship upon Sherlock Holmes as the first detective to exploit chemical science as a means of detection

Watson and Holmes have taken rooms at 221B, Baker Street. Holmes receives a telegram requesting consultation in a fresh murder case. He is reluctant to help because credit would go entirely to the officials. Fatefully, Watson urges him to reconsider. Holmes does so, and invites Watson to accompany him to the scene of the crime, an abandoned house off the Brixton Road. And so the world-famous partnership began.

‘A Study in Scarlet’ was the first work of detective fiction to incorporate the magnifying glass as an investigative tool

Having or showing a sardonic sense of humour. A Scottish and Northern English term Arthur Conan Doyle would have known well from his own Scottish upbringing. In context Holmes may have used the term in the sense of ‘sly’ or ‘artful’

The mortal struggle with arch-foe Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Final Problem’ had not led to the Consulting Detective’s demise after all. Although Conan Doyle wanted to rid himself of his famous creation and turn to other literature, he came under more and more pressure to revive him (not least from his money-conscious mother), which he did in ‘The Empty House’, proposing that Holmes had decided to travel incognito to exotic places over a three-year ‘great hiatus’.

Watson writes, ‘I had not been in my study five minutes when the maid entered to say that a person desired to see me. To my astonishment it was none other than the strange old book-collector, his sharp, wizened face peering out from a frame of white hair, and his precious volumes, a dozen of them at least, wedged under his right arm. “You’re surprised to see me, sir,” said he, in a strange, croaking voice. I acknowledged that I was.’

Thinking Holmes long since dead, Watson has no idea whatsoever it’s his old comrade-in-arms in disguise. Watson continued, ‘When I turned again Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table. I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life.’