Sherlock Holmes The Blue Diamond

Wolfram Research Data Repository

Victorian Studies 63.2 (2021): 303-05. Print.

The Hound of the Baskervilles. By Arthur Conan Doyle. London: BookVolts, 2023. 2,698 words. Web.

The story that pits Watson against Holmes and in which Dupin tries to save them from Prof Moriarty. What is the detective? How do we seek truth and justice? The very foundations of justice are threatened. Writing as Dr Watson. This is to be the worst day of my life. Despite some truly awful days, days of loss, of bereavement, of injury and failure, today will see me question, challenge, the greatest friend I have ever had, and the life we have shared privately and publicly. This involves you, for we have a relationship. This will change the life I have shared with you, my readers, through my reports of the criminal cases we have worked together. The stories you know of me, the man you know as Dr Watson, and my hero and mentor, Sherlock Holmes. I pickup the large magnifying glass from the crowded, round side table, next to the worn comfortable leather chair. I examine my hands, the ripples of the fingerprints as laid down before my birth, as if ripples had left their mark on the sand of a beach. Was I born for today? Where these patterns, of curved lines and loops, my uniqueness; hiding amongst the swirls, the story of my life. Could I have prevented what is about to happen? Did these fingers, looming like five snakes about to break the glass, write the stories that lead to this final one. The stories, even more complicated whorls of identity, curved scribblings. Had I become my writings? From the very moment of a case beginning, even in that quiet morning, with horses' hooves, and shouting newspaper boys-just before it was to break into an adventure-the silent tension of this room, my mind would scan our world, noting details and feelings that could form the start of one of my written stories. The world had become a draft diary, an internal narrative adding to that of the public one with Holmes, trying to create his imaginary world of clues sewn together to trap the culprit. That was one of the differences that gradually destroyed our friendship. We veered on two different journeys without fully knowing it until the last few months, without realising that our stories might threaten each other. He recreated the story of the crime, whilst I recreated the story of his story. I had never really seen it as this. I loved the thrill, the humour, the challenge portrayed in the Sherlock short stories and books. In writing them I relived them, in preparing to write them, they heightened my experience of them as they happened. I became an addicted, impassioned chronicler. Not for the money, or the fame. Just for the life it gave me, and the relationship it created between me and Holmes.

2016

2013

Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews, 2019