Holograph letters to A. P. Watt

Tetchy about when he intended to write the remaining four stories and turn them in, Conan Doyle wrote Watt three letters in two days, flexing his authorial muscle:

We always said that if we undertook the 12 stories it was with the proviso that we could stop at any point. . . . I preserve the option of doing 12, but at present I don’t want to burden my mind by the promise. . . .

In the next letter he reminds Watt of his reason for not wanting to “burden” his mind: he had begun campaigning to represent a trio of Scottish border towns in Parliament. And in the last of these letters, he expressed concern about not writing if he felt “wearied out.”