Loving Sherlock, loving yourself? Or someone else? Or not?

"What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?"

Edgar W. Smith asked that question at the beginning of a much cited editorial bit in the April 1946 issue of The Baker Street Journal, and it is a question worth revisiting every now and again. Edgar Smith answered soundly and well for 1946 Sherlockians, but his thoughts, were they a human being, would be now well past retirement age. Many generations of Sherlockians have been born since, and as well-phrased as Smith's words were then, the question he asked must still be answered anew every now and again.

Take for example, the first half of Smith's answering essay: Victorian England. Even though other Sherlocks made it to their own modern day, as Basil Rathbone did, fighting those Nazis, every fan of Sherlock Holmes knew his true home was Victorian England . . . until recently. Television Sherlock has now broken the time barrier, and massive numbers of fans of the great detective now feel as comfortable with him in a modern 221B as ever did with him in the 1880s. And while one might feel a bit of nostalgia for the old Victorian period and love the source material deeply, the good side of Holmes breaking the time barrier cannot be denied -- solid proof that there is something eternal in Sherlock Holmes. Time and technology don't matter to him.

Why?

Well, that is where we come to the second half of Smith's essay, the part that gives it its title, "The Implicit Holmes."

We love Sherlock Holmes because we are, to some degree, narcissists.

Smith wrote it much kindlier and more diplomatically than that, but basically, we love Sherlock Holmes because we see something of ourselves in him. We see a part of ourselves that knows there are truths to this world we would like to freely expose. We see a part of ourselves that is smarter than the Scotland Yarders who so often surround us. We see a part of ourselves that we know could rise above it all and set the world's wrongs to right . . . if we just had a little more of Sherlock Holmes in us.

And we love that part of ourselves, that part that is Sherlock Holmes.

Edgar Smith waxed warmly about it all, invoking hearth-fires and sitting rooms, but have you ever noticed how many serious narcissists do pop up in the Sherlockian world? Those who love Sherlock Holmes a little too much, and their own point of view even more? (Yes, yes, I am including those who blog far too much about matters Sherlockian. But I'm a self-aware narcissist -- that makes me less nasty, right? Sure, it does . . .) One wonders if we're now getting more of "jerk Sherlock" and "addict Sherlock" because our view of ourselves has changed . . . or maybe we're seeing Sherlock as something outside ourselves . . . as our partners.

When Edgar Smith wrote his answer to "What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?" he was writing as a man for an audience of male Sherlockians. He didn't think of it that way, I'm sure, and some women did read him, but in the culture of the day, let's be frank -- pretty darn male-dominated. Watson, like a wife of the Victorian era, was not Holmes's equal back then. Friend, yes. Trusted companion, yes. Much love between them, yes. And even though we saw Holmes through Watson's eyes, Watson wasn't allowed to be the protagonist. And that came through in films, as film-makers felt a need to include this vital character from the stories, but didn't know what to do with him in a movie format.

Now, we're getting John H. Watson more often as his own man in dramatic productions. A rich and complex character all his own, as he was at first. And sometimes that character overtakes us in the tale, becoming the protagonist and making Sherlock Holmes this strange other thing that has to be dealt with. We are suddenly the wife of this very unusual husband, so to speak.

And what is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes then? Or do we?

These days, with so many Sherlocks to choose from, that question becomes well worth considering. Because we don't have to love every Sherlock. Only those that touch something in ourselves or something we'd like to see in a partner.

It's not as easy a question to answer these days, as it was in Edgar Smith's time, unless one is completely Doyle-Canon-centered. And why would we want easy questions anyway?

We're fans of Sherlock Holmes. The game is afoot.

Reprise.

"The name's Sherlock Holmes, and the address is 221B Baker Street. Afternoon!"

Oh, my God, I'd forgotten just how good this show was. Lightning in a bottle.

And the detail. Benedict Cumberbatch does look like an otter. Watson's sister's wife is named Clara, making her "Aunt Clara" to that baby bump that comes around third season. Anthea.

John Hamish Watson.

Re-reading the complete written Canon of Sherlock Holmes, often in the summer, has long been a habit of mine. Re-watching a complete television series, however is something new. So as summer begins this year, I decided to do it with that other Canon of Sherlock Holmes, as it's been called by so many. Not jamming through it in a weekend, but just taking it in at a leisurely pace over a week.

