What Makes A Sherlock Holmes? (2026 reflection)

 Over the years, I've come to discover than any adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, and whether I like it or not, really keys in on the actor and their choices/direction in portraying the character. Scripts can rise or fall, but there's something in the man himself who must no by off-key when playing along with my inner music that is what Sherlock Holmes means to me. The fascinating thing is that I have liked so many widely differing personality of the character.

Rathbone, Cushing, Stephens, and Attwell all come down on my "liked" list, and if you look at them chronologically, you can see Holmes start to change with the times. While his origins in literature are that of a young professional, starting a career of his own as something of a prodigy, adaptations soon started to want to make him an older man, with the wisdom of a classic male authority figure. Robert Stephens from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was the first glimmer we had of a Sherlock Holmes who might not be "all that," as Stephens's Holmes points out himself, claiming Watson has over-hyped him in the stories.

Then, of course, came The Seven Per Cent Solution and the idea that for all his gifts, Sherlock Holmes could also be burdened with a drug addiction, a childhood trauma, and deep flaws to somehow balance out his genius. Those themes seemed to come up more and more as Holmes started to be portrayed younger and younger. Benedict Cumberbatch seemed to catch the most perfect and palatable mix of wonder and weirdo, so different from Basil Rathobone and yet popular enough to catch the attention of a generation, just as Rathbone did.

Harry Attwell's Sherlock on the podcast adaptation Sherlock & Co. has become another favorite, starting as a familiar echo of Cumberbatch, but then evolving into something new and yet oh, so Sherlock. Attwell's Holmes is almost childlike at times, silly, but also imperious and commanding at other times because he knows the truth and is acting upon that thing he knows he is not wrong about. That is a fine line for an actor, to hit that part of Holmes and not come off as a complete asshole. (I won't name the actors that I didn't think made that leap, because your mileage may vary.)

There's a steel rod at the core of a Sherlock Holmes that must be there, I think. There are softer, malleable parts around that core that can be molded for a particular adaption, but without that core, I don't think a Sherlock can fully succeed. We never got to see enough of the non-hallucinatory Robert Carlyle version of Sherlock Holmes in CBS's Watson to 100% say that core wasn't there, but one has to wonder how he would have developed in another season had the show not been cancelled.

While we all have our likes and dislikes among our Sherlocks, there must be threads that run through all of the varieties of Sherlock Holmes that we each choose as favorites despite their differences. Those keys for opening the door to 221B Baker Street are what make for any great Sherlock Holmes portrayal when they work for more of us than not, keys that can not only unlock doors, but be played in a new tune that we'll love to hear.

And on Sherlock Holmes will go.

A Sherlockian at True Crime Pottery Night

 It seems like whenever I get pulled into a trivia night, it seems to be as the wild card in the deck.

Usually, I avoid themed trivia nights, being a more "random info" sort of guy, but some of my friends from work needed a sub, and it wasn't just a trivia night -- it was a True Crime Pottery Night. Having not done a pottery night, which has been a common social outing for years now, and intrigued by the blood-spattered examples of what could be done, it seemed like an interesting diversion for an evening.

But here is the first dilemma with any sort of pottery-painting night -- first you have to pick an item to turn into your masterpiece. Themes abound on the shelves of a place like Art At The Bodega, across the river from Peoria. Highland cows, dragons, toadstools, and the like, scattered among the mugs, plates, planters, and more functional pieces. But something in a Sherlockian theme? 

Not all dogs can be a demon hound of the Baskervilles. (Missed opportunity, now that I think about it -- Watson's bull pup! They had young bulldogs!) Gasogenes, tantaluses, pipes, deerstalkers, cyanea capillata . . . nope . . . and what I thought was a snake turned out to be curled up primitive swan. A treasure chest looked more piratical than Agra. So I finally went with an object that wasn't just a plate, but still offered flat surfaces to create upon . . . a dresser that you could plant small plants in. A dresser from Bart's.

With that first problem solve and my compatriots joining me at the table to start painting, the true crime trivia began. 

"I'm afraid all of my true crime knowledge is well over a century old," I apologized, before things took off

We named our team "The Saints of Bloody Gulch Road," combining our employer with an actual road from a hotel we once stayed at for work. And round one started with a seeming mandatory Dahmer question, which most folks knew. Followed by our first mis-step, which was all my fault: "Name the platform where true crime rose to prominence in popular culture."

Well, it's podcasting, of course, a true crime podcaster (or someone who plays a true crime podcaster, if that character believes Sherlock Holmes Is Real), will immediately tell you. But, sadly, apparently the desired answer was "Netflix."

The very next question was right in my wheelhouse, however. So much in my wheelhouse that I rolled my eyes so hard they about left my head. "What city did Jack the Ripper commit his crimes in?"

