Summer 1935

Dear Jamie,

You teased me with your questions since you came back for that summer holidays . You were 12, and your classmate lended you one of my books. You easily discovered that even if the characters are real, it is a fiction, and asked me why I lied about my friend´s and my life. I told you that it is not a lie, that I only omitted some facts for the sake of discretion, and refused further explanation. You told Scott, but neither he nor you didn´t find out anything more. I remember you two presented me a list of contradictions and errors in names, facts, datation and so on, and he asked me (and I was hearing clearly his father´s tone in his voice), if it is not better for me to write the truth, as I am so bad a lier.

I thought the matter closed, but as I am getting older, the true story is haunting me more and more. My friends are dead now, so no harm can be done to them. You and Scott are alive and your memories of us (I am 81 and still sane enough to understand that I am not here forever) will be partly formed by my former recits about our adventures and so no doubt deformed. That is why I decided to write down the true story for you, Scott, and those who will come. You are a big boy now, so I leave to you what´s to become of it.

Thanks to these books, Conan Doyle and I earned a lot of money and my friend´s name became famous. I depicted an aloof, strange man, a „brain with appendixes", living alone, but not feeling lonely, in Baker Street, and me as his lifelong friend. I heard, and that is one of the most important reasons for me to exerce myself in putting this story on the paper and torturing my old brain with memories, that some people suppose us to be more than friends ... they call it a homosexual relation. I almost hear her laugh at my uneasiness about this word. Do never think there was something like this between us. If I was in love with Holmes, it was not with Sherlock, but with Violet.

So, the true story of my relations with the Holmes family.

I met Sherlock Holmes in the laboratory at the Barts, and I became his fellow-lodger, as I described in Study in Scarlet. His description there is also quite precise: he was tall, thin, clear shaven, with sallow complexion, black glossy hair, hawk-like nose and those great grey eyes. Not a handsome man, as far as I can judge it. As to his habits, he was really smoking that terrible shag tobacco, playing his violin in the most inconvenient hours, was the most untidy person I´ve ever known with the special gift to encumber every place with piles of books and papers and chemicals (you surely remembrer that) and he had these occasional fits of feverish activity alternated by days of total laziness. Sometimes he remembered me of a sleuth-hound, as I wrote, sometimes, especially in these periods of torpor, he looked like a big gaunt gray lazy cat. As to his knowledge, I must say that the solar system question was his favourite joke. I never understood why, but it was so and he tried it upon several people.

I started to write about his adventures because I exceedingly admired him and his work, but also because I was really an late army surgeon with half pay and nothing to do. I showed two or three stories to an acquitance of mine, Artur Conan Doyle, M.D. He was a writer himself, he liked the stories and he became my agent. Holmes despised this bussiness; he didn´t prohibit me to publish the stories, but he always asked me to change a few particulars for the sake of discretion. So our quarters weren´t at 221B Baker Street (a wise decision – otherwise the house would be invaded every day by the fans; I couldn´t believe the stories were becoming so popular), Lestrade was not Lestrade and so on. In some cases I changed the name of our client, sometimes I didn´t specify the year, sometimes I had to alternate a bit the data. Holmes always thougt that it was no use to write about his cases this way, but he acknowledged at least that I made his name famous and it brought him a lot of interesting cases.

I really married Mary Morstan in 1888, Holmes really disappeared in Reichenach Falls in 1891 and caused a serious shock to me in 1894, when he appeared in my rooms in that shabby disguise (I really fainted then – many years later, he told me he was really frightened).

I said there was nothing improper in the relation between us. I could not understand for a long time why he was discussing his cases with me and why he was often asking me to work with him. I suppose I am clever enough but in comparison with him I was terribly slow and blind. In our later years I concluded that smart and brisk, self-conceit and independant as he was, he still missed something, deep in his heart, too deep to acknowledge it, too deep to even fully realise it himself. I don´t know why, but I was able to saturate this need, at least partially, so he sticked to me.

I am writing this old story for you, my son, to help you understand, and I´ve decided to be absolutely sincere and open. I don´t want to conceal nothing. If I do, it will be no use to continue. You are a grown man now, so you will understand me, my hesitations and my doubts. You will understand also the complexity of our relation. I hope so at least.

After his return, Holmes sticked to me very much. My Mary was dead, as well as our baby-boy, and I had no reason to continue my practice. Holmes asked me to sell it and to move back to our old lodgings. The three following years we were always together. I observed that he gave up the cocaine, but there was still the mental habit, the need, that empty place in him. I can say that he was no more addicted neither to cocaine nor to any other drug, but he was addicted to me. He was like a little child needing his mother – it was perhaps not so apparent, but it was real. I became anxious that such a close mental relation could easily be transformed in an other sort of close relation. To prevent it, I decided to find my own lodgings. I never gave him any explanation, and he never asked any.

I don´t want to say that Holmes had such tendencies, neither I had. But I observed several relations of this sort formed in my school years and in the army. It was almost the same story: two lonely boys or men (sometimes one of them was yet experienced in this area), close friendship, no loving parents or family, no one else to love and to feel safe with, then some crisis and ... We were both alone, close friends, nobody to love and to be loved by. I know you take me for the „normal one" and Holmes the „strange one". Most people did so. Let me tell you here that I had the same doubts about him as about myself those days.

I moved out, but I visited my friend very often and we worked as usual. Then, in October 1897, Violet Holmes appeared and changed totally our lives.