The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 1.3
Featuring Billy Joel, Oscar Wilde and Cockney rhyming slang
Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Watson made deductions about a walking stick.
And now, the story continues…
“Interesting, though elementary,” said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee1. “There are certainly one or two2 indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several3 deductions.”
“Has anything escaped me?” I asked with some self-importance4. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”
“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth5. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal.”
“Then I was right.”
“To that extent.”
“But that was all.”
“No, no, my dear Watson, not all—by no means all. I would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt6, and that when the initials ‘C.C.’ are placed before that hospital the words ‘Charing Cross’ very naturally suggest themselves7.”
“You may be right8.”
“The probability lies in that direction. And if we take this as a working hypothesis9 we have a fresh basis from which to start our construction of this unknown visitor.”
“Well, then, supposing that ‘C.C.H.’ does stand for ‘Charing Cross Hospital,’ what further inferences may we draw?10”
“Do none suggest themselves? You know my methods. Apply them!”
Without modern forms of entertainment such as television or iPhones or complaining about the cost of Taylor Swift tickets, 19th century readers often found amusement in ranking corners of settees and other pieces of household furniture.
An uncharacteristic lack of precision from Holmes. Is it one indication? Or two?
This, however, is precise. When this story was written, ‘several’ meant ‘exactly seven’.
This novel came out in the immediate aftermath of the wildly successful play, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Conan Doyle is sneakily mocking Oscar Wilde here. Conan Doyle despised Wilde, who he believed used ‘too many adjectives’ and ‘not enough cocaine-fuelled deductive reasoning’.
Watson, here, is revealed to be a kind of Bizarro-Holmes, using invariably incorrect backwards logic. Indeed, in 1960, the Conan Doyle Estate attempted to sue DC Comics and Superman writer Otto Binder over the Bizarro character, but their claim was thrown out of court by a judge who was later revealed to be a fan of the misshapen villain. ‘This case am making perfect sense,’ he ruled, before hitting his hammer with a gavel.
For a brief time, Cockney fanboys trialled ‘a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt’ as a piece of rhyming slang, before reluctantly abandoning it as ‘too unwieldy’ and ‘insufficiently crass’.
This story predates the existence of Cindy Crawford, of course.
In 1980, legendary were-pianist and Sherlock Holmes scholar Billy Joel recorded a single that took as its title this very quote. In 1989, he also recorded ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which was originally titled ‘Interesting, Though Elementary’ and recapped the entire Holmes canon, before a late pivot to the ‘more commercially viable’ form in which the song was released. The original demo tracks are much sought after by Conan Doyle enthusiasts.
A risk from Conan Doyle, here, as ‘working’ hypotheses were considered very much lower class. “Can’t we have some aristocratic hypotheses?” was a common complaint from society’s elite at the time. “Conjectures with refinement, civility and moral rectitude?”
Not so self-important, now, are we Watson?