"Do we get extra points if we can name all of the victims?" I asked. Sadly, no. 

Living in downstate Illinois, our state killer clown was easy to identify, but everyone in the room was from downstate Illinois. The name of the car OJ Simpson tried to escape in? If you lived through that year, Ford Broncos are etched in your mind. But then we got to the nitty gritty: The Zodiac Killer's unsolved clue. The BTK Killer's name. The state where some more recent murders that I never even heard of occurred. Ed Gein trivia. 

But thank goodness for the play "Arsenic and Old Lace," when it came to "What is the most common poison used in murders?" Well, arsenic had a play written about it and strychnine and cyanide don't, soooo arsenic? Correct!

No Palmer and Pritchard questions. No Jonathan Wild questions. Nothing about Oscar Slater.

It appears that a knowledgable Sherlockians can be a bit weak on a subject that a current day Sherlock Holmes might be well versed in -- no great surprise there, of course. My chemistry knowledge is probably worse. But such an evening, even dipping lightly into that topic as we did painting pottery, gives one pause to wonder how many true crime devotees possess a Holmes-level knowledge of the annals of crime?

We might want to add one or two of them to our social circles.

Pastiche, More Than Fanfic, Can Be A Battlefield

 A friend brought up the topic of folks vocally hating pastiche the other night, talking about fanfic as well, and it was interesting to me how close and yet how far apart the terms "pastiche" and "fanfic" can be. And why one fuels the flames a bit more than the other.

Fanfic, of course, is simply that fiction written by fans, both extending and deep-diving into some existing intellectual property with their own creations.  Pastiche, however, while often written by fans for the same reasons, can more easily tread on holy ground. A true pastiche is actually trying to replicate an experience anew, to catch a creator's voice and give us that one thing we so desire: That new tale the original creator did not tell. Fanfic so often is used to write stories from other mediums, so it raises less hackles. Pastiche dares to work in the same medium as the original, where direct comparison is possible and charges of blasphemy or fraud can be levied by the self-appointed judges of said works.

Loving something so much you want to try to replicate it, make something like it all your own, is really the next level in being a fan. It's also the exact opposite of that other next level of being a fan -- the sort of love where you want to put your beloved text in a box, protect it, and keep it a sacred and special part of your life. And with two next levels of the same fandom, we suddenly have the sheepmen and the cattlemen of the Old West, ready to go to war.

Both sides have their point. Creativity and the freedom to explore the world that exists in a great work is a grand concept. Trying to recreate, to inspire that feeling we felt before, is a basic human urge. And we have seen those who seem to succeed. Yet all creativity has its failures, and Frankensteining parts of a great beauty into a monster can also bring the villagers with torches. While most try to be kind and not call out the uglier specimens wandering into our fandom village, there will be those, through choice or habit, just have to be a little too honest. 

I've been on both sides of this great divide in fandom, and after decades of being a Sherlock Holmes fan, I've learned there are no winners in fighting that fight. (And some other fights.) Sherlockiana is not that big a pond, and sometimes we have to accept that the opposite of our opinion exists in this big tent, to mix my metaphors. The divide is not a chasm, there is no real canyon that separate us from the other side. Just a spectrum of fans in between us and our opposite numbers, sharing our views to a degree and their views to a degree, friends who can bridge that gap and occasionally call us out when we might be verging upon unkind or treat our wounds when we're cut to the quick by a sharp comment.

And few things bring out the cutting comments more than a new attempt to make new Sherlock Holmes, be it TV, movies, or that story you wrote last week. The best wisdom that exists in this internet age has long been "never read the comments." Being careful where you swing your own sharp objects, however, is a wisdom that goes back to when humans first used tools, so maybe we need to give that one even more consideration.

Walp, this palaver went a lot of places I didn't expect, so I'll step away for now. Take care out there.

Sherlockian Periodicals: The Baker Street Chronicle

  

The Baker Street Chronicle 

Duration: July 1981 to July 1985, twenty-three issues, four years
Frequency: Bimonthly
Editor: Pattie Brunner
Club Affiliation: See below

Sometimes things happen in the Sherlockian world in reaction to other things in the Sherlockian world. Clubs splinter off from other clubs. Articles are written in reaction to other articles. And in some cases, journals come out of dissatifaction from other journals. Such was the case of The Baker Street Chronicle, originally called John Clayton's Underground Newspaper, its first issue announcing that it was being published in reaction to the silence of The Morning Post, the newsletter of St. Louis's Noble Bachelors. Of course, this sort of rambunctiousness caused all sorts of friction in St. Louis, but it also produced a really fun little journal that appeared more often than most. With art by Jeff Huddlestone (a great Sherlockian artist of the day) and articles by regulars like Kelvin Jones and Brad Keefauver, The Baker Street Chronicle was a fun journal that made attempts at graphic design few would attempt with a typewriter, border tape, and paste. If I'm going to get sentimental about any Sherlockian period, its going to be the early 1980s, so I'm not the most objective where this one is concerned -- a great, fun journal of its time!

