Incoherent Memoirs

As an update to my previous post : although wanting to read the canon this time round without annotations, I quickly looked up CHAS in the Annotated and found a yet further crime committed by the 'heroes' of the story: Battery Watson says of their escape:  " I felt the hand of the man behind me grab at my ankle; but I kicked myself free". We later learn this was the under-gardener of Appledore Towers, an entirely innocent man; and very aggrieved he must surely have felt at being kicked (assaulted!) by the fleeing Dr Watson!

One of the reasons I rebel against the strict rules of 'the Great Game' these days is that there are a great many instances in the Holmes stories of Watson laying various people (including himself) open to charges of serious breaches of the law, such that if they were indeed genuine historical records would have seen the stories' characters most likely flung in jail. Doyle wrote a good deal of biographical prose but never at any point did he casually reveal that he let a murderer go free or that he did a spot of breaking & entering on occasion. Sherlock Holmes himself, perhaps surprisingly, comes off the worst in this regard - and it is something of a surprise to say the least that the world's foremost exponent of criminal detection puts his foot in it a great many times. Doyle seems to play with this - 'Charles Augustus Milverton' begins with the 'realistic' framing device of having Watson say that names, places and even the decade of this case have