Would Sherlock Holmes have been able to solve the mystery of the Mary Celeste? Had he been invented sooner, he might have given it a go. There's an early story by Arthur Conan Doyle called 'J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement', which appeared anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine in January 1884, three years before the publication of 'A Study in Scarlet'. Jephson is a prototype Watson: both narrators are doctors (as Conan Doyle himself was); both have old war wounds that occasionally still trouble them (Watson received his in Afghanistan, Jephson during the American Civil War); both display a startling ineptitude for the art of deduction. Unlike Watson, however, Jephson purports to be a survivor from a ship called the Marie Celeste.

LRB 17 February 2005 | PDF Download