An occasional feature of published pages about John Watson
The date of Watson’s death is unknown, and those who dream of an immortal Sherlock Holmes long for Watson to remain by his side. Without Holmes’s aid, however, the “old campaigner”, as he styled himself in 1891, must have passed over those Reichenbach Falls in the sky not long after his friend and colleague Arthur Conan Doyle. “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius,” Watson wrote of Inspector Macdonald in The Valley of Fear, but he might well have said the same of himself. Without the talents of John H. Watson, Holmes may well have laboured in obscurity.
From The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Vol I by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edited with a Foreword and Notes by Leslie S. Klinger, pg. lii.