Holmes Sherlock - The adventure of the peculiar protocols: adapted from the journals of John H. Watson, M.D

For a good portion of my adult life I have been involved with and found myself editing missing, unknown, or unearthed manuscripts alleged to have been authored by Sherlock Holmess amanuensis, John H. Watson, M.D. It had been years since I had given any thought to this subject when an item in The New York Times last September caught my eye.

An auction had taken place at Sothebys in London at which a diary or journal (the catalogue used both terms) supposedly written by Watson had been purchased for a princely 45 million sterling by an anonymous buyer via phone.

I had no idea what to make of this. Did Watson keep a diary? On first blush, as weve no mention of it, this appears unlikely. On the other hand, Watson refers constantly to his copious notes on which his case accounts are based, which may amount to more or less the same thing. I suspect, by whatever name, Watson was a compulsive chronicler, somewhat in the manner of Pepys or Anas Nin. He wrote down everything, if only for the sake of writing it down.

Regardless, I did not expect the anonymous diary purchaser to reveal himself(or herself)any time soon.

Nor did they.

But last December I was contacted by Greg Prickman, head of Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries, where my papers are kept. Greg (who has since become librarian of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC) astonished me by saying that the diary in question had been loaned by its purchaser to the university for the period of one year.

Why in the world would he have done such a thing? I asked Greg on the phone. For sure therere places with bigger endowments than my alma mater.

Hey, this isnt rocket science, the librarian responded. Cant you guess?

The first response that came into my head was Holmess dictum I never guess: it is an appalling habit, destructive to the logical faculty, but in truth, not being Holmes, I guess all the time. Im also a sucker for magic acts and can never correctly figure the solution to any mystery stories.

Well, I can, Greg offered from Iowa City. The donorand dont ask who, because Im not allowed to tellclearly is aware of your editorial functions on previous Watsonsonia. He knows your papers are held here and is hoping the journal is catnip youd be tempted to look at and possibly work on.

But he doesnt want to shell out any more dough.

Heck, maybe the purchase bankrupted him.

Sure.

Once hed connected the dots, I suspected Greg was right. I was in the middle of working on Star Trek: Discovery, but after the show was up and running, I flew to Iowa City (or rather Cedar Rapids), where Greg met me at the airport.

What do you think? I asked him, wasting no time. Fools gold or the real McCoy?

Youre the expert, he said, climbing behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee.

But you must have formed an opinion.

Yes, I must.

This was all I could get out of him. We checked me into the newish Hilton Garden Inn on Burlington, but only long enough to park my bag. Then it was off to the library, where Greg dialed open the big-ass walk-in, temperature-controlled vault reserved for precious manuscripts. Within was a metal desk and an uncomfortable folding chair.

What Greg showed me was an old date book of sorts, whose brittle red leather binding had almost entirely fragmented. Inside were yellowing, lined pages in what looked to me like Watsons familiar hand. It was some kind of diary, though very hard to make out in places. Truth to tell, the thing was falling apart, and a bunch of pages were altogether AWOL. Some looked like they had been torn out. Greg told me that the document had lain in an airless safety deposit box in a UK bank that had gone under or been swallowed up by a larger bank (he thought Lloyds, but couldnt recallwherever it was stashed had no humidifier), before it went under the hammer at Sothebys and was snapped up by who knows? Someone with a lot of kale.

Greg, evidently, but he wasnt talking. Fishy, fishy, fishy. The world of art and artifacts, as we all know, is cluttered with fakes. There are more Renoirs floating around (many of them in prominent museums) than Renoir ever painted. The anonymous donor or buyer, the Rembrandt in the attic, blahblah.

Still, if this was a phony, someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble. And the whole deal was not without what Holmes might term features of interest. Chief among them is that what I read is the account of a failure. There are, of course, cases in which Holmes failed (one has only to think of the word Norbury), but here we have what, if true, amounts to the biggest and most consequential failure of the detectives entire career.

I amagainin no position to authenticate what follows, and Ive done the most editorial work Ive ever performed on a manuscript, which was frequently illegible in its original format, mandating much guesswork. There are snatches of dialogue, brief descriptions, cramped marginalia, instructions (remember! or dont forget!), and occasional words in foreign languages. The writer, whoever he was, used both sides of the paper, which added to my difficulties. There was a lot of bleedthrough. The events chronicled occur at the start of the twentieth century, but there is no evidence that Watson (?), who died in 1940, ever revised or corrected what hed jotted down at the time. Thus the reader will discover no prescient anticipations, re-jigged with the benefits of hindsight. The tone, it must be conceded, certainly resembles Watsons. The matter of dates, for once, is indisputable; this was, after all, a journal, and the diarist had been punctilious in specifying them. Moreover, it is easy to confirm these dates when juxtaposing them with events of record, alluded to in the text. Ive retained Watsons orthography; he was writing in English, not American. (I note that Ive drifted into referring to the writer as Watson, which may reveal a certain willing credulity on my part. I did say Im a sucker for magic tricks.) As noted above, several pages are inexplicably missing, and another did in fact crumble as I scanned it too hastily. Rather than maintain the diary format (though Ive retained his use of entry dates here and there), it was, I confess, easier to recast what I could make out in the form Watson might have used had he seen fit to arrange the case for publication. As will be seen, that idea never occurred to him.

For good reason.

For that same good reason, Watson never appended a title to his notes. The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols has been supplied by me, in addition to occasional explanatory footnotes.

Lastly, it must be stipulated that notwithstanding the foregoing, any errors in what follows are Watsons, not mine.

Nicholas Meyer

Los Angeles, 2019