the 'first' first
Before A Study in Scarlet , the first published Holmes story, even begins we are met with the words: 'Part 1 Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson MD, late of the Army Medical Department' This is a delicious example of the fun absurdity of 'the Great Game'. Scholars can pretend they seek high, low, far and wide for the 'original' publication - of which the version put out by Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 was merely a "reprint" - but, of course, they will never find it. Yet knowing you will never (can never) know about a thing in no way impacts on the instinct to speculate on that thing. And so the fictional words of Conan Doyle take on the substance almost of a 'real' Watson. Speculation naturally rests on where these "reminiscences" were first printed, where and by whom - to say nothing of what they may have contained by way of the autobiographical information so conspicuously absent from the published A