Sherlockian Classifiers

 As a fan of Sherlock Holmes who interacts with other fans of Sherlock Holmes over decades, I've alway felt that unnecessary urge to somehow find order and patterns in our legion of co-enthusiasts. The human mind likes to categorize things, and Sherlockiana is an ever-changing mass of humanity that sure looks like it can be categorized -- much like the Sherlockian canon looks like it can be put in date order. So one occasionally tries.

The very first set of categories that I ever considered breaking Sherlockiana into was local and national, back when international mingling was more rare. Eventually, it seemed like local, regional, national, and international were a better geographic breakdown. Of course, there are arguments to be had there, as some regions sure seem national due to a heavier populace of fans, and what the heck is the internet? The John H. Watson Society often feels like a local club that extends over a chunk of the globe. The Barque Lone Star is larger, with a more regional, even national feel, but again crossing so many geographic boundaries that it's hard to pin down. 

The Baker Street Irregulars, centered in New York City every January, always felt national, prides itself on being a bit international, yet can't help but be a bit regional by the simple fact that those who can take a train into the city can be there easier than those who fly. And with the recent announcement of a Midwest BSI Canonical Conclave of Scion Societies -- definitely sounding regional -- that some folks outside of the middle of the U.S. don't want to miss . . . well, it just shows that the lines we draw are just never that solid.

And then we get into types of Sherlockians/Holmesians, which is an even more complex business. Most of us are not limited to being one type of Sherlockian, but mixy-matchy combos of particular Sherlockian types.

The Organizers. At one point, someone called them "sparking plugs," those folks who start and run scion societies. But some event planners don't tie themselves down with a standing herd to corral like a specific club, and fit into this bunch just the same.

The Scholarly. Historians, literary analysts, footnote fans, and those who like to say "Conan Doyle" more often than "Dr. Watson." Doing the serious stuff.

The Professionals. Sure, next to no one is making 100% of their income from Sherlock Holmes (even Conan Doyle). But some have more of a vested interest in the man than the rest of us. People outside our hobbyist sphere associate them with Sherlock Holmes.

The Party People. Here for the social. Friends are the prime collectable and events to get to see those friends are key. "Two Sherlockians and a bottle," as the old saying goes, but these folks can dispense with the bottle.

The Collectors. Can't stop acquiring the Sherlock stuff, whether its just books or other bits that tickle the Sherlock fancy.

The Creators. Yeah, mostly writers of various breeds, but artists, crafters, and even editors and event creators can fit here. Creation is creation.

Is that enough categories? I don't know. You'd still have to take that list and rank a given Sherlockian on a 10 point scale in each of those categories to come close to capturing even a bit of who we are. And do you know what that yields, with six categories and ten possible rankings in each?

A million possible different kinds of Sherlockians. A million.

Classifying people is silly, whether its horoscopes of corporate HR "colors" schemes. Yet these are the tools we have to try to figure ourselves out.

The Dangling Prussian 2025 -- Professor Presbury's Powerpoint Punditry!

 January is fast upon us, and that particular Friday evening in January when Sherlockians celebrate the great detective's birth -- January 17th this year! -- is nigh upon us as well. And for those who aren't attending one dinner of another in New York City 'pon that night, there is always a Zoom option: The Dangling Prussian virtual pub night.

Over the last few years we've see a lot of odds and ends to get us through the six hours of remote Sherlockian fellowship. We've had toasts, we've had short films, some new Holmes-inspired music, and even a live murder mystery featuring Holmes and Watson on a brand new investigation. Other than the annual membership ritual inducting new members of the Montague Street Incorrigibles (the off-brand Baker Street Irregulars), it's mostly a night of hanging out and random talk, but we do try to have some little bit of something organized . . . well, sort of.

In the ongoing spirit of the Dangling Prussian, its impromptu nature, and general chaos, this year our featured entertainment will be a slate of speakers who don't know what they're talking about. And you could be one of them!

Professor Presbury's Powerpoint Punditry is what we're calling it, and Professor Presbury, who called his stand-up career quits after the first Prussian night, will be running the slide show for our guest speakers. And if you know the Professor's monkey-shines, that means trouble. Ever hear of something called "Powerpoint Karaoke" or "Battledecks?" Well, the basic premise is this: A brave presenter will take the stage to give a talk based on ten slides they have never seen before. In this case, of course, they will be Sherlock Holmes based slides, following a title card. The presenter has to do their best to improvise a talk on the spot as the slides appear, just as if they knew what they are doing.

