So, I'm thinking this was the first guy Sherlock Holmes killed.

 Our library book club that only does short stories, and only short stories with Sherlock Holmes in them, and only the ones by Conan Doyle, except sometimes we do those four novels . . . well, anyway, we met tonight. And we talked about "The Boscombe Valley Mystery." And I had this thought.

At the end of the case, Sherlock Holmes says, "I never hear of such a case as this that I do not think of Baxter's words, and say, 'There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes."

Now, the case he's talking about involved a guy who killed a blackmailer from his past. Sherlock Holmes was hired by the guy's daughter, and the guy is old and supposedly dying anyway, so Sherlock lets him off. But that thing he says . . . "There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes." It sounds like Sherlock Holmes has just heard old Turner's confession and thought, "Wow, I really relate to that."

But why would he think that? Had he killed a blackmailer who returned from his past to haunt him?

Or maybe helped kill a blackmailer who returned from the past to haunt that friend's family member?

It seemed like such an odd thing for Holmes to say out of context that I immediately theorized tonight that Holmes must have done that very thing. And we know that Holmes's start in the crime business was a triggering incident in the story Watson wrote up as "The Gloria Scott." And, gee, there was that blackmailer Hudson that came out of Trevor Senior's past in that story, just as the events in Boscombe Valley played out. Could Holmes and his college buddy Victor Trevor have killed Hudson, just as old Turner did in Boscombe Valley?

Victor Trevor does flee England to live in southern Nepal or northern India after whatever happened at his family home. Sherlock Holmes returns to London and seeks our a fellow lodger so he has an excuse to fund a landlady named Mrs. Hudson in need of tenants. And eventually we are. told that Holmes paid Mrs. Hudson "princely sums." Was someone trying to ease some guilt with those payments?

It seemed pretty odd as well for Sherlock Holmes, after telling Watson about Hudson in that case write-up to just basically go, "The police think Hudson killed another guy named Beddoes and fled, but I think Beddoes killed him." So if Hudson's body ever did turn up, Holmes has a pre-selected suspect from a case he's have surely solved if it had been just hanging out in his origin story all that time.

It has always seemed a bit coincidental that we never hear of Mr. Hudson or what happened to him, and maybe that was on purpose . . . because we sort of did hear. Was "The Gloria Scott" Watson's way of telling us without telling us, even though Holmes was thought to be dead when he published it?

A number of criminals who passed through Sherlock Holmes's casebooks had mysterious deaths after seeming to escape justice. And Hudson was the first. 

Maybe the first at not escaping justice, thanks to Sherlock Holmes, as well?