What If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Had Written About John Watson? Everything Is The Same, Except That We

What if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had written about John Watson? Everything is the same, except that we are reading Sherlock Holmes’s observations about his new flatmate Doctor Watson.

Things start out impersonal, intellectual, but fall right off that cold, craggy cliff before the first page is done with. The detective deduces the doctor from top to toes but by the second paragraph he’s forced to admit having a blush surprised out of him by Watson’s unlooked-for wonder and admiration. For accuracy’s sake and perhaps with a pinch of pride, he details everything that Watson had said in his praise, and ends up confessing to the pages how very agreeable it was to be met with applause instead of derision and doubt for once.

Holmes is later pleased to be written about in turn, but disgusted with the overly romantic tone Watson’s tale-telling takes. In a pique, he begins a paper on the man’s latest conquest, intending to show his flatmate how the wrong tone can ruin a story by using a cold, scientific tone to describe a passionate scene. Alas, the great brain meets a puzzle it cannot solve. Try as he will, his prose will not stay unmoved by its subject. Watson’s looks, Watson’s manners, Watson’s honesty and humor and curious mixture of humility and hubris; they poison Sherlock’s pen with admiration, and he throws the papers into the fire in the end, and tells himself it is proximity to the flames that heat his cheeks.

Doctor Watson has regular hours, but illness and injury do not. Holmes watches his flatmate dash away at all hours and in all manner of weather, leather satchel in hand and shoulders set for battle. He amuses himself by deducing the difficulties the doctor has ahead of him and predicting the hour he will return. If he foresees a particularly trying case for his friend, he ensures that Mrs. Hudson will send refreshments up at the proper time, and that he himself will be in the middle of playing one of Watson’s favorite airs to welcome him home. Between cases, Holmes assists by deducing diagnoses from symptoms related to him, and sometimes even accompanies Watson when he admits that an additional set of hands will not be unwelcome.

Their vocations even overlap now and again. Both Watson’s books and Holmes’s notes will at times mention the same names and places, with the doctor stitching up a man’s leg while the detective interrogates the other end of him. Their lives, their work, their stories grow more deeply intertwined as time passes, and what began as a scientific observation ends up as what can only be called a love letter.