A real life reference

[mightymads]

I’ve just finished my Herriot marathon—read all eight books and a memoir by his son—and found a curious parallel with Watson. Herriot based his stories on real occasions too, changed names, dates, and even sex of the people involved to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.

He had set the book in the Dales, whereas nearly all the stories occurred around Thirsk. He also placed everything in the period before the war and gave his date of qualification as 1937 rather than 1939...

In retrospect, it seems laughable that Alf Wight should have gone to such great lengths to preserve his anonymity, but he did – never losing the instinct to keep secret the true facts behind his stories. For the next twenty years, he repeatedly asserted that his first books contained incidents that had occurred before the Second World War, and that the characters within them were either very old, or even dead. In fact, many of the stories had their origins in comparatively recent events. He stuck stubbornly to his statement, as though hoping that his true identity would remain a secret, and that no one about whom he had been writing would be offended by their portrayal in his books.

—The Real James Herriot by James Wight

It opens endless opportunities for the Holmes world. Watson could deliberately mislead his audience by stating that Irene Adler, Helen Stoner, and Mary Morstan were dead. These awesome ladies could be very much alive while Watson killed them off in his fictionalised accounts to preserve their privacy. And I wonder who of the clients might be of the opposite sex in the stories vs. the actual cases. Any speculations?