I thought, like the written Canon, I could take a lot of notes during the course of it, harvest a few details for later consideration as I went. But as I watched that first episode of BBC Sherlock all over again, all that went out the window.

"A Study in Pink" takes a lot from A Study in Scarlet, and other literary Canon sources, but it has never been a straight adaptation, which I've always loved. Straight adaptations, while all charming and nice as tributes, rarely get me too excited. I know those stories too well. My headcanon argues with what I see on the screen. "Pink," however, did something even better, and it was almost suddenly discovering shared telepathy with another human.

Oh, you understand Sherlock Holmes, too.

"A Study in Pink" didn't just show us that its creators read the Canon. It showed us that they got why millions of people have loved it over the past century. To use a metaphor that will sound too literal, but isn't: Sherlock wasn't just cosplay; it was real acting. Too often we've been treated to the trappings of Sherlock Holmes adventures without the spirit of same. Here, someone got the spirit.

And it's no wonder the Sherlockian world has never been the same since this thing appeared.

It's been an interesting road, with so much inspired from this flagship effort, and fans who love it so much that even the show itself didn't live up to their expectations in later years. (Expectations -- always trouble.) Going back to the source last night, however, proved even more interesting.

I had another favorite movie on as background while I cleaned and did other chores earlier in the evening, but when "A Study in Pink" started playing, nothing else got done, not even notes on the show itself. It just drew me into its spell all over again.

And that is a very good thing to rediscover after so many years.

Shirtless Sherlock.

As a part of the aftermath of my last post, I found myself doing a Google image search for "shirtless Sherlock" this week. ("No shirt, Sherlock!" does not work real well.) And it brought up something I never expected we'd be discussing in the Sherlockian world:

What did Sherlock Holmes look like without his shirt on?

We now have Downey, Cumberbatch, and Miller versions of a topless consulting detective. Did Gillette, Rathbone, or Wilmer ever expose their nipples as Sherlock on film? Of course not. Cushing? Plummer? Stephens? Well, maybe James D'Arcy did when he had that three-way prior to getting hooked on heroin. (He was the pre-Elementary Mr. Elementary.) But it wasn't something we could really do side-by-side comparisons of before.

What can we gather from our sudden influx of bare-chested Holmeses?

Well, Hollywood apparently doesn't see Sherlock as an Adonis. More of the guy who gets sand kicked in his face, if you will excuse an old-geek reference. I'm sure that many a lady-fan is going to disagree with one point or another of anything I'm about to say here, so forgive me in advance -- strictly a hetero male POV in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

So here's the good part about Downey, Cumberbatch, and Miller: None of them makes me feel badly about my own not-so-attractive beach bod. Downey has the rigors of middle-age showing in abundance. Cumberbatch looks like he's about to be bullied in a high school locker room, all pale and scrawny. And Miller has that special quality that evokes a carny with a half-smoked cigarette dangling from his mouth as he starts the ferris wheel. Yes, they've all made some attempt to suck in their gut and done a few sit-ups, but none is going to attain that Daniel-Craig-emerging-from-the-ocean-in-Casino-Royale-make-you-doubt-your-own-sexuality level of shirtlessness.

And as Sherlock Holmes was a man who avoided "exercise for its own sake," this was not a man bound to have six-pack-abs. None of his adventures required him to go scuba-diving or surfing, despite the sea creature featuring so prominently in one of said adventures. And his bedroom escapades of late requiring sensual fleshly attributes have been completely non-Canonical. So until recently, who really cared what Holmes looked like with his shirt off? Ah, you modern day and your hedonist ways!

Or maybe this is just a sign of the great gender culture shift. William Gillette's fans of the early 1900s may have speculated intensely about their hero of the stage without his shirt on, but just couldn't break into the male-dominated publishing world with any writings upon the subject. Had the Baker Street Irregulars of New York been founded by Cristina Morley, perhaps Violet Starrett and one of the ladies comprising the pseudonym "Ellena Queen" might have commented upon Sherlock's chest early on.

Who knows? We now have one more thing about Sherlock Holmes to discuss. Scholarly papers can be written on "Chest hair or no chest hair: Which is better for the detection of crime?" And if you're in the mood to see three different half-naked Sherlocks on your desktop screen all at once?

Well, this is your lucky decade.

The Sherlockian thing I hate the most.

Okay, let's be honest. As much of a Mary Sunshine front as some fans want to put on, if you're a true fan of something, a true fanatic, enthusiast, afficianado, or whatever you want to call it, if you are really into something . . . like, say, Sherlock Holmes . . . there are parts of that field of interest you hate.