Sherlockian Periodicals: The Air-Gun

  

The Air-Gun

Duration: January 1985 to May 1991, seventeen issues, six years
Frequency: Monthly
Editor:Wally Conger
Club Affiliation: The Blind German Mechanics of Monrovia, CA

Here's a slim little number that was especially fun. Irreverent, arcane, with a touch of anarchy, yet as perfectly written and edited as one would hope from someone who made his living in the writing trade. Wally wrote about all the current Sherlockian bits like many another newsletter of the day, but he did it in a way that's still fascinating to read, even now. The Air-Gun featured articles some of the usual prolific writers of the day, but it was mostly the editor's baby and he did make it interesting. The ongoing series, "Sherlock's Secret War," spotlighted the very strange secret's behind the Canon, involving Holmes and the Illuminati, Holmes and things Lovecraftian, Holmes and all sorts of Things with a capital T. Wally also had a habit of pulling interesting quotes from his correspondence -- stuff that would get you tut-tutted on any internet chat for bashing Brett or the BSI in these non-1980s times. (But in reading these old issues one gets reminded that our current Sherlockian gripes have been with us a lot longer than anyone thinks about.)

There's the Sherlockian mainstream, and then there are those bits of the hobby that are the wild frontiers of the borderlands and beyond, which is where  The Air-Gun set up shop during its run.

Sherlockian Periodicals: Afghanistanzas

Twenty-first issue

 Afghanistanzas

Duration: October 31, 1976 to Summer 1986, fifty-six issues, eleven years
Frequency: Monthly
Editor:George Scheetz (1976, un-named), Mike Clark (1976-1980), Doug Highsmith (1980-1982), Jack Nordheden (1983-1985) 
Club Affiliation: The Double-Barrelled Tiger Cubs of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois 

I'll admit it: I'm probably a little prejudiced when it comes to this particular newsletter. It was the first one to which I ever subscribed. Maybe that's why it's one of my favorites, or maybe it was the enthusiastic mix of articles, news, pastiches, humor, movie stuff . . . basically, anything and everything about Sherlock Holmes and his legacy. 

The Double-Barrelled Tiger Cubs were (and are? I'm never sure.) a college-based group at the University of Illinois. Their membership turned over constantly as students enrolled at and graduated from the university, and they were (are?) consistently one of the youngest Sherlockian groups, and that youthful energy was always present in Afghanistanzas. Whether it was Doug Highsmith's Hornblower Holmes parodies, or the pastiches written by Toby Sherman (yes, that's Toby the dog), Julie Maynard's cover art, the comprehensive Christmas gift guides, or John Wyman's movie stills with word balloons added, Afghanistanzas showed off that energy with every monthly issue.

The Passing of a Paper Generation

 I had seen the signs. I knew things were changing. But now that I've seen it confirmed, I feel like I've lost an old friend.

The mass market paperback is dead.

Cheap, lightweight, and so common we thought they'd be around forever, the just under 4.25" by 7" standard paperback on cheap paper is going the way of all things historical. Sure, trade paperbacks will still exist, twice the size and mostly on better paper, but damn . . . I cut my teeth on the mass market paperback. My Sherlockian teeth.

Every Sherlock Holmes pastiche stocked by my junior college bookstore -- Farmer, Wellman, Boyer, Mitchelson & Utechin, and, of course, Meyer -- were gobbled up like M&Ms in my early days as a Sherlockian. 

Paperbacks were where I met Solar Pons and Vincent Starrett, and I can remember the exact location where I found each, a Walden Books and a Walgreens, in two different local malls.

The reasons for the demise of the mass market paperback are many, all of them eating away at the sales numbers that made them mass market.  Reading books on screens for one, but also that larger cultural shift we've seen since the internet started giving us near-unlimited options for entertainment: We're not all reading the same things any more. More writers are being published than ever before. A simple trip to Barnes & Noble can be a mind-boggling experience at the array of choices. Where Nicholas Meyer's Sherlockian pastichery was plentiful in the days of paperback bestsellers, his latest was just one among many Sherlockian works in today's trip to Barnes and Noble.

Books still exist, yes, and so do readers. And when you reach a certain age, for better or worse, you get to watch as previous eras slip through your fingers and fade. Moments of grief are natural. But then we turn back to the current world as it exists right now and get on with enjoying the people and things that are still with us, and plan for the days ahead.

But for today . . . alas, poor paperbacks. I knew them, Horatio . . .