We're betting that Sherlockians (and Holmesians) know their Sherlock enough to make this work. And if they can't? Well, we're a friendly enough crowd at the Dangling Prussian.

More info about the evening to come, but if you think you're going to want to see this or try this on Friday, January 17th, around 7 or 8 o'clock Central time, you might want to go ahead and sign up! Here's the registration link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwof-qgqjsoH9AItYBhp8Rkm4j5x5_s1vpT

Hope to see you there!

Happily Ever After? Well, Maybe, Maybe Not?

 People do enjoy joking about how dull Sherlockian chronology must be. Sooooo boring!

But what nobody realizes is the wild, often scandalous revelations that chronology's second layer brings to the fore. For example, here's a bit from "The Literary Agent's Ten Percent" segment from last week's Watsonian Weekly.

Holmes and Watson's last recorded case from the Baker Street days is "The Creeping Man," which a chronologist can date as starting on Sunday, September 6, 1903. Sometime after that, Sherlock Holmes must have retired to Sussex and left London. In October of 1903, The Strand Magazine publishes "The Adventure of the Empty House," announcing to his fans that Sherlock Holmes is still alive and living at 221B, so he had every reason to get out of town and head for Sussex ASAP. Then, on December 17, 1903, Watson's literary agent goes to see Madame Tussaud's, the big tourist attraction in the neighborhood of 221B Baker Street. 

Now, Conan Doyle knew how popular Holmes was at that point. He probably also knew enough about America to know his fellow writer Mark Twain had seen Tom Sawyer's cave from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer making money as a tourist attraction since 1886. So if the famous Sherlock Holmes's rooms were both vacant and in the neighborhood of another prominent London tourist attraction, might Watson's literary agent have thought of stopping in to see Mrs. Hudson and work out some sort of deal.

Of course, what he should have remembered was that Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft Holmes had previously had a deal for keeping the Baker Street rooms intact and unvisited while Sherlock was not in residence, so there's one reason that wouldn't happen.

But let's look at another example.

Chronology tells us that in late June 1902, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves in the apartment of Mr. Nathan Garrideb confronting a certain Killer Evans. Watson gets shot in the leg. Holmes gets very worried Watson is hurt -- powers of observation plainly not working well enough to assess the bullet's passing through Watson's leg. Of course he's hurt, Sherlock!

But Watson's internal reaction, "It was worth a wound -- it was worth many wounds -- to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask." This line is purest sugar to those who see Holmes and Watson as lovers, equating it with the moment in a romantic comedy where someone finally professes their love after a long "will they, won't they." It's that moment when someone in the audience is definitely chanting "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" The happy ending.

But, as with all the Canon, it's Watson's perception of the moment, however you want to translate that text's emotions. And a Sherlockian chronologist will want to give you another date to ponder now. Back to "The Adventure of the Creeping Man" in September of 1903, a year later.

"The relations between us in those later days were peculiar . . . His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me -- many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead . . . If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality . . . such was my humble role in our alliance."

Yes,  Watson isn't feeling real great about things and he's not living at Baker Street. It that moment in September of 1902 was the happy movie ending some take it to be, that happy didn't last. Watson deserted Holmes for a wife in January of 1903, only six months after he thought he saw how much Holmes loved him. (Again, a date the chronologists would give us from "Blanched Soldier.")

Such a soap opera there to be explored, and all because Sherlockian chronology brings a chain of events to light. Boring, you say? Well, if you just stop at the dates. But if you look at what was going on behind  those dates, whoa, mama! So much more to explore.

If A Million Monkeys Write Sherlock Holmes Stories . . .

 If there is one field of endeavor that I don't worry about AI poking its stupid robot head into, I think it's the world of Sherlock Holmes pastiche.

Well, let me correct that . . . I do worry that someone is going to waste valuable electricity, processing time, server usage, all that stuff to make an AI do something that we already have a cheaper resource creating a constant supply of. 

Remember celebrating the freeing of Sherlock Holmes into the public domain? Remember going "Now ANYONE can write a Sherlock Holmes story!"? What we didn't consider then was that not just anyone, but everyone would decide to write a Sherlock Holmes story.

What's that you say? You haven't written a Sherlock Holmes story yet? Let me ask you a question: Have you retired from whatever you did in the mainstay of life? No? Wait for it. You'll get there.

And everybody gets one. I mean, ya gotta try it.

Show your most brutally honest friend. Get someone to really beat it up. Send it to someone crazy enough to be collecting stories for some new volume called Yet Another Casebook of Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Everybody gets one. 

And, if you're really into it, if you really feel the need and you've survived critiques of your first story, or your friends find your work entertaining, keep going. But here's the thing . . .

