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 . . .

Sherlock's Cousin Carl

 When you're a lifelong fan of something, you tend to see the world through fan-colored glasses.

When Harry Potter blew up, there was something about the phenomenon that felt very familiar to me, much like when Sherlock Holmes blew up in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

Sherlock Holmes was helping his readers transition to a new world of using logic and science to solve mysteries. Technology was built on math, physics, chemistry, all those reason-based fields that said, "Hey, if we think about things hard enough, we can solve mystifying problems." Sherlock Holmes foreshadowed a new age rolling in.

Harry Potter helped readers deal with a new age as well. His magic-based reality, to my mind, was a transitional metaphor for a level of technology that was beyond our understanding. Instead of a two-way mirror, we say a magic word like "Siri-call-mom!" into a screen and another person's face can even appear if we're using the proper phone app. We're pretty sure it's not magic, but can most of us build, or even fully explain, all the tech that goes into making that happen? Working in IT, I've seen more and more people become accustomed to having their wishes become true that they think this magic can make anything available to them. And a lot of times, it does.

So, flying to and from 221B Con, I had picked up a very popular book called Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. Well-written, and with the feeling of a Harry Potter level fan favorite, the story of dungeon crawler Carl hit me with one of the feelings of transitional echoes that Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter gave me.

The planet Earth, as we know it, has basically been strip-mined for elements, and the surviving millions of residents are placed in a reality-TV D&D sort of game show of survival, where just getting by through the next day is the best achievement one can hope for. Getting fans, the attention of an TV show host or the patronage of the ultra-wealthy aliens that run the galaxy-wide streaming service is how one best places one's self for survival.

Now, one could see this as Jonathan Swift level parody, and it is, somewhat. But as I read the book, it lowered my stress levels about all those stupid, stupid things we see in the news. Not just due to the escapism, but because, like Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter, I could relate to Carl. And in relating to Carl, it seemed like, yes, there is a way to get through all this. One day at a time. One confrontation at a time. One moment at a time. 

Good fictional characters are there, not just to entertain, but to inspire and to make the day-to-day more manageable. And I was glad to find another one who does the job.

The Land of Sherlockian Lakes

 Minnesota, when we're not thinking of it as the home of the great university Sherlock Holmes collection, is also known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes." As I recover from the grand weekend of 221B Con, I'm thinking that Minnesota being a Sherlockian center, as well as this land of many lakes, is very appropriate.

Because when you do a head count of Sherlock Holmes fans involved in a specific thing, Sherlockiana can seem like a very small pond. Three hundred people is a great success for a live event, be it in New York, Atlanta, or anywhere. Three hundred people, that three digit number 300, compared with an American population of 342,000,000, or something like American football where a single game pulls an average of 70,000 attendees. A very, very small pond indeed.

But we know that there are more Sherlock Holmes fans than that. There have to be. There are TV shows.

But some of the truth of that came out this weekend as I ran the Alpha Inn Goose Club Trivia Hour, and tested a full room of my fellow Sherlockians on what I thought was common Sherlockian knowledge. One of the categories was "Those Non-Canonical Baker Street Regulars," in which I selected a character from a Sherlock Holmes TV show who appeared regularly, but was not in the original stories. Molly Hooper, Marcus Bell, Sergeant Wilkins, Amelia Rojas, and Ingrid Derian were the names that answered each of five questions, each of those characters coming from a TV show that reached millions of viewers and was made due to the popularity of Sherlock Holmes.

Someone in the crowd knew the answer to almost all of them. (We shall forgive no one knowing Wilkins, as his TV show was in the early 1950s, even though it's readily available on YouTube.) But it was a different someone each time, and not many someones.

Because even with our most widely viewed Sherlock Holmes media, we are not a small pond -- we are a collection of small ponds. Sherlockiana is, like Minnesota, a land of ten thousand lakes.

It's easy to look at one's own view of the elephant, to switch to the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant, and think that it's the whole elephant. (I think it was former U of M Sherlock Holmes Collections curator Tim Johnson who first made that comparison with Sherlockian fandom.) The older the part of the fandom, the easier it is to see that as the whole. And maybe that's the comfortable level we want to make a part of our lives, sticking with the original Canon, BBC Sherlock, creating our own pastiche version of 1880s Baker Street, whatever trips our trigger. But we can never forget that our piece is part of the Minnesota of the whole Sherlock Holmes culture.

An annual dip in the 221B Con pool, figuratively speaking -- I've yet to indulge in post-con "nerd soup" at the Atlanta Marriott pool -- is a good thing for reminding one's self of all of the diversity of thought within the fan culture of Sherlock Holmes. Because it isn't just a pool. It, like Minnesota, is a land of lakes.

Napoleon Bust of Crime Does Con!

 I'm sorry . . .