Never Said It: Sherlock Holmes Never Said Elementary, My Dear Watson
Four novels, 56 stories, no joined catchphrase. Holmes follows the pages while the hats follow him.
Check the pages. Then question the hat stand.
Doyle's four Holmes novels and 56 short stories never join the famous words. In The Crooked Man (1893), Watson says “Excellent!” and Holmes answers “Elementary”; Holmes uses “my dear Watson” elsewhere in the passage, separately. The word elementary occurs in other stories too. P. G. Wodehouse gives Psmith the joined line in the January 1910 installment of Psmith, Journalist, whose serial began in 1909. Clive Brook says it in the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes, as a contemporary Screenland review confirms. Sidney Paget drew the famous deerstalker, while Doyle describes an “ear-flapped travelling-cap”. Three opinionated hats inspect the evidence, and Holmes identifies a suspect.
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Never Said It
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