Thoughts toward an alternate history of Sherlockiana.

Christopher Morley was 44 years old when he founded The Baker Street Irregulars of New York.

Forty-four is an interesting age, old to a young person, young to an old person. Seasoned, yet still holding on to the drives of youth for a while longer.

About twenty years later, when Evelyn Herzog and some fellow college girls started The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, needless to say, they were much younger. Follow that statement up with a glance at the Baker Street Babes of our modern era and one starts to wonder . . . do female Sherlockians tend to organize earlier than their male counterparts?

And to take it a step further -- if women had not been held back by the sort of culture that didn't give them the right to vote until 1920, would we have had a Sherlock Holmes society in the Roaring Twenties, instead of the war-torn 1940s?

A goodly chunk of any sci-fi/fantasy section of major bookstores can be found holding novels of alternate versions of history, where one takes a "What if?" premise and rolls out a story from there. T'were I not such a lazy soul (or otherwise occupied with work, take your pick) it might be fun to play with the concept of the first Sherlock Holmes society being spearheaded by a flapper-era female dynamo, and how that might have played out, especially with Morley and crew coming to the party second.

As I'm very short on time this morning, I can't even play with that concept on this page as much as I'd like, but it seemed interesting enough to let you think about it as well.