Significance of Donative Transfers in the Sherlock Holmes Canon
I am please to present, with some relevant annotations, a manuscript written by John H. Watson, M.D., late of Her Majesty’s Army Medical Department in Afghanistan. I found this manuscript in a Vicrtoian-era trunk that my wife and I purchased at an antique shop in the Cotswolds town of Winchcombe during our recent visit to England. I am sorry to say that the manuscript is merely a fragment—albeit a rather extensive one—of an adventure of Dr. Watson and his great friend, the renowned consulting detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I have transcribed this felicitous discovery verbatim except for conforming its spelling and punctuation to modern American usage.
This manuscript confirms something that I have long known: issues relating to donative transfers—inheritances, wills, and trusts involving presnt possessory estate and future interest—permeate many of the great cases that Mr. Holmes solved. Given the prominence of these issues in the adventures of Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson, perhaps no one should be surprised to learn that there came a day on which they discussed these issues in their rooms at 221B Baker Street in London. What a fortunate occurrence it was for me to find this document, which contains the lengthy and thorough dialogue between the good doctor and his great friend about these matters. For me, the most unexpected and congenial discovery in this manuscript is Dr. Watson’s more-than-passing familiarity with these subjects. That Sherlock Holmes was well acquainted with the field of donative transfers is not particularly surprising, given his vast store of knowledge in so many diverse areas. But Watson’s knowledge in this field is a revelation.
A brief explanation is in order about the citation and annotations that I have added to this manuscript. Where Watson refers to specific matter hat appear elsewhere in his published writing, I have cited to those writing. Those matters to which he refers in the present manuscript for the first time and that have not been previously published do not, of course, bear any citations to Watson’s prior writings. As the reader will seem Watson’s previously published writings do not report much of what Watson has written here about Holmes’s adventures.
As for my own annotations herein, when I first read this manuscript it occurred to me that some analysis of certain relevant legal issues might be useful to the reader as a means of better elucidating some of the events that Dr. Watson has described. Therefore, I have supplied citations to and appropriate discussion of pertinent authorities—primarily treatises (some contemporaneous and some modern).
My great hope is publishing this fragmentary manuscript is that some reader may be able to supply the missing portion hereof, thus bringing to the many devotees of the stories of Sherlock Holmes and the writings of John Watson yet another tale of their exploits. My discovery of this manuscript raises the possibility that still others written by Dr. Watson may be extant outside his famous “dispatch box” in the vaults of Cox’s Bank in London and that such other manuscripts will be unearthed in due time and presented by their discoverers to an eager and waiting public.