Choosing Your Friends Wisely

‘I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.’
‘THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES’
For all that Holmes stands alone as the greatest detective in English literature, he was but one half of a remarkable double act even though he was
sometimes reluctant to admit it. Holmes was self-confident (even arrogant) and occasionally teased Watson mercilessly.



Even when he was ‘being nice’, his compliments could be distinctly double-edged. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, he told Watson rather condescendingly: ‘It may be that
you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.’
Some portrayals in television and film productions (notably Nigel Bruce’s Watson alongside Basil Rathbone’s Holmes in the Hollywood movies of
the 1930s and 1940s), depicted Watson as a bungler. He was not. Here was a qualified doctor who had served his country in India and
Afghanistan. He had foibles of his own (there are numerous suggestions of a historic overfondness for alcohol and gambling), but in his partnership
with Holmes he was never less than loyal and extraordinarily brave, and often provided that dose of humanity lacking in the Great Detective.
Holmes knew this too. When he baited Watson, it was usually done with the mischievous affection common to strong male friendships. Holmes
had the insight to recognise that Watson filled some of the gaps in his own personality and was the perfect ally whenever he was needed. Watson
was Holmes’s ‘someone … on whom I can thoroughly rely’. During their Baskerville adventure, Sherlock admitted that ‘There is no man who is
better worth having at your side when you are in a tight place’.
Crucially, Watson was also an impeccable foil for Holmes, someone with whom the Great Detective could discuss his train of thought (though he
often did so in an infuriatingly enigmatic manner). Holmes even stated: ‘Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.’ If there
were gaps in his thinking, talking over his deductions with Watson was a sure way to expose them.
Watson in his turn understood what he brought to the crime-fighting party. ‘I was a whetstone for his mind,’ he wrote in ‘The Adventure of the
Creeping Man’. ‘I stimulated him.’ In ‘His Last Bow’, a troubled Holmes told his old friend: ‘Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a
changing age.’ But perhaps Holmes summed it up best in ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’: ‘You won’t fail me. You never did fail me.’
Holmes, a man who by his own admission had ‘never loved’, knew that, in the words of John Donne, ‘no man is an island’. He understood that a
trusted friendship did not lessen him or steal glory away from him but made him more than he otherwise would have been. He would, no doubt, have
agreed with the seventeenth-century English poet Abraham Cowley:
Acquaintance I would have, but when it depends
Not on the number, but the choice of friends.