The Rise of the AI Sherlockian

 Perhaps I just stayed up too late last night and I'm cranky this morning. But then again, no.

When the first thing you see on the internet for your morning look-see is an AI generated ad for what is surely an AI-assisted book by someone who has already published an AI-assisted book THAT YOU BOUGHT. You tend to go -- and excuse the language, but here it is well deserved -- "Well, fuck that guy."

We all know driven Sherlockians. Those who love Sherlock Holmes so much that they just can't stop the Sherlocking. Once upon a time, that meant someone who read the Canon and read the Canon and read the Canon, taking copious notes, developing a specialty for a time,  then moving to another area of Sherlockian interest or just remaining the expert in that field. That was every Sherlockian of a certain level, once upon a time.

But it's 2026 and the devil runs on servers now. It's in our searches, in our emails, listening in on meetings, actually moderating meetings, working with doctors, making movies, acting in movies . . . well, I could go on all day.

And that devil LOVES a driven fan-boy. Well, all the devils love a driven fan-boy, because we're easy to tempt into bad things since the bait is pretty obvious.

It's too easy to go "just this once." 

Last fall, I was looking for a December activity for the John H. Watson Society and went "just this once" to see if Google's AI could produce a reader's theater adaptation of "Blue Carbuncle." And it did. And I was open about it, immediately AFTER I had folks read it, which made the actors feel a bit tainted, like they'd just found out their date was a prostitute. A bland and boring prostitute, too. 

Because here's the thing. When AI is your co-author, it's not your work. You can claim "Oh, I had the idea!" but your work is going to look the same as everyone else that used your co-author, the same way we all know that not-quite-painted art of that certain style that AI uses. And chances are, a hundred Sherlockians have had that same idea that you had, because there are only sixty stories and thousands of us, so anyone else could have done that same thing. Except that the real champion on that topic did the actual work and actually wrote the book using their actual words in their own actual voice.

Everybody's got ideas. Everyone. Even the AI has ideas. 

But if you're not going to take the time to actually do the work, why should I waste my own precious time on your non-work? If it takes me longer to read something than it took you to write it, that's just sad. I'm sorry you didn't learn the skills needed to do the thing. The problem is that we've just gone from the information age into the slop age, and we don't need you to create slop. The AI can and will do it without you. Maybe we'll invite it to the BSI dinner for being such a great Sherlockian.

Learn a skill. Check your sources. Be an actual human.

End of rant.

Just living in Doyle, Indiana with a tulpa . . .

 In honor of the 80th anniversary of the Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis, I decided this month to read a novel by their founder, J.N. Williamson, author of a whole bunch of horror novels. As the founder of our local Peoria scion was also a genre author (Philip José Farmer), we have a little sort of kinship to our neighbors down I-74, and as I'd heard a particular novel of Williamson's, The Tulpa, had Sherlockian bits in it, I grabbed the last copy Amazon had to offer.

It was an old used copy, with a duct-taped corner and pricing on the inside cover that was stamped "3 FOR $100" and with a newer sticker opposite that said "15¢," I knew that I was very late to the party, having paid $17.59 for the thing. But it arrived four days sooner than predicted, an I was going to have plenty of time to get it read before the Clients' anniversary dinner.

(WARNING! THERE WILL BE SPOILERS AHEAD!)

Diving right in, the book starts with a Rod Serling-like prologue before a first chapter about at old man at his wife's funeral who has a senile-seeming outburst that turns out to be prophetic. Nothing Sherlockian there, but then we come to Chapter 2 and the old man's son-in-law, a sportswriter named Steve Neal who lives in Doyle, Indiana. Seeing "Steve" and "Doyle" in such close proximity makes you wonder if Williamson might not have been a bit prophetic himself, but such thoughts are pushed aside as one reads this:

"Doyle, Indiana had been founded about a quarter of a century ago by a successful and wealthy favorite Hoosier son, who belonged to the Baker Street Irregulars, that group of tongue-in-cheek devotees of Sherlock Holmes. Despite the fact that the Irregulars claimed that Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes's loyal "biographer," was really the author and simply reporting the facts, Jay Finley Smith had named the town after the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle."

Somehow this 25-year-old town has a bus station named "Charing Cross Station," a small hospital called "St. Bart's," a grocery store named "Covent Garden Market," fifteen Canonical streets, and an invitation only bar called "the Carlton Club," among other references. I was good when that all started with a life-sized statue of Conan Doyle in a town called Doyle, but at some point, you're just going "How rich and powerful was Jay Finley Smith?" and trying to calculate how one finances, builds, and then populates that whole situation in under 25 years. (I left out the Canonically named theater, jail, and police station the guy built, too.)

And things immediately get worse.

There's a BSI scion society called "the Master's Clients" that was founded by a fifteen-year-old who became "a Nobel prize winning author" who "thought the current group, for the most part, was composed of stuffed shirts who used the democratic sweep of Sherlockiana for social contacts."

Bravo, Mr. Williamson! This cranky aging Sherlockian salutes your full public display of cranky aging Sherlockian-ness! 

Sportwriter Steve from Doyle drives a car brand called Granada, which for a book published in 1980, is again, pretty psychic. Steve wants his rapidly failing father-in-law to come live with his family, though his wife Ellen isn't too thrilled about it. They move the old man in, and it's another thirty pages and a brief sex scene before we get another Sherlock Holmes reference: "Even more than Sherlock Holmes, his passionate avocation was the study of the unexplained, the unknown, wherever he might encounter it."

J.N. Williamson, to his credit, is a pretty readable writer. As the story goes on, delving into the old man's psychic predictions in a 1980 "ESP, telekinesis, UFOs" kind of way, I found it pretty readable. Ah, for the good old days of gatekeeping editors at publishing houses! (Yeah, I said it. Have you read some of the stuff that sees print?) But back to the Sherlockian notes, as on page 117, I get:

"A mile away, William W. MacDonald, the bank vice president, patiently dusted his prized collection of Sherlockiana and then spoke with a fellow Holmes devotee on the phone, discussing an upcoming meeting of the Master's Clients."

And that's all that is said about that. It's kind of a verbal camera pan across Doyle, Indiana.

Thirty pages later, a full 147 pages in, we finally get the titular tulpa. If you want to read up on tulpas on Wikipedia, I'll wait. They're not nearly as exciting as a whