Starting the correspondence as an eight-year-old school boy sent to a Catholic boarding school, the letters trace his life from impoverished uni student, medico on a sealer, struggling author (there’s a short note where he complains of having to sell all the rights for a Study in Scarlet to The Strand Magazine for just 25 quid), to the death of his first wife and subsequent second marriage, war historian and bereaved father, through to his public, rather painful championing of spiritualism.

The letters also show his ambivalence to the popularity of his best-known creation, and how he pumped out these stories workman-like, as family demands and circumstances required.

As the child of English and Scottish parents, I ate kidney, liver and brains enthusiastically until a few years ago when I suddenly sat up and thought:
(1) Holy shee-it, liver and kidneys are impurity / toxin filtering devices! and
(2) If I was going to get a prion disease, a lambs’ brain would probably be a pretty easy way to get it!

Over-thinking is a killer isn’t it.

Good God! Are you saying it’s the other way around?!?!?

Nice bit Nabs. Also, how awesome is offal done right, and how awful done wrong? Is there anything else in the world save say, recorder playing, which exhibits such confounding polarity?

Reading through it I was reminded of why, when I first encountered Holmes – before I was old enough to drink, Doyle’s stuff worked. He was a crisp plotter of story and economically created a beautifully evocative and self contained world, even for the time.

If he was around now, he’d be one of the Beeb’s best showrunners. Or creating and running another very successful literary-based IP franchise.

But on rereading the Holmes stories, and then delving into the teenage collection I retained, I was struck by how much Conan Doyle, an apparently uxorious man, dwelt at such length on the details of Holmes and Watson’s batchelor life.

No, it’s not the sublimated gay thing, more I feel Conan Doyle’s nostalgia for the carefree life of a young medical student sharing digs. Someone really should write a book on the fertile intersection between the study of medicine and high bohemia over the past few centuries.

As I pointed out before, Watson is an Afghanistan veteran and Holmes is basically a rusticated post grad who’s surprisingly well connected – and who somewhere along the line pressed the keys of a hospital drugs cabinet into a bar of soap.

So they are both pretty worldly bachelors of some independent means, in by all accounts their late 20s, often out late looking for adventure and with a cheerful indifference to domestic niceties.

Withnail and I meets The Odd Couple.

I suspect Guy Richie may be taking a similar tack with his upcoming Sherlock Holmes film. The trailer doesn’t look promising. Too glossy and too many explosions. Also, much as I love Robert Downey Jr (the 21st century Robert Mitchum), I feel he should played Watson and Law Holmes.

However, as always, I’m prepared to be pleasantly disappointed.