|
Excerpts from the Private Diary
of Dr. John Watson
by Setcheti
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, but the
movie this work is based on is not – hence the necessity of stating that no
infringement was intended, because none was. And the reviewers who said this was
the worst Holmes movie ever deserve to be eaten by a giant Sumatran rat.
Rating: FRT: MP,SC,SLC
Author’s Note: Several years ago I came across this movie called Sherlock,
and it had Vincent d’Onofrio in it and I just knew he had to be playing Holmes
so I bought a copy on the spot. Turned out Vincent was playing Moriarty, but
it still worked out to be a surprisingly entertaining retread of the Sherlock
Holmes mythos – I liked it, anyway. And after I watched it, this little pair
of diary ficlets happened. I don’t write first-person stories very often (and
I post them even less), but sometimes a character just insists that his voice
is the only one the readers need to hear. And I did like this movie’s Dr.
Watson quite a lot, so I let him have his way.
A few important points for
those who haven’t seen this particular movie: Watson is a medical examiner for Scotland Yard. Sherlock
is a hot young stud of a ladies’ man (that part really threw me at first) with
a flair for the dramatic. Mycroft stays in the Diogenese Club because Moriarty,
who is sort of a drug kingpin, had pretty much broken him – Sherlock,
coincidentally, hates drugs and Moriarty in equal measure. Moriarty is smart,
evil, violent, and somewhat thuggish. And Lestrade is neither stupid nor incompetent.
Hindsight, Trollops, and the Benefits of Sexual Exercise
I wanted him almost from the moment I saw him.
Well all right, not from the first moment. I don’t think
I truly started wanting him until I saw the way he didn’t flinch when I started
my autopsy. It’s not many men who don’t – in fact, he was the first.
He’s self-abusive, of course. He gets depressed, he
drinks, he sleeps with any trollop who’ll have him…I’ll break him of all that,
eventually, but for now it’s all he’s got besides detective work. And Mycroft,
of course, but his brother isn’t much good to anyone outside of the Diogenese
Club and Sherlock doesn’t often go there. Although I was afraid he might retreat
after what Moriarty did to him with the drugs.
I suppose I didn’t know him as well as I’d thought.
Although in hindsight leaving that last trollop to take care of him wasn’t such
a brilliant idea on my part as it might have looked at the time. He never said
it – not that he would have, being a gentleman – but I’m quite sure that once
he refused any more of the drug Miss Doyle found a more…physical way to make
him feel better. Irritated me even more that it worked; he was on his feet the
next day, damn her, shaky but fully in possession of his faculties and raring
for revenge.
And against my better judgment, we went after Professor
Moriarty. Twice. So much for that, he shot Holmes, which wasn’t good for him
on top of all he’d already been through, and then shot the trollop in front of
him. And then the bloody bastard shot me in the leg, which didn’t do me much
good either – and it meant I couldn’t follow Holmes when he ran after Moriarty
again. Killed him, too, but damn near killed himself as well doing it as there
wasn’t anyone else around to tend to him afterwards. He lost quite a lot of
blood, almost too much, and it took him a good long while to recover.
Which gave me the excuse to move in with him, of course –
he needed tending, and I was just the person to take on the job. The only
person who could, actually, since he wouldn’t let a nurse touch him. And now
that he’s back on his feet again, at least within our rooms…well, I think that
the benefits of sexual exercise in rebuilding one’s constitution during a long
convalescence definitely need more looking into. And by his own admission,
he’s off women for the foreseeable future.
So in that case I suppose I’ll just have to do, won’t I?
Yes, I just suppose I shall.
The Press, The Casebook, and the Bluebeard of Baker
Street
I learned a hard lesson about the press during our first
adventure, Sherlock’s and mine; I learned that talking to them is just about
always a mistake. The problem is, if one’s name doesn’t show up in the morning
papers, the great general public doesn’t know who one is – which is very bad
for business, especially a consulting business like ours that is so very
reliant on that same great general public knowing exactly who and where we are.
