Watson

Note:  This page will be updated from time to time to include more examples of the Watson convention.  

A "Watson" in mystery fiction is the detective's sidekick and first person narrator of events, so called after Dr. John H. Watson, the chronicler of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.  The Watson is usually presumed to be a bit dimwitted and bumbling, mainly to show off the superlative abilities of the detective himself.  In fact, Father Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction rule that says that the Watson must be slightly less intelligent than the average reader.  

I've always felt that dictum to be rather unfair to the original Watson of the Holmes stories, which show Dr. Watson to be intelligent and observant, although less so than Holmes himself.  The popular movie series of the 1940s featuring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson may have contributed to the image of Watson as bumbling and not too bright.

Although the first person narration can be helpful to the reader in that the reader sees everything the Watson, and presumably the detective, sees, the narrative form can also subject the reader to any mistaken observations or inferences or opinions expressed by the narrator.  The use of a Watson can be quite annoying at times, as witness Agatha Christie's use of Captain Hastings as the Watson of Hercule Poirot.  Christie introduced both characters in The Mysterious Affair At Styles, published in 1920, but eventually decided to do without him and sent him off to herd cattle in Argentina in Murder On The Links, published in 1923.  She brought Hastings back several more times over the years, but also brilliantly used the Watson convention to bamboozle the reader in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  

Probably the next most notable use of a Watson can be found in R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke stories; Freeman actually uses several different narrators, but the most usual one is Dr. Jervis, Thorndyke's junior partner, who, like Thorndyke, is both a medical doctor and a lawyer and who assists Thorndyke in most of his cases.  Jervis sees the factual matters Thorndyke sees, but Thorndyke often possesses additional knowledge that Jervis does not have and refuses to disclose any inferences or opinions he has until the end of the case.  For example, in one case Thorndyke notes that the clothing of the murder victim includes the shell of a particular mollusk, but Jervis does not know, and this reader certainly did not know, that the mollusk was on the verge of extinction and therefore only found in two very limited geographic locations in Great Britain, which renders Thorndyke's zeroing in on a particular site as the scene of the murder unnecessarily mysterious.   

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 What is there left to say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories?  A Study In Scarlet, published in 1887, introduced both Holmes and his chronicler, Dr. John Watson to the reading public and also introduced the public to the idea of the application of scientific methods to the study of crime.   For those reasons, I would give A Study In Scarlet a B, although this time around I found Doyle's American narrative and language more irritating than entertaining.  Grade:  B.   

The Hound of the Baskervilles still gets an A, though.  I first read it when I was about twelve years old; my mother caught me reading it late at night and made me turn out my light before I found out that the hound was a real dog and not a demonic apparition, and I couldn't sleep for envisioning a spectral hound slathering at my bedroom door.  Well plotted, well written, it still gets Grade:  A.  

I also re-read the short stories collected by Sir Arthur's son Adrian Conan Doyle in A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, which were published over the years in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, and The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes.   After the first several books of Holmes stories, Doyle apparently tired of writing them and decided to kill Holmes off.  To accomplish this, he introduced the criminal mastermind, Professor Moriarty in the story "The Final Problem", in which he has Holmes, pursued across Europe by Moriarty, grapple with Moriarty on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, with the result that both men apparently fell to their death.  Later, bowing to public pressure and financial needs, Doyle resurrected Holmes in "The Problem of the Empty House", in which Holmes reveals that Watson had misinterpreted the confused footprints on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls and that Holmes had climbed up to fake his own death.  This never made much sense to me because it's apparent during the course of the story that Moriarty's chief lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran knew from the start that Holmes was still alive as he dislodged boulders above him in an attempt to kill Holmes then and there, so why the need to pretend to the rest of the world that he was dead?  

At any rate, it was a very satisfying exercise to revisit the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Grade:  A overall.  

Wilkie Collins

 It's been decades since I read Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, and I had forgotten how fascinating that book is.  Like many authors of his time, Collins wrote the book as a serial for magazine publication in both the U.K. and the United States; his style is not exactly cliff-hanger, but the end of each chapter leaves you with pleasurable anticipation of what will happen in the next one.

The Moonstone starts with the theft of a legendary diamond from an Indian temple, and the curse that follows the diamond and anyone who possesses it.  The diamond is bequeathed as a birthday gift to a young woman, Rachel Verinder, who wears it to her birthday dinner; that night the diamond is stolen from her room.   Careful searching by her cousin Franklin Blake and Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard, reputed to be the best detective in England, produces no sign of the diamond.  Rachel refuses to cooperate with the investigation and in fact, opposes the continuation of it.  

    Wilkie Collins uses successive multiple viewpoints to move the story forward, starting with that of Gabriel Betteredge, the elderly Verinder family head servant, who is much given to consulting the oracle of his tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe in moments of doubt or distress and who makes a very creditable Watson to Sergeant Cuff.  Betteredge narrates the story up to the loss of the diamond; the evangelistic and annoying Miss Clack takes up the narrative to contribute what she herself has witnessed and overheard following the disappearance of the diamond; the family attorney, Mr. Bruff then contributes his share of the story, and it moves on through several more narrators to its eventual resolution.  Wilkie Collins rightly called the story a "romance", and it's a fascinating one.    Grade:  A.  

The Woman In White, published in 1860, six years before The Moonstone, also uses multiple viewpoints to narrate the story, although most of the story is carried by Walter Hartright, an artist and illustrator, who does most of the detective work, and by Marian Holcombe.  The story starts with an encounter one night between Hartright and a mysterious woman dressed all in white who asks the way to London.  He gives it to her, then shortly thereafter finds that she has escaped from a lunatic asylum.  He again encounters her in a country churchyard and realizes that she closely resembles Laura Fairly, his drawing student with whom he has fallen in love.  Laura is engaged to and subsequently marries Sir Percival Glyde, who connives with his friend, the menacing Count Fosco, to gain control of Laura's considerable fortune, while Walter Hartright is absent on a scientific expedition to Central America.  When Hartright returns, he is told that Laura has died, but suspects that it was Anne Catherick, the mysterious woman in white, who has died instead.  Aided by Laura's elder half sister, Marian Halcombe, who has liberated Laura from the lunatic asylum where Sir Percival had concealed her under Anne Catherick's name, Walter proceeds to have Laura's identity restored to her.  Grade:  B.