[ SECRET POST #2564 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2564 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 013 secrets from Secret Submission Post #366.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

08. http://i.imgur.com/O2Flwsr.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, yes he does. /will not be persuaded otherwise

[(Anonymous)]

As a medical student, a great deal of our training involves jotting down notes or committing details to memory so as to be able to write the case up later or present the patient verbally. To hear the older doctors tell it, the emphasis really used to be on straight memorization, so this could plausibly go either way, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had just developed a good memory.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm pretty sure that's essentially what it is. Maybe not scribbling down notes everywhere he goes, but at the very least writing notes soon after the case is done.

[intrigueing]

1. ROFL that pic. Watson's like "LET ME DEDUCE THIS THING IN THIS HAUGHTY BOSS POSE AS DRAMATICALLY AS POSSIBLE TO HIDE THE FACT THAT IDK WTF I'M DOING" and Holmes is like "Eeeeeeexcellent :D" a la Mr. Burns.

2. I like to think he does! One of my favorite parts about the Granada series is how Watson is always popping his notebook out.

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't there a Granada episode where Watson's like "don't talk so fast I have to get this all down!" during one of Holmes's deductions? Or am I just transplanting things from some fanfic I read?

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe it's a good memory and artistic license?

[kamino_neko]

I don't think it's mentioned specifically in canon (but I haven't read every story, so I may have missed it), but since he's the chronicler of Holmes' adventures, I would assume he does, indeed, write notes on every case.

Also, since he isn't gifted with Holmes' particular talents, he probably keeps notes to refer to if he's asked for his thoughts on the matter at hand, but can't remember all the details.

[(Anonymous)]

He does mention having notes, and says "upon looking over my notes in such-and-such a case..." in a couple of intros, I think. I don't know if he ever describes himself in the act of taking notes. Although in the Hound of the Baskervilles, he transcribes part of his diary and his letters to Holmes in place of two or three chapters, which were written back during the middle of the case, to paint a more convincing/suspenseful portrait of what his confusion and worrying felt like before the solution was revealed.

[(Anonymous)]

I have this problem with all memoirs/diaries and books written in memoir/diary format.

I can't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday.

[(Anonymous)]

I was just going to post the same thing.

I've been thinking of Jeannette Walls' "The Glass Castle" lately, and doubting its veracity. Not to single it out, necessarily, but it's like a novelized memoir, recounting dialogue apparently spoken when she was a little girl. How could any of that be true? I don't remember what I said to my coworkers six hours ago; how could anyone relay conversations they apparently had 30 years ago? No way.

[(Anonymous)]

As I recall, much of the "great game" that the Baker Street Society and their ilk have been playing for over a century revolves around explaining away continuity errors and problems of fact by saying that Watson misremembered something, or fudged a date, or didn't look up a reference.

Now I'm picturing old!Holmes looking through them saying "Really, Watson, a TRAINED SNAKE? That wasn't even... how could... were you drunk that ENTIRE week?"

[intrigueing]

Since the Speckled Band is one of my favorite stories ever, hell no. I'd much prefer an alternate universe where snakes like that exist than dismiss that awesome story even in fun. An insult, I say! (Although come to think of it, I think I once read a good fic where Holmes realized he'd solved the mystery all wrong.)

The only problem with the Game is that the whole point of it collapses when you go all Baring -Gould and remove everything that made you like the stories in the first place on grounds as paltry as the fact that it's a bit insane. :D

[(Anonymous)]

re: your last paragraph. SO TRUE. Though IMO, it works better in fanfic, because you get to build a whole story around the change there. Do you remember the name of this fanfic about The Speckled Band?

[intrigueing]

I don't recall the fic's name (and actually can't even remember how the fic turned out). I read it quite a while ago :| Sorry!

[(Anonymous)]

Could Fill a Book, by the Plaid Adder (who also seems to have gone by the pseud Irene Adler)

[(Anonymous)]

Here's the link: http://www.hwslash.net/content/couldfill.html

[(Anonymous)]

Baring-Gould has a lot of the fanboy traits that I find faintly charming and mostly irritating. But then, I always tend to roll my eyes at rabid Sherlock/Irene shippers.

[intrigueing]

I would consider Baring-Gould to be pretty adorably inventive if his insane theories and nonsensical weather-pattern-based timeline weren't taken so damn seriously ;)

[(Anonymous)]

He pretty much states this in Canon. And Holmes mentions that he's using Watson's notes, at one point in His Last Bow, doesn't he? /too lazy to check

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a bit alarmed by how much Watson resembles Jude Law in that illustration O.o

[(Anonymous)]

As well as Watson, Holmes appeared to keep copious notes and/or memorabilia from previous cases, the better to go over them again later. For illustration:

I have some papers here," said my friend Sherlock Holmes, as we sat one winter's night on either side of the fire, "which I really think, Watson, that it would be worth your while to glance over. These are the documents in the extraordinary case of the Gloria Scott, and this is the message which struck Justice of the Peace Trevor dead with horror when he read it."

He had picked from a drawer a little tarnished cylinder, and, undoing the tape, he handed me a short note scrawled upon a half-sheet of slate gray-paper.

"The Adventure of the Gloria Scott"

Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places. But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner. One winter’s night, as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to suggest to him that, as he had finished pasting extracts into his common-place book, he might employ the next two hours in making our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom, from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him. This he placed in the middle of the floor and, squatting down upon a stool in front of it, he threw back the lid. I could see that it was already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red tape into separate packages.

“There are cases enough here, Watson,” said he, looking at me with mischievous eyes. “I think that if you knew all that I had in this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting others in.”

“These are the records of your early work, then?” I asked. “I have often wished that I had notes of those cases.”

"The Musgrave Ritual"

(I like that one because it's also the case where Watson idly notes that: "I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it." Gods, I love Watson).

So, yes, apparently the pair of them were the greatest pair of packrats when it came to notes and documents and the like. Which is not to say there's not plenty of room for them to be misremembering stuff or prettying stuff up for publication and the like: there's plenty of discrepancies both within and between stories to imagine that they tended to fudge the odd detail here or there.

[(Anonymous)]

I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

The dry, passive-aggressiveness of that paragraph is so adorable!