Sherlockian fandom is a community that some of us live in. We're not a market for selling late-in-life attempts at authorship by copying existing IP. We are, for the most part, a welcoming community, especially for minor celebrities. But if the first time we see someone, they're trying to sell us a book? And that's the only time we see said person.

And we have plenty of pastiches. We don't need salesmen knocking on our community door trying to sell us another one and then heading down the road to the next fandom house trying to sell that group on their next thing. Sure, some kindly soul is gonna let said salesman in our house, invite them to dinner maybe, but we're not running into the streets and throwing a parade for something we're already swimming in.

Okay, rant over, but while we're on pastiches here's one more thought: Every pastiche is an adaptation, if you think about it. Even if an inhabitant of 2024 tries to match every Victorian thing they can think of, they're still not British Victorians . . . and heck, even British Victorians weren't Conan Doyle. So it's all adaptation of some sort. So why not go whole hog and show us something new? One of the greatest things that BBC Sherlock brought to us, at least to this burnt-out old fan, was the wild experimentation of fanfic putting Holmes and Watson in wildly different roles, environments, and bodies. Wonderful exploration of the characters, and it showed us things we might not have seen about our Baker Street friends.

Think about it.

Okay, post-rant thought over.

The Adaptation Problem

One thing that has delighted me about the fabulous Sherlock & Co. podcast is that one of my totally non-Sherlockian friends is listening to it and loving it. Today he texted me that he'd finished Sherlock & Co.'s "Gloria Scott" adaptation and how intense parts of it were. He then asked if these were based on the original stories . . . and I had to do a "Yes, but . . ."

"The Gloria Scott" is not really a favorite among Sherlock Holmes stories. I would not recommend it to anyone who was not already a fan of Holmes and the better tales. Because it's not really a highlight, sad to say. Yet Sherlock & Co. made it pretty darn fun.

And that presents a new issue with adaptations that I never thought about before.

What if they actually are better than the originals?

As our local library discussion group is fond of noting when they discuss first looks at the tales, they are dated in ways we didn't even think about twenty years ago, and they were dated in ways we did think about then. And its more than the "isms" one encounters. Some of the situations involved are harder and harder for a modern reader to relate to. Very few Sherlockians in 2024 are coming to the fandom directly from the original stories. Sherlock Holmes clicks with them in some other medium and they follow the river of Holmes back to its source. 

In the last century, "not as good as the originals" was a constant refrain. The question "Why can't they just do straight adaptations to the screen, like the Jeremy Brett series?" could be heard again and again.

But did we really want to see a straight adaptation of every one of the sixty stories? Like "The Gloria Scott?" Young Holmes goes on vacation meets his friend's father, leaves, and later comes back just as his friend's father dies of a stroke and reads the story of what was stressing the old guy out. Oh, and he figures out a word puzzle. When Granada did adapt a "young Holmes" story with "Musgrave Ritual," even they added Watson to the mix.

At some point, we actually need adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories to be better than the originals, to keep Sherlock Holmes alive in the culture. No one can afford to make productions just for the populace of avowed diehard Sherlockians -- we a literally less than a millionth of the world's total population. If we were a country and went to war with the fans of any NFL team, South Korean boy band, or, bless her heart, Taylor Swift, we'd be snuffed from existence immediately. But all those regular folks who find some version of Sherlock Holmes entertaining enough to watch a TV show, see a movie, or listen to a podcast keep our hero alive for us.

As I said, I am delighted my friend is into Sherlock & Co. We've been friends for over thirty years, and he knows more than enough about Sherlockiana just from knowing me. But he's not jumping into a local scion or coming to Dayton, Minneapolis, or New York. His enjoyment of Robert Downey Jr. or Harry Atwell is enough, reminding me that I'm not entirely crazy for dedicating so much time to this hobby. (Not entirely! Hee hee.)

So bring on the adaptations! Some will rise to the top, and some will sink into the great Grimpen Mire. (Speaking of which, after their adaptation of The Sign of the Four, I am dying to see what Sherlock & Co. does with the best of the novels.) But in the end, they will keep Sherlock Holmes alive, for generation after generation after generation.

The Practically Canonical Tent Joke Prequel

While the classic tent joke premise is non-Canonical, there is a place where a tent joke actually does fit in. Before Sherlock Holmes, there was Watson's other friend . . .

Dr. Watson and Murray the orderly went camping, somewhere between Mumbai (then Bombay) and Kandahar. 

"Why do they call this a 'dome' when the canvas is draped from that single center pole?" Murray asked as he stared at the roof of their two man tent. "Aren't domes round?"

