Playing the Game Backwards

 I don't think anyone ever had as good a reason to dislike something I wrote as much as Philip Weller did when I came out with The Armchair Baskerville Tour in the mid-1990s. Weller, I was reminded during Sunday's talk by Jim Webb at the Crew of the Barque Lone Star meeting, was the world's foremost expert upon the locations of the novel The Hound of the Baskerville at that time, and was very fond of Dartmoor. The real Dartmoor.

Myself, being bookish, non-traveling American, wrote an entire book about a time and a place within a novel that, to me, was best experienced as a sort of virtual reality. Like 1880s London, it wasn't a reality that I thought existed, and was always content with the one in my imagination. Moors and metropolises are two different things however, and while Dartmoor might be a very real place to a Briton like Philip Weller, to me, it might as well be Narnia.

And I treated it as such in The Armchair Baskerville Tour.

The grand game of Sherlockiana has always been about melding history and Holmes to move Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson into the real world, and I have heard some overly cautious folk worry that playing that game might rob Conan Doyle of some credit somehow. But nobody worries about the opposite thing of treating Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as being as real as a professional wrestling victory.

If Holmes and Watson really lived in London, really went to Reichenbach Falls, and really wound up in Sussex, the minute one starts to doubt the reality of Holmes and Watson in the slightest, the reality of London, Reichenbach, and Sussex starts to fade a bit as well, like some photo of Marty McFly in Back to the Future.

"England is England yet, for all our fears. Only those things the heart believes are true," the very American/Canadian Vincent Starrett famously poeticized, which makes it sound like if we don't believe in England and clap for it like a dying Tinkerbell,  we might suddenly not hear from Paul Thomas Miller again. 

In the era of both "Birds Aren't Real" and bigfoot tracking training, the lines between parody play and true believers are blurring like no one in the early days of Sherlockiana could have imagined. Does someone among America's three hundred and twenty-nine million people actually believe that England is a mythical place? Given all of the stupidity evidence currently out there, one would have to say "yes." And if you google "Is England real?" you quickly find "Well, it's not really an actual country any more." That doesn't help.

It's enough to make one want to curl up in that wicker chair at 221B Baker Street and just not think about it all for a while, isn't it? Because that's an option.

Or . . . wait . . .