Chronology part 4

Chronology explanations on the novel The Valley of Fear

• VALL - January 7, 1887

Now this one is definitely complex. This novel has a well known conflict with "The Final Problem" in that Watson knows all about Moriarty in VALL, but in FINA, set a few years later, he's never heard of Moriarty. Holmes also talks about the professor so much to Scotland Yard that they think he has a bee in his bonnet about Moriarty. The novel also has a chronology problem in its American flashback featuring a Pinkerton investigating the Scowrers 20 years ago, which is not enough time for him to lose his first wife Ettie Shafter, get rich with Cecil Barker in California, and be chased by criminals out of America to England. It's really a shame that Conan Doyle keeps using this long flashback format, because he almost never gets the time periods to mesh well with the main text. Oh, also Doyle based the Vermissa Valley story on the real life Pinkerton John McParland investigating the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania; it's an example of their union-busting deeds, and Doyle doesn't see the Pinkertons as villains at all. He thinks of them as clever, brave detectives righteously taking down an evil criminal gang, as if the Mollies were equivalent to the KKK. He even features another heroic Pinkerton in "The Red Circle" story.

Infatuation

Expanding from Watson's letter to Doyle, here's what happened later in April 1883, after the Specked Band case. Apologies if I haven't caught all the present tense and changed it to past tense.

Fandom: Sherlock Holmes

Story: Deeper in Memory, partial chapter 16

Pairing: Holmes/Watson, Holmes/Helen Stoner

Warnings: unresolved sexual tension, G

Watson's letter to Doyle

As a break from the boring chronology posts, here's another bit from my DIM novel. Recall that there's a love triangle going on between Holmes, Watson, and Helen Stoner in the 1880s, during their bachelor days. However, Holmes has rejected Helen Stoner since Chapter 21, when he visited her in New York and briefly met Irene Adler in 1884.

Since 1886, Watson has become friends with a fellow doctor, who is also an author. In fact Conan Doyle helped write the Mormon part of A Study in Scarlet, and got the novel sold to a publisher, though they lost the copyright in the deal. The publisher is holding the novel for a year due to the glut of "cheap fiction", and will publish it in December 1887. Meanwhile, the two writers correspond and discuss which other case they should make into a novel next, because then they can keep the royalties and maybe make money. So Watson has written up "sample stories" of some cases such as the Copper Beeches to show to Doyle. As they discuss Holmes in their letters, Doyle asks a question about Holmes's drug use, and this is Watson's response. Notice that he carefully lies and suppresses the full truth about his "strange brief affair" with Holmes in 1887.

Chronology part 3

Some more reasoning on my Sherlock Holmes chronology.

• SPEC - April 1883
• COPP - early spring 1884
• BERY - Friday in February 1885
• YELL - Saturday in early spring 1886

"The Speckled Band" has long been undisputed by chronologists. Watson says it occurred in early April 1883, and there's nothing to contradict it. It was published in the Strand in February 1892, and Watson opens by discussing "my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes." Chronologists all pounce on a similar opening in "Veiled Lodger" to calculate the length of Holmes's career, yet they forget that SPEC has this reference to the past 8 years. 1892 minus 8 years only gets back to 1884. Is there something else he's not counting? 1881 plus 8 years gets us to 1889. Oh, I see. He's not counting some months in early 1881 when he didn't go with Holmes on cases, he's not counting some months in early 1887 when Holmes is away in France solving a big case without him (REIG), and he's not counting some months just after his marriage (before SCAN) when he was busy with his new practice and not visiting Holmes. So assuming those months add up to a year, we can get to from 1881 to 1890. Per "The Final Problem," Watson barely saw Holmes for 3 cases in 1890, and then didn't see Holmes early the next year. Watson only saw Holmes because of Moriarty's threat from April to May 1891 and that wasn't a case so much as an escape to continental Europe. That's why he's not counting that year. So those are the years that he considers himself Holmes's biographer. Keep that in mind for when he recalculates for us in VEIL later. Odd how it's always the early months in the year that he misses recording cases.

Chronology part 2

Now the next part:

• STUD - March 1881, see my notes on the Orontes troopship and the weekday.
• RESI - October 1881 based on the original Strand text, before the mind-reading scene was grafted on from CARD. Or October 1886, if Watson is fibbing to protect Trevelyan. The Worthingdon bank gang were sentenced to 15 years and got out way too early.

Written in 1886 and published in December 1887, A Study in Scarlet is the first novel in which we ever meet Holmes and Watson. It's greatly entertaining in the beginning chapters, but it has a structural flaw. Half the novel breaks off from the Brixton mystery to suddenly flashback to America to explain a motive for the murderer; he apparently wanted revenge on two Mormons, but all Mormon society in general is depicted as an evil murderous cult. This is not even framed as a flashback from Jefferson Hope's point of view; it's an omniscient 3rd person narrator describing events happening to John Ferrier and his adopted daughter Lucy, survivors of a wagon train to the West. Some readers are fine with the Mormon section while others prefer to skip over it to get back to Holmes and Watson. Whatever suits you. It's just a melodrama derivative of other anti-polygamy novels of the time period, and Doyle eventually gave an apology to Mormons. Unfortunately, the break in the London narrative allows Conan Doyle to lose the thread of his plot and forget about the dead dog in the sitting-room.

Chronology part 1

So now I'll begin explaining the reasoning behind my chronology in more detail, taking a few stories at a time. I'm not sure how many parts this will take to do all 60 stories. This is the chunk I'll try to tackle now.

• GLOR - Summer 1875 when Holmes solves the case. Maybe 1885 when Holmes tells the story to Watson "one winter's night"
• MUSG - July 1879 when Holmes solves the case. Holmes tells the case to Watson on another winter's night, after having told GLOR.

First, "The Gloria Scott" is a well known mess, almost as bad as Sign of Four with its fucked up dates. There's actually 3 different time periods in this story: 1) the "winter's night" when Sherlock Holmes decides to tell Watson the story of his first case 2) the year in college when Sherlock was friends with Victor Trevor and "solved" the "mystery" such as it was, and 3) the year that James Armitage participated in a fatal ship mutiny, a scandalous past for which Hudson blackmailed him. These 3 time periods are all fighting each other, creating a headache for any chronologist. I mean, there's even a 4th time period, if you count Watson's present narration quoting Holmes's narration of the "Gloria Scott" case. Conan Doyle for some reason likes this nested flashback device, and he gives too little time for the past flashback to take place; he doesn't care about such details if he can just tell a "ripping good yarn" of an adventure.