Am I having Wisteria hysteria? Or a glimpse of the truth!

Those of us who prefer analog to digital clocks know that even a broken clock is right twice a day, at least if it isn't the hands that have broken off.  And likewise, even the most crackpot of theories can have a grain or two of truth. But then again, we can give a theory a bit more than its due for our own reasons, as well.

In John Allen's Shadow Woman: The Real Creator of Sherlock Holmes, Allen puts forth the very wild theory that Conan Doyle's two wives wrote practically the entire Sherlockian Canon. Louise got her licks in up until "Final Problem," then Jean took over sometime later.  The idea that Conan Doyle would put his name on works someone else wrote is as ludicrous as the idea that he was Watson's litera . . . oh, wait, we like that one, don't we? It's our Santa Claus, a cherished tradition, if not, perhaps what proper historians will accept from us.

But all those Sherlock Holmes stories being written by Louise or Jean? That's just a bridge too far . . . well, with one exception for me.

"The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge."

There may be other stories held up as the worst of the Canon, but for me that one deserves special recognition. First, it has that ridiculous 1892 date to it, being the only story to fall between "Final Problem" and "Empty House." It's a level of error that I can't believe Conan Doyle capable of, despite all the other slips of season or month we've seen him do. And when was "Wisteria Lodge" published?

August of 1908. About a month shy of a year since Conan Doyle married Jean Leckie. It had been four years since he had published anything about Sherlock Holmes. He had spent all of 1908 up until that time honeymooning and playing a lot of cricket, plainly feeling full of manly vigor.

And along comes "Wisteria Lodge." Watson thinks it's 1892. Sherlock is talking about "Colonel Carruthers" when you know he has to mean Moran and the true end of the Moriarty empire. Holmes's big deduction is "But no one can glance at your toilet and attire without seeing that your distubance dates from the moment of your waking." Wow, he can tell when someone just got up and ran out that morning! Genius!

The writer of "Wisteria Lodge" suffers from that weakness of so many pastiche writers: They want to use Sherlock Holmes, but don't know exactly what to do with him. And while I find the idea that Conan Doyle would let his wives write most of Sherlock Holmes, the thought that he would let his second wife -- the one whose spirit-possessed scribblings he would later find worth publishing -- try her hand does not seem that out of the question. Conan Doyle was plainly all kinds of smitten over Jean Leckie, and, like I said, he did do crazier things with her involved.

Is it telling that he put "Wisteria Lodge" as the lead in the collection of His Last Bow, to be followed by a tale he was a bit ashamed of, one about marital infidelity from the decade before? Or that "Bruce-Partington Plans," which followed "Wisteria Lodge" by a few months in original publication, was a return to the original Conan Doyle "snap" of a writing style, which seemed lost a few months before?

I may disagree with John Allen on fifty-nine other stories, but when it comes to "Wisteria Lodge," I am a little more suspicious of Conan Doyle letting his heart over-ride his authorial integrity "just one time" during his honeymoon year.

And it wasn't like Watson was writing for him in 1908, anyway, as Sherlock Holmes had to write up his own 1907 adventure with the "Lion's Mane." I mean, come on!