Mrs. Hudson

Mrs. Hudson is the landlady of the fictional house 221B Baker Street, in which Sherlock Holmes lives, in the "Sherlock Holmes" detective stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

She is described as a very good cook by Dr. John Watson. Holmes once referred her to as a Scotswoman. She is a woman who wants the home to be clean and tidy and often fights with Sherlock Holmes for this. Other than one mention of her "queenly tread," she is given no physical description or first name, although she has been identified with the "Martha" in "His Last Bow." In film and television adaptations of the stories, she is often portrayed as an older woman, although in "Meitantei Holmes" she was young and named "Marie."

At one point in "A Scandal in Bohemia" Holmes says "When Mrs. Turner has brought in the tray I will make it clear to you," just before he and Watson are described as eating food prepared by their landlady; it is unclear whether "Turner" is here a publisher's/author's error for "Hudson," some sort of servant of Mrs. Hudson's, or an example of Holmes being thoughtless and forgetting his own landlady's name.

There have since been several explanations for this name which have varied from the sensible to the absurd. It was reported in "The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" that the name Mrs Turner once again featured in the original manuscript for "The Empty House" but had been crossed out and replaced with Mrs Hudson. This lends weight to the idea that the name was a mistake by Doyle.

Another theory was that Mrs Turner could have been a stand-in while Mrs Hudson was on holiday. The most absurd suggestion was that Holmes and Mrs Hudson were secret lovers and that Turner was the name that they used when checking into hotels for trysts. In "Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds", Holmes and Mrs Hudson are lovers, although Watson is too oblivious to notice.