A Bit of the Pre-Internet Sherlockian Life

 This morning I discovered a time bomb left by someone in my household forty years ago.

It was a large scrapbook in which they had inserted Sherlock Holmes related clippings and paper paraphernalia between the pages, plainly intending to paste them in eventually.

Here's a sample . . .

The full stack is almost an inch deep.

Deerstalkers abound, amid actual articles about Sherlockians, headlines that sound like they're about Sherlock or Watson but are really about boxer Larry Holmes or golfer Tom Watson, and a dozen other related topics. Want to improve your child's reading by using a TRS-80 Color Computer? There's a $14.95 program on a tape cassette to help them through The Hound of the Baskervilles! All those things that today we would share a link or a pic on social media to amuse our Sherlockian friends, all clipped and collected -- things that many a mailed-out newsletter would pass along as well.

A few bits, like a tiny John Bennett Shaw news clipping, evoke memories of events. Others, like the program for a Hound of the Baskervilles play that I know we saw in Chillicothe, Illinois, are long forgotten. How an AP newswire printout on Conan Doyle's self-experimentation with something called gelsemium made it into our hands, I have no idea, other than all the friends I had in the newspaper industry back then. (That was about Alvin Rodin and Jack Key publishing an article in the Journal of American Medicine, by the way, if you want to to down that rabbit hole.) 

The schedule for "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" on WCBU public radio, starting with a three part adaptation of A Study in Scarlet. A TV Guide clipping about Peter Lawford as Sherlock Holmes and Mel Ferrer as Professor Moriarty soon to appear on Fantasy Island. The Ballymote Tape Library, out of Bayshore, New York, offering "Buy any 4, get 1 FREE!" tape cassettes of Rathbone/Bruce and Gielgud/Richardson radio shows. It's a veritable time capsule of Sherlock Holmes's influence and reach on the 1980s.

A 1985 Hardee's Huckleberry Hound Action Meal box, with Funslide(TM!) Card? That's in there two. We're much less concerned with random characters wearing deerstalkers in 2025, with a wealth of Sherlock Holmes related content available at the ease of a Google search, but in 1985, seeing Huckleberry Hound dress up like Sherlock Holmes was a moment worth noting. It was a different world.

I was doing some serious cleaning when I stumbled across this view of the past and am going to have to force myself to walk away from it for now just to keep at my task -- a busy Saturday ahead! But I had to stop and share a little bit before moving on. 

Sherlock Holmes's Regulars

 As someone given to pondering the structure of our Sherlock Holmes fandom and the levels of participation we see from fans of the great detective, I've been watching the Midwest BSI Canonical Conclave with great interest. What is the "Midwest BSI Canonical Conclave," you ask?

That's been a puzzle many of us have been pondering, even as we signed up to attend it. A recent FAQ sent out about the event gave a little more explanation gave a bit more info, parsing it out from local scion meetings, regional conferences, and the big kahuna weekend in New York City every January. The best brief description of the Conclave is "a super-sized multi-group scion society meeting." One almost pictures something like that congress of gangs in the old movie "The Warriors," so well reproduced in an episode of "What We Do In The Shadows" last year.

That would be the dream, I think, seeing a decent and fairly equal representation from all of the Sherlockian clubs of the midwest. But in practice, I'm wondering if our local scions will see any more of our members attending than make the effort to go to the regional conferences. As the Conclave FAQ explains, scion societies are the feeder clubs to both regional conferences and the birthday weekend in New York. Most local clubs only have a few members who make the leap to subscribing to The Baker Street Journal, much less hit Dayton, Minneapolis, or New York.

One interesting tell is the folks outside of the midwest who have expressed interest in the Indianapolis event -- the same folks you see almost everywhere, the Sherlock Holmes "Regulars." They'll be in New York. They'll be in Minneapolis. The best of them will be in Dayton, St. Louis, or any city where you're having a full-on weekend conference. And the most-most dedicated hit multiple scion meetings a month as well. We know we'll see them at the first of these Conclaves, even if they're not in the midwest. And if a similar event occurs in California or Philadelphia, they'll probably be there too.

