The Resident Patient

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1894. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

More edition wackiness here. Remember how I said that in American printings of Memoirs (such as the one listed on Feedbooks) that the story “The Cardboard Box” was removed? Well, they thought the opening scene for the story was so impressive that they cut it out and stuck it at the front of this story. And yet, when “The Cardboard Box” makes its eventual appearance in the American printing of His Last Bow, the scene is there as well! In the interest of not repeating myself, I’m going to skip my commentary on that scene, which consists of a series of amazing deductions by Holmes as well as a case of his outright hypocrisy. If you’ve read this story and wondered why I’m not talking about this fairly lengthy scene, I’ll get to it in approximately five months.

But in either version of the story, we see another instance of Doyle becoming disenchanted with writing stories about his detective, right off the bat.

Glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of Memoirs with which I have endeavored to illustrate a few of the mental peculiarities of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes….

He even takes a mild swipe at A Study in Scarlet and “The ‘Gloria Scott’” on the way out of the first paragraph, but that paragraph adds another piece of the continuity puzzle – at least, one version of it does. The original Strand version of the text (not the American version that contains the hastily added scene from “The Cardboard Box”), Watson says that it must have taken place “towards the end of the first year” in which he and Holmes take rooms on Baker Street. The reference to the ‘Gloria Scott,’ however, indicates that Holmes must have told Watson that story before this one, so he must have related that story to Watson fairly early on in their relationship. While it doesn’t settle much in terms of questions of case continuity, it does show that Holmes opened up to Watson on the scale of several months into their relationship, instead of the implied answer of several years – an interesting indication on how quickly Holmes went to trusting and confiding in his one friend.¹

After the last story, Doyle swings Watson back to his earlier mode, explaining that Watson was “sufficiently conversant with Holmes’s methods to be able to follow his reasoning” and reverse-engineer one of his deductions. This happening so early in their relationship does seem to contradict some of Watson’s amazement at Holmes’ methods in the earlier cases, however. This disconnect has led to a certain amount of Watson apologism, claiming that Watson was actually never stupid, but rather too modest. This camp maintains that Watson likely altered the recordings of his cases to reduce his own deductions and intellect in order to bolster the skills and aptitudes of his friend. They point to sections such as in “The Blue Carbuncle” where Watson modestly underrates his own abilities, and this camp maintains that his inadequacy comes not from his intellect, but from his editing skill in being unable to excise more remnants of his own talent. Obviously this line of thinking ties in well to The Great Game, but some non-Game-playing Sherlockians have posited this as well.

Being a Watson fan, I want to believe this line of logic, but this idea causes my head to explode when I consider it at any depth. The reason why is that to make this work, you have to assume that Watson is simultaneously a reliable and an unreliable narrator. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, an “unreliable narrator” is a narrative device in which the reader realizes that the narrator of the story is misled, lying, mad, or otherwise incorrectly reporting the events of the story. We do get all of our information about Watson and Holmes from Watson (with the exception of three stories in the later canon), so if we assume that Watson is an unreliable narrator, anything he tells us about himself or his friend is suspect. This actually addresses some lingering issues like inconsistencies in chronology and the back and forth waffling on whether Holmes has emotions or not. But if an author uses an unreliable narrator, he has to do it with some purpose in mind, and I don’t see that purpose when I review the supposedly unreliable sections of the canon.

I’ve heard the theory that Doyle might have come to realize that he had made some errors and started to intentionally make Watson unreliable in order to explain away those problems, but that doesn’t seem consistent with his growing boredom with the characters – why would he go through the trouble of making his narrator unreliable when he’s going to kill off Holmes in a few stories anyway? I mean, he even recycles the ending for “The Five Orange Pips” in this story – once again, the villains escape and then are mysteriously killed at sea. How can Doyle be simultaneously so careless and so nuanced in his writing? While it is technically possible for Doyle to be thinking and creating his stories on these levels, the more likely answer is that Doyle cranked out these stories as inspiration (and money) motivated him, and he just wasn’t paying that much attention to the little details. Ergo, moving Watson more and more to an observing role and Holmes taking up the lion’s share of deduction is easier and less taxing than writing two flawed but complex characters. Hey, any writer will tell you that they have off days, and that means some stories come out better than others.

Anyhow, the case itself is another con game with bits of “The Five Orange Pips” worked in (as mentioned above). We meet an Inspector Lanner, but we barely see him in this story and never see him again in the course of the canon, so fuck him. Most of the interesting bits of the story actually belong to “The Cardboard Box” anyhow. It’s not a bad story for all that, but it looks particularly weak next to upcoming stories like “The Greek Interpreter” and “The Final Problem.”