Bit of a rock and a hard place, wouldn’t you say? But I
found a way around it. I’d never really fancied myself a writer, not of the
sensational sort…but The Casebook practically writes itself. Sherlock has a
flair for the dramatic anyway – hence the old fascination with theatre
trollops, which I’ve since done away with – and so with just a little bit of
tweaking here and there, change a few names and the pertinent details that
Sherlock and Lestrade say shouldn’t be made public, each sordid case becomes a
fascinating adventure.
Lestrade has been an immense help to me, I must admit. He
started coming ‘round after I’d moved in with Sherlock, just seeing how the
‘great detective’ was doing and trying to ascertain when I’d be back to work in
the autopsy room. Or so he says, but on one occasion he brought Mycroft with
him for a visit and he never failed to keep us up to date on all the nasty
details of the clean-up of Moriarty’s drug ring. He respects Sherlock quite a
bit, I know, he just worries for him as a ‘civilian’ working in such a
dangerous business as private detective work. “The main problem I’ve got with
it is the lack of backup,” he informed me gruffly over a glass of port one
evening. “Yourself aside, Watson, of course – but one man sometimes isn’t
enough.”
I sat back in my chair and looked at him. “He’s learned
to trust you, he’ll bring you into it if he gets in over his head. Or I will.”
He snorted and drained off the rest of the port, waving
off my offer of a refill. “You mean you’ll convince him to,” he told me, but
he said it with a smile. “That’s good enough for me, though; just between us,
I’m not unable to admit that there are certain…situations where the official
police force can’t be quite as effective as I’d like. But you’ll do me the
favor of writing up these little adventures to make it sound like I barely
tolerate Holmes, if you would? Make me as nasty as you like, Watson, but we
can’t afford to have every Tom, Dick and Harry setting out a shingle as a
consulting detective and thinking the Yard is all for them.”
I understood what he was saying. There’s only one
Sherlock Holmes, after all. So I agreed to do it the way he wanted, on the
condition that he would come ‘round to offer suggestions on just how nasty he
wanted himself to be in my tales. I think he’s had fun with that, in fact he’s
surprised me more than a few times with just how far off the mark he’s willing
to portray himself to make the story go.
And he surprised me again when he made the very blunt
suggestion that Dr. Watson needed to get married, sooner and not later.
Sherlock had an excuse for avoiding the fairer sex, he insisted, but I did not
and that sort of gossip was not the sort of scandal a man could recover from.
So I took some details from our very next case, twisted things around a bit and
then arranged for the fictional Dr. Watson to fall in love and marry the
heroine. And then I killed her off in the next story with great relish and
moved Watson back in with Holmes so he wouldn’t be lonely. Our great reading
public bought it hook, line and sinker, and to everyone’s surprise the
condolences I received were almost evenly matched by responses upbraiding me
for leaving the Great Detective alone when he needed me most.
That one shocked Sherlock into silence for a good
half-day, to know he was thought of with such sympathy by the public, although
he was concerned that those same individuals might prove a threat to me
personally if any of them happened to be retribution-minded. He really has
grown very attached to me over the past year, as I am to him, and the idea of
having me taken from him seems to be a weight that presses on his mind at
times. I assured him, however, that as our readers find me necessary to him
there was no way one of them was ever going to attempt to do away with me for
fear of hurting their precious ‘Great Detective’ and so I should be safe in
perpetuity – or at least as long as the stories kept being entertaining,
anyway.
I found a better way to reassure him after that – and I’d
have to say he was completely reassured, if the way he screamed out my name was
any indication. God, how I love that flair for the dramatic, it does wonderful
things for my virile ego.
I think Watson will definitely have to fall in love and
get married again sometime in the future. Now I just have to come up with a
way to kill off the next fictional wife without making our readers think me
some adventurous Dr. Crippen or the Bluebeard of Baker Street…
|