"Who called it a dome?" Watson inquired, as he hadn't heard it described in that way.

"Captain Moran -- you know, the one with that grand moustache."

"Ah. The gambler. Heard he bagged a Bengal today that had attacked a mail runner." Watson sighed. "I suspect that fellow enjoys going out of his way just to shoot things."

"Still sore from Moran picking at your double-barrelled musket, are you?" Murray chuckled. "Why do you even have that thing? You're a doctor."

"My brother insisted I take it. More of a hunting piece than an army one. You'd think Moran would have appreciated that, if he's the sportsman he claims to be."

Murray suddenly sat up and froze, motioning Watson to keep silent. 

"What is is?" Watson whispered.

"I hear something," Murray whispered back.

Something pushed against the side of the tent, then again closer to the front flaps. The front tent flaps rustled and a furry feline head came through.

"TIGER!" Watson shouted and grabbed for his double-barrelled musket, swung it toward the intruder, and pulled both triggers. The musket clicked on empty chambers.

"Rowr" chirped the curious tiger cub.

Murray broke into hysterical laughter and Watson found himself laughing along.

"Shoo!" he said and tried to wave the cub off, but the young tiger started swatting back at Watson with his paws. Using his musket's barrels, he pushed the tiger cub out of the tent and tied the flaps up tight, also holding them together until he was sure the cub had moved on.

"We should have brought a guard dog," Watson suggested. 

"Only Americans use pup tents," Murray quipped.

"Go to sleep," the doctor ordered.

And so they slept. And at some point in the night, Murray attempted to wake Watson.

"Watson . . . Watson . . . wake up," the orderly spoke quietly.

"What?"

"Look up and tell me what you see."

"If somebody didn't steal our tent, I'm not opening my eyes."

Something snuffled next to Watson's face.

The tiger cub was back.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, I have no idea how to write a joke. And I don't know what happens with that tiger cub now. So I guess this is just random fanfic at this point.  Thanks and apologies to all who make it to this sentence.

The Grand Game turns out to be a match, or have a match, or . . .

 It's been a good week.

Sherlock & Co. had my favorite episode ever. I signed up for March's Holmes, Doyle, & Friends conference. And a noted Sherlockian authority declared that Sherlockiana and professional wrestling are pretty much the same thing.

I KNEW IT!!!!

Going back as far as June 1985, and a little newsletter article entitled "When Holmesamania Was Running Wild" commemorated the "Brawl at the Falls" where Holmes surely body-slammed Moriarty into the abyss (and Watson horribly corrupted "body slam" to make it sound faux-Japanese), I've been trying to connect professional wrestling and Sherlockian scholarship. Always trying, but never quite getting there, I have spent the laster nearly four decades trying in vain to tie the two together.

And then, like some Krampusnacht miracle, it happened. 

I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere posted Scott Monty's revelation "The Sherlockian Game Gets A New Word in the Dictionary."

"What could that word be?" I wondered aloud, as I often claim to do when I'm writing my reactions to things. Could it be "Canon?" No, in the dictionary already. "Headcanon?" I had, just this week, heard a wrestling podcaster refer to his own headcanon about a particular wrestling storyline and wondered where that word came from first. And then I just went "Heck with all this guessing!" and read Scott's article.

Kayfabe! Kayfabe was the wo . . . wait a minute. That's a pro wrestling term!

But it all became clear as he cited the word's broader usage: "tacit agreement to behave as if something is real, sincere, or genuine when it is not."

And just as wrestlers train, work out, and strain their bodies to perform their art, so do Sherlockians train their minds, exercise their studies, and push their talents with words to perform their art. Both occasionally risk looking quite ridiculous, and sometimes just go for it and look quite ridiculous on purpose. The same countries seem to favor both . . . Japan, England, America . . . though the Saudis haven't arranged a BSI function in their homeland the way they got the American WWE to bring their best.

And of course, there is that one classic movie that brought in a pro wrestler to fight Sherlock Holmes, only to have Watson do a run-in and beat Holmes's foe with a chair -- those guys knew what was up! One more sign that Holmes and Watson was far ahead of its time and the rest of the world will catch up to it eventually. (And that, my friends, is NOT me doing kayfabe.)

As the producer of a podcast called Sherlock Holmes Is Real, I guess I probably knew there was some kayfabe in this hobby all along. But I just didn't know that word connected us with pro wrestling so well until today. Thanks, Scott, and a happy Krampusnacht to all, and to all a good night! (Except for those bad kids who are going in the bag!)