I’m currently reading THE GREAT DETECTIVE by Zach Dundas, a splendid history of Sherlock Holmes from Edgar Allan Poe (whose Dupin was a Holmes predecessor), through Basil Rathbone all the way to Downey and Cumberbatch.

I haven’t even passed Conan Doyle’s era yet, and I can already see that Dundas picks up meanings that most readers and dramatizers have missed, starting with the precise reason why Watson is always so loyal to Holmes, which until relatively recently I thought I was the only reader to understand.

Many readers miss it in Doyle’s vivid but Victorian prose, but at the time the two then-young men meet, Watson is a broken man: a recent military veteran, suffering from a disability, living in indolence on a miserly pension. They become roommates out of financial necessity and for weeks, weeks, Watson watches his odd companion come and go at odd hours, following strange errands, and has nothing at all but do but watch him in resentment, wondering what he’s up to, while he sits at home and does nothing, which is at that point the sum of his ambition. When Holmes invites him along on the case that we know as A STUDY IN SCARLET, he specifically tells Watson that he’ll be useful and should come “if he has nothing better to do.”

That savant of perception saw that his roommate had given up on life, and with that one gesture, pulled him out of despair.

By the end of their second case, Watson has made a new best friend, discovered that he can make a contribution to the world, and met the woman who will become his wife. (One of four wives he would have, by some counts; none of whom would live long. It’s a storytelling problem. For Holmes and Watson to make sense, Mrs. Watson needs to be either absent, or very very understanding.)

Watson is loyal to the man who helped him with his Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

And in return, Holmes gets, not a slow-witted fool, not somebody to whom he can show off his brilliance, but a man in whom he can place his utmost reliance: a man who will march with him into hell, if need be. (As all the best Holnes/Watson dramatizations get; see how brave Watson is in THE SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION, for instance. They may not get “why,* but they do understand that Holmes would not saddle himself with an idiot.)

The only dramatization I have ever seen that understood exactly what was going on with them is Stephen Moffat’s SHERLOCK, in which Sherlock, who “cannot read people”, figures out *precisely* what’s going on in Watson’s head and acts on it. “Want to come along?” “God, yes.” It’s nothing less than an intervention. (And the reason why I argue with people who think Moffat and company don’t get Sherlock. They get it better than almost anybody working on TV or film has ever gotten Sherlock.)

I have always seen the intervention angle, since my first reading of A STUDY IN SCARLET.

This is one reason why, as good as it was, I rebel at the middle-aged Basil Rathbone Holmes and the portly, doddering Nigel Bruce Watson; it is *critical*, genuinely critical, that the pair meet and partner up as young men, one of whom is about to idle his life away in self-pity. It’s what the story is about.

Tags: Sherlock Holmes, The Great Detective, The Seven Percent Solution, Zach Dundas | Category Books, Commentary, Writing