Letters From Watson: The Noble Bachelor

[beatrice_otter]

I'm reading Letters From Watson, which is a substack mailing list sending out the Holmes stories in chronological order. And right now we're on The Noble Bachelor. One thing that caught my eye was this exchange. The client has just told them everything he knows (which is not much) and Holmes announces that he knows what happened to the missing woman. Watson is mystified, and says:

"But I have heard all that you have heard."

"Without, however, the knowledge of pre-existing cases which serves me so well."

In other words, Holmes knows what's happened not because he is So Much Smarter Than Everyone Else, but because ... he's got experience with people going missing in weird circumstances.

Comments

[senmut]

YES, this!

[ndrosen]

That’s at least part of it, but there is still the matter of being able to apply one’s knowledge and experience to different new cases as they transpire.

[genarti]

Yes! I love the moments when the original stories are like, yes, Holmes is incredibly smart and observant, but also he has a lot of experience with people going missing and being stolen from and manipulated and so on, and also he has incredibly detailed case notes, and also he uses his free time to gather more background knowledge and learn more skills that he thinks will be useful to him in his field. And that's so rarely factored into adaptations, it seems, except as background color.