Tooled up on Baker Street

[slightlyfoxed]

On Dr Watson's first adventure with Sherlock Holmes, the laconic consulting detective asks him:

"Have you any arms?"
"I have my old service revolver and a few cartridges."
"You had better clean it and load it..."

A few years later, in The Sign of Four Holmes asks him:

"Have you a pistol, Watson

Comments

[booklectic]

I can't swear to this, but during my years of reading more or less every Agatha Christie book, I think I spotted that two of them were virtually identical except for the title. I forgot which two, though, so one day I hope to discover again the elusive duplicate. (The Elusive Duplicate would make a good detective story title, actually.)

[slightlyfoxed]

That's brilliant. Could it have been a rebadged, edited edition, or did the characters and locations change names?

[booklectic]

Different characters and locations, so far as I remember. Have been vaguely googling to see if this is actually a thing people know about but nothing so far. Maybe I dreamt it.

(I note I have two Dorothy L Sayers icons and no Agatha Christie icons. Should change that.)

[slightlyfoxed]

I like your thinking. 'Have you *your* pistol' would have seemed less forgetful, although it's harder to say than it is to read.

[softfruit]

It may be terribly pedestrian of me but isn't the likely reason for the amnesia that Doyle can't assume readers have read the previous book, and otherwise it might seem out of character for hippocratic-oath Watson to suddenly produce a gun from his pocket?

But I like the idea of the writer pondering whether the reply should be "my old trusty service revolver" or "oddly, I have an experimental model of this new 'machine gun' thingie, fires off 120 rounds a minute Holmes, it'd make mincemeat of Moriarty at five hundred yards. So should I bring that or the old service revolver that jams all the damn time?"

[slightlyfoxed]

Aha! Hadn't thought of that.
Or possibly, it's playing on *more advanced* continuity, and there's an intervening story in which a blood-spattered Watson has sworn off weapons, decided to get back to his healing roots, and promised to toss his pistol into the Thames. So 'I have my service revolver' is a confession, delivered with foot-shuffling (or steely, reborn determination to give something both barrels. If it doesn't jam).

'Shall I fetch the steam-powered mecha battle-suit from the stables, Holmes?'
'No, Watson, we want the element of surprise...'

[softfruit]

"And," thought Holmes, "until we get paid for the Deceptacon job, we just can't afford the quantity of coal it takes to keep that damn thing powered up."

[softfruit]

(I'm also a bit worried that in my head the mecha suit makes the same noise as Ivor the Engine)

[drdoug]

I vote continuity snafu. If Conan Doyle can't even get Watson's first name consistently, I think we're expecting too much for him to remember that he's already written almost exactly the same passage in a previous story. At least it's totally consistent - more alarming would be if the second exchange had Watson explaining that, having used firearms in battle and killed people, he's sworn off such things for life.

[slightlyfoxed]

If Conan Doyle can't even get Watson's first name consistently

And retrospectively shot the poor blighter in the leg! Having already had a crack at his shoulder. (Unless some kind of advanced therapy simply moved the injury - maybe it eventually gets massaged further down, off the end of his toes, and pains him no more.)

I'm trying to think of novels (possibly postmodern ones) in which characters are deliberately inconsistent, but can't.

[drdoug]

On the other hand, he supply him with a vague and variable number of wives. From memory there's heavy hints that one died while Holmes was pretending to be dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, but it's not explicit. I think I've read something arguing moderately persuasively that on textual evidence alone it could equally have been a puppy of which Watson had become inordinately fond in Holmes' absence, and it was all smokescreen for Watson's lurid love life. I suspect Victorian polyamorism, all Gothic and secretive.

I'm trying to think of novels (possibly postmodern ones) in which characters are deliberately inconsistent, but can't.

The Adventure of the Unreliable Narrator?

I'm sure I've read detective fiction where this is part of the shtick. And plenty where the narrator changes, and troubles the previous account(s). Susan Howatch's Starbridge novels do this particularly well, I think. Oh, and then there's the gimmick where the concluding chapter totally undermines the preceding narrative in its entirety (I'm sure there

[the_maenad]

At more than one point in The Five Red Herrings, Dorothy L. Sayers refers to the landscape of Galloway as possessing mounds "as round as the hill of the King of Elfland".

Somehow it seems very Sayersish that when she inadvertently repeats herself, it's while making a cultural and literary allusion.

[slightlyfoxed]

I want to reread this to find it, now - as you say, it's a lovely appropriate thing - even though the first time I read The Five Red Herrings I found it unusually hard to keep track of all the characters.