Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman

Notes From The Author

My Endpieces seem to grow in length with each succeeding Sherlock Holmes adventure I write. Kindly readers tell me they enjoy reading this section but of course you do not need to bother. I add them simply for interest and colour. I list the books I have read as background including memoirs of the Edwardian age in England and Turkey. Some of the writing is so atmospheric I incorporate small bits into Holmes’s and Watson’s Stamboul adventure. I have also tended to use the spelling current in the Edwardian period, so for example Mombasa was often Mombassa, diplomats spelt Baghdad without the ‘h’, hence Bagdad, and Kiev as Kieff, and the ‘s’ many British now prefer to use in words like ‘civilisation’ was then a ‘z’, like the USA today.

Readers of my other ‘sherlocks’ will have realised I have very considerable admiration for Dr. John H. Watson. There’s no doubt the Sultan was correct. If Watson had not taken on the task of chronicling Holmes’s cases, the latter’s career as a Great Detective may never have taken off. It was sheer kismet the former Army doctor on a wound-pension needed to find and share the cost of digs in London in 1881 at the precise time the peripatetic young Sherlock Holmes did too. I have little time for the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce depiction as a well-intentioned bumbler, loyal but clueless. Watson said of himself, ‘If I have one quality upon earth it is common sense’. He was also eager, chivalrous and courageous. Much more than Holmes he was like his creator Arthur Conan Doyle. Like Doyle, Watson had the qualities of a good doctor - kindliness, optimism and a healthy scepticism. Watson had another value to Holmes. Medicine is said to be as much the ability to gain the confidence of the patient as it is an abstract science.

‘Your best friends would hardly call you a schemer, Watson,’ Holmes told him, adding later, ‘I never get to your limits. There are unexplored possibilities about you.’

It’s not possible to trace the various paths by which Conan Doyle himself created Watson. While writing these notes I was on the train to London Charing Cross from deepest East Sussex reading The Crooked Scythe by George Ewart Evans, an anthology of memories of men and women of a past era - farm labourers, shepherds, horsemen, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, sailors, fisherman, miners, maltsters, domestic servants. The introduction by a David Gentleman described the author Evans as follows:

‘George was in his mid-fifties when I first saw him...upright and vigorous, with an open and friendly manner and a clear, piercing gaze. He looked the part of a countryman, in a tweed jacket, a hat also of tweed, drill trousers, and stout brown shoes. As I grew to know him, I discovered that he was sympathetic and generous with help and encouragement. He was intelligent and shrewd; his judgements, though seldom sharply expressed, were acute and rational. In conversation he was tolerant and unassertive, but it was soon clear he held independent views with firmness and conviction.’

I’m certain this is how Watson’s many friends at the Junior United Services club and at the Gatwick races would have viewed him too, a man of gentility though of limited means and no property. We should all have friends who wear stout brown shoes.

At several points in this new adventure I mention Watson’s unfulfilled plans to go to Africa (‘the Dark Continent with its great herds of elephants, odd-toed ungulates on the Luangwa, hippo on the Shire River, the Tsavo man-eating lions, dust, blood, sleeping sickness, malaria, alcoholism, the smell of camp-fires long extinguished...’). Writing about his plans took me back nostalgically to my own late-teenage years in East and Central Africa. One day I shall get Watson there too.