I can’t leave The Blue Carbuncle without saying something about pickiness and Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle himself wasn’t picky. He said “In short stories it has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it, and have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?”
Quite right. The real reason Sherlock Holmes has lasted so long is that Doyle was a master spinner of tales. He knew how to tell a story right, and we all fall for it. The rest is important too—the substance of the detection, the logic, the drama in those cases that have action. For us now, there is also the charm of the Victorian scene. The bird, always waiting on the sideboard when the case is finished, the tantalus, the smoking jacket, the slippers, the various carriages, the fog, all the contrivances of life of that time. We lap it up.
That said, there is a whole industry of being picky about Sherlock Holmes. There are people who love these stories who gather together in groups to pick them apart. The one I’m most familiar with is the Baker Street Irregulars, but there are others. They start with the assumption that every word in every story is true, never mind that Doyle was dashing off the stories to make money for more important things and didn’t worry too much about consistency. Then they concoct elaborate explanations to explain the inconsistencies.
Take the matter of Dr. Watson’s second wound. When we first meet Watson, he is an army surgeon, recovering from a bullet wound in the shoulder, acquired in Afghanistan, and the enteric fever he got in the hospital. In later stories, his wound sometimes aches from the weather, and sometimes makes him limp. Limp from a shoulder wound? But there is an ingenious and amusing explanation.
It’s all great fun if you happen to like that kind of thing.