Hate, hate, hate.

As much as you love the thing you love, karma demands that a price be paid, and that price is your hatred of the thing that doesn't fit into your love-match with the subject of your fandom. You may keep it quiet, you may hold true to a "live and let live" philosophy, and you may behave the way a perfect lady or gentleman behaves, but deep down in your gut there's always going to be some thing attached to the object of your fandom that also makes you one of the dreaded haters, should you ever let it out.

Now, given the tendencies of this blog, regular readers might think I'm discussing my own feelings about a certain television show. But here's a big "NOPE!" to that. If you want to get to the one thing I have pure unadulterated Sherlockian hatred for, the one thing I've never seen anyone trying to defend, and heaven help them if they did, is a very small thing. A very small thing.

A phrase I first saw on a button, years and years ago.

To me, it's the most anti-Sherlock Holmes thing that exists in our culture, the Calvin-pissing-on-a-Ford-logo of the Sherlockian world, a thing that takes all the goodness that Conan Doyle put into the creation of the world's first and foremost consulting detective and turns it on its head.

And Howard Ostrom reminded me of this thing this morning on Twitter. Like so.

While the name of this new acne product is not that thing that I hate the most, it plainly was derived from it by someone who thinks it's a clever line. Which it is exactly the opposite of, though it is the sort of line used by the un-clever to feel so. The greatest quantum physicist in the world could make the most brilliant discovery ever, but if the rube standing next to him utters that horrendous three word phrase when he's done explaining his discovery . . . invoking negation, the gods of poop, and a condescending use of the first name by a non-familiar . . . well, somehow the rube is certain he just elevated himself above the quantum physicist.

And anyone who thinks that Dr. Watson . . . the Canonical Dr. Watson, a Victorian gentleman and gentle literate fellow . . . would utter such a phrase, as is often implied, plainly doesn't know Dr. Watson.

Sure, times have changed. Modern Watsons in the modern day use Sherlock's first name. It's what we do these days. And modern Watsons say "shit." (Or would, if network censors would allow it.) And if your guy named "Sherlock Holmes" is kind of an idiot drug addict, well, that phrase I hate so very, very much -- "No shit, Sherlock!" -- might actually fit the situation.

But when I first saw it used, on a seemingly harmless little button, all those years ago, we didn't have any modern Watsons who might say "Sherlock" and "shit" and make it seem perfectly reasonable. Back then I was an old school Sherlock Holmes fan in an old school world, and a button reading "No shit, Sherlock!' still had all the fresh, non-cliched impact it was meant to have.

And in that moment, a deep, despicable hatred was born. A hatred that lives on in my Sherlockian heart to this day. A hatred beyond any other reaction to anything else with the name of Sherlock Holmes used in it.

So it's a very good thing I don't need any acne medicine.

Like birds to kalimotxo.

I was pondering Mary Morstan Watson the other day, and that description John gives her in the opening to "The Man With The Twisted Lip":

"Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a lighthouse."

And Watson doesn't necessarily mean "grieving" grief here. Given the situation faced by Kate Whitney, who came to Mary when she just didn't know which way to turn, it seems to have more of a "folks in trouble" connotation.

I was thinking about what it must have been like for Watson -- his former room-mate didn't really attract people with troubles, necessarily, but people with puzzles to work out. Watson's wife attracts visitors of a different sort, as evidenced by the wife of an addict looking for help with her husband. No mystery there, just the sort of grief with no easy solution faced by ordinary people every single day. While Sherlock's visitors offered John a chance at adventure and curious events, Mary's visitors were probably more along the lines of sad, sad stories needing a sympathetic ear.

In Kate Whitney's case, John Watson actually has a purpose he can serve -- going after the husband -- but as evidenced by Mary's first reaction, "Or should you rather that I sent James off to bed?" (Let's not get into the "James/John" issue at the moment.), Mary Watson did not always need a man around to deal with her friends' issues. Nor find it of help.

But as I pondered the life of the husband whose wife is constantly attracting folks in sad situations, I went back to the original text for another look, and then got distracted.

"Now you must have some wine and water," Mary Watson tells her guest. She plainly prescribes a gentler nerve tonic than her husband, whose habit was usually to get brandy into Holmes's distraught clients. So that got me curious about wine and water, a drinking practice that apparently goes back as far as the Romans and Greeks.

