memoirs (incoherent)

I named this blog after a comment Watson  makes in 'The Musgrave Ritual' about "these incoherent memoirs" (meaning his own stories). 'Incoherent' is a bit strong, one thinks at first - or is even Watson aware of his slips of the pen, his contradictory dates, and such lapses of continuity/memory such as being unable to remember which limb he was wounded in at Maiwand?

I'd forgotten that he uses the same word in 'The Resident Patient' and in the same context: "In glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of memoirs..." I don't think the word necessarily means how it reads (the stories are perfectly comprehensible). After all, he follows this by referring to Holmes' "mental peculiarities", which again sounds slightly odd to us. Chalk it up to Victorian usage.

But blow me down - starting to read 'The Final Problem', he's at it again! :-

"In an incoherent and [...] entirely inadequate fashion, I have endeavoured to give some account of my strange experiences in [Holmes'] company..."

The repetition may be down to Conan Doyle and his own sense that the Sherlock Holmes stories, fun as they were, were detracting from his 'serious' work. Doyle himself admitted he was "careless" as to details but didn't mind as long as the stories themselves held the reader. And so say all of us! Maybe all those lapses in detail were mounting up in his mind, becoming one more black mark against the Baker St saga - and further necessitating Holmes' death at Reichenbach.

If only he knew how those "incoherent memoirs" of Dr Watson would continue to provide joy a century (and much more) hence!

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