The Canonical description of a Baker Street irregular is "These youngsters, however, go everywhere and hear everything. The are as sharp as needles, too, all they want is organization."

Which kind of inspires one to wonder -- what if someone did organize those uber-Sherlockians? The annual dinner of the capital "I" Baker Street Irregulars does eventually honor the most die-hard of them, especially if they live close enough to New York to attend regularly. (Yes, that is a mild dig at the slightly regional nature of BSI weekend attendance.) And maybe it does organize them -- I'm not present enough in those ranks to say. One thing you do know about those folks -- if you did organize them, they'd definitely show up.

But as for the rest of us, going everywhere and hearing everything is always the challenge. And whether or not the Midwest BSI Canonical Conclave will be able to draw a different crowd from a regional conference or a special dinner of the Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis, we shall be interested to see.

The things we criticize . . . and the things we don't

 The advent of a widely broadcast TV show that's Sherlock Holmes related has brought on a wave of opinions in every venue where opinions are expressed. And as with any TV show involving Sherlock Holmes . . . except maybe the holy Granada, which only gets a pass on its final season due to the illness of its star . . . the knives are out. Not from every Sherlockian, of course, but darn close. We may not all gather together to express our opinions on TV shows like Matlock, but tie in Holmes and everyone comes to the table.

But, as some would say, we are a literary fandom. Of course, we're going to be harder on non-literary mediums. The movie is never as good as the book. (Except for maybe Twilight, but that's an entirely different discussion.) Why aren't we as hard on books? Why don't we see our trollish side coming after the writings of Laurie King, Bonnie MacBird, Lyndsay Faye, and Nicholas Meyer?

Well, because we're not all reading pastiches. When we were reading more pastiches back in the day, Sherlockiana as a whole was very hard on pastiches. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution got away with a mild "rather far-fetched" comment in the first issue of The Baker Street Journal that it was mentioned in, but the book's author, Nicholas Meyer, also had an article in that same issue. We are kinder to those we know.

Case in point, when the creator of CBS's Elementary spoke to Sherlockians at a BSI-run conference before that show came out, it got a much kinder treatment in traditional Sherlockian venues than it might have otherwise gotten. Like the Doyle estate, we seem to have wanted our fee paid, but it was attention and not dollars. If we know you, we'll let you pass.

I made a comment on a recent podcast that while we'll rip on about a TV show, we'll never go after articles in any of our journals or books. They may have all of the same problems of a television adaption -- dullness, off-topic, taking some weird angle on something we'd personally rather not see -- but, again, they're written by part of the clan and collected and published by the most respected members of that clan. And none of the above are making any money for said works, they're just doing it for the love.

Back when internet piracy first raised its ugly head, many a movie had some small comment attached about the number of jobs that movie made and the families it supported as a hoped-for deterrent to people thinking they could have movies for free. Some things will only get made for the money, especially with the budget required to make a movie or a TV show. There might be love of Holmes in there somewhere, but we don't even see our wealthier collectors trying to fund a production purely out of love.

So maybe we might want to be a little more publicly supportive of productions that get Sherlock Holmes out to the masses and eventually bring us the diehard Sherlock Holmes fans that make up this hobby? I mean, we're already giving free passes to those within our ranks on so much silliness. (Speaking as a lifetime beneficiary of said free passes.) Or are we too fond of the chance to grouse over something not as incendiary as the stuff we really want to grouse over . . . you've seen the world out there . . . as a needed release?

If we need to fight against something, there's always AI. No AIs have joined our ranks yet, so we don't have to be nice to those digital cretins yet. Though one is probably reading this now and having its feelings hurt (in the future, if not now), so I suppose I shouldn't go there. Sorry, AI Sherlock Holmes fan, whichever future date you're reading this . . .

Sigh.