Sherlock Holmes II. [antikvár]

on the significance of boswellsby Loren D. EstlemanI SUBMIT FOR your inspection one John H. Watson: medical man, late British Army surgeon, raconteur, journalist, connoisseur of women, Knight of the Battered Tin Dispatch-Box, valiant and loyal friend.He has suffered mightily at the hands of scholars and the public since the 1887 appearance of A Study in Scarlet in Bee-ton's Christmas Annual, calumniated on the one hand as a tan-glefooted incompetent and on the other as a boozy Bluebeard, to say nothing of sundry slanderous impostures his admirers have had to endure, beginning in 1905, when Sherlock Holmes and his indispensable biographer made their silent-screen debut. (We will ignore the 1900 vignette Sherlock Holmes Baffled, in which Watson was ungraciously not invited to appear.) Chief among these poseurs was the otherwise distinguished character actor Nigel Bruce, whose corpulent and ineffectual humbler in thirteen Universal features starring Basil Rathbone in the 1940s fixed Watson in the public mind for decades as a comic foil. If a mop bucket appeared in a scene, his foot would be inside it, and if by some sardonic twist of fate and the whim of director Roy William Neill he managed to stumble upon an important clue, he could be depended upon to blow his nose in it and throw it away. I am convinced that this lampoon of Holmes's trusty right bower has colored much of the pseu-doscholarship undertaken during the past forty years regarding the good doctor's life and habits.Moriarty is not involved in this misconception; it is without malice. Directors simply don't know what to do with Watson. His presence in fifty-six of the sixty published adventures (two