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? 

Comments

[recently_folded]

Well, that's some fic fodder if I ever saw it! I'm reminded of the few bits of "unreliable narrator" we saw in the BBC Sherlock's "Abominable Bride" ep, when Mrs. Hudson complained about how Watson was writing her. While that was more likely supposed to be set-up for the eventual reveal of the tie-in to the modern eps's long plot, it was a nice hat tip to this concept. I think there's potentially a lot of fun material in this notion, well beyond the typical one of them being together and pretending not.

[mightymads]

Yes, that was a tongue-in-cheek comment that she hardly says anything in the stories :) I’ve always thought that it was terribly unfair that Irene was dead, and that Helen Stoner didn’t enjoy her freedom from Roylott for a long time. Mary was probably a reference to Doyle’s first wife, but still it’s so much better if she’s alive somewhere out there.

[luthienberen]

Fine fodder for Watson the unreliable narrator!

[mightymads]

When we imagine Watson we often wonder how it would work—balancing between facts and fiction, cover up identities, changing time periods... In this respect James Herriot is a real life example of that, and I find it fascinating :)