Mixing water with wine seems to have a great many varieties and reasons, and my initial theory -- that Mary was using the gasogene to add soda water to the wine for her guests -- didn't seem to have been necessarily the case, especially if she was just calming their nerves and not making a party beverage. But the minute my web wanderings found kalimotxo, the mixture of wine and cola, things suddenly look a very non-Canonical turn as I contemplated this much-less-classy cousin to sangria.

Which is part of what I've always loved about being a Sherlockian: The Sherlock Holmes stories are perpetually a portal to ideas that had never crossed your path before, even it is something as silly as mixing wine and Coke, and stumbling upon it from a rumination upon Mary Morstan.

But then, we never really know just what to expect out of Mary Morstan these days, do we?

A Conan Doyle-Harry Houdini love match.

A while back when I wrote about the new Conan Doyle/Houdini supernatural investigation drama that Fox network had ordered up, the thought of the inevitable Doyle/Houdini slash fiction that would follow came quickly to mind. Well, the world spins awfully fast these days . . . so fast that apparently, even as that thought crossed my mind, a couple of improv actors were already spinning up such a scene.

I was catching up on some podcasts today when I got to  "The Ugly Couch Show Couchcast." a.k.a. "Geek Shock" episode #280, "R2-D2stein." And what to my wondering ears did appear but Paul Mattingly as Harry Houdini going to town on Conan Doyle in a manly fashion.

It starts at the 28 minute 50 second mark, if you're so inclined as to listen to it (or are the ultimate Doyle completist). Totally NSFW (Not Safe For Work) or playing while any proper society ladies are present that you don't want to go, "Oh, my word!"

But it made me laugh out loud, and if the sound of Conan Doyle spinning in his grave from everything else going on these days hasn't bothered you, you might get a laugh out of it, too.

The politics of dead authorship.

Well, if anyone thought the Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd. was just going to call it a day after the "Free Sherlock" loss in court, they now should know differently. The Estate apparently has decided the upcoming movie "Mr. Holmes" featuring Ian McKellen is going to make enough money that it's worth suing. Not that we all didn't know this movie was in production for quite some time, or that the book it was adapted from has been on the shelves for what now . . . nine years?

The backlash on the internet has been freely verbalized -- I seem to remember the phrase "die in a fire" used at some point. (Which always seemed the secular version of "burn in Hell" to me, though it probably just is used more as "Go away, with pain.") The Doyle Estate appears to be viewed a lot like a literary "patent troll" to many, which is probably is always going to be the case when the linking between services rendered and payment becomes as tenuous as it is with non-descendent copyright holders.  Does the Estate care about being popular with the fans? Probably not, as fans don't render lawsuit judgements or stop seeing big screen Holmes movies if they don't have Estate approval.

But it's interesting to look back at the political side of the Conan Doyle copyrights where the fans are concerned, as it has gone a couple of different ways over the years. The Baker Street Irregulars and Conan Doyle's son Adrian had their issues when he controlled the copyright, but when the copyright went away and came back . . . this time in the hands of Adrian's little sister, then a nice elderly sort, members of that same group were much more in her corner. And why wouldn't they be? Nobody wants to steal cookies from a nice old lady who might let you have a look at the recipe if you treat her right.

These days it's a bit messier. There is no one face to the Conan Doyle estate, an Adrian or a Dame Jean, unless it's a certain fellow who couldn't be more on the outs with the Irregulars. And while the U.S. courts freed the basic character of Sherlock Holmes, the character of retired Sherlock Holmes from "The Lion's Mane" seems pretty tightly held in their legal grip with the copyright to that single story. (Though a few details of Holmes's retirement -- "a small farm upon the downs five miles from Eastbourne,"  "rheumatism," and dividing his time "between philosophy and agriculture" -- appear in the out-of-copyright preface to His Last Bow.) And Sherlock Holmes fandom is a lot bigger than the Irregulars and their scions now, energetically zigging and zagging about in ways that make you wonder if they even have time to spare to worry overmuch about court battles that probably shan't affect them.

When it's all over and done, the adventures of the Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd. is going to make a decent read in The Baker Street Journal -- maybe even a special "Christmas annual" of that same magazine. And one day those adventures will be over, as time gets to everything, eventually.

For now, though, it looks like there's a bit more to be written, about the Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd., if not about Sherlock Holmes from the pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We only get to see these sort of issues when that pen has long ago stopped writing stories or signing checks.