“On a day last autumn, while reading over the Stories, some lurking Demon tempted me in an idle moment to test one of Watson’s dates, and, being of a somewhat pedantic humour, when I found that it did not conform to the calendar, I was troubled.”

When Harold W. Bell wrote those words on the first day of March 1932, he was explaining himself to his readers. It seemed necessary, I’m sure, because what he was doing was a very new thing. What was he doing? Simply just trying to put the sixty tales of Sherlock Holmes in the order in which they occurred.

With some writers, the order of stories isn’t an issue. Each novel follows the previous one, the main character picking up where he left off. Often, no definite dates are mentioned, but there is still a general sense of order. A character who gets married in one book will be married in the next, or at least have some mention of why he or she isn’t married. But the series character has come a long way since the day of Sherlock Holmes.

When Conan Doyle was first putting out monthly stories, even though he had Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in every one, he probably really wasn’t thinking of them as the main characters. Each tale brought a new client, a new culprit, a new story with a new cast of characters. Holmes and Watson were simply the frame for some human drama that was either unfolding or was being rediscovered. Dr. Watson’s married life was never the subject of a given adventure. It was simply background, not really germaine to the case at hand.

All that would have been fine, and no one would have thought at thing about it  . . . except for the level of detail that Conan Doyle liked to put in his writings. He has Watson telling us what day of the week something happened, dates that include month, day, and year, newspaper headlines, historical references, you name it. But he doesn’t do it in every story, and he certainly didn’t go back to compare notes with past works.

What Conan Doyle wound up creating was something much like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle sitting on a table. Passers-by see the parts of the picture that are clearly put together, and those with the time and inclination can’t help but want to start putting the other pieces in place. Had he not put any dates in, it would be like a puzzle still in a box on the shelf — not nearly as tempting. Had he given us the full picture, it wouldn’t be a puzzle. But Doyle gave us a Watsonian jigsaw puzzle.

Ronald Knox lined up a few pieces for his campus entertainment talk in 1911.  S.C. put parts of the puzzle together to give substance to his 1931 pamphlet biography of Dr. Watson. But in 1932, H. W. Bell was the first to try to get every single one of Watson’s recorded cases into date order (as well as the unrecorded cases mentioned as well). So one can see why he might have felt the need to explain himself.

Since Bell, dozens of us have tried getting those missing puzzle pieces into place. Even though I’ve been all through it once, I still get tempted to move some more of those pieces around every now and again. And I always enjoy reading fresh considerations of the puzzle from writers like Vince Wright in The Illustrious Clients News.

After over seventy-five years, the puzzle still hasn’t been put together and I’m sure many more will follow in Bell’s footsteps before Sherlockiana is done. And like Bell, we’ll probably all feel the need to explain ourselves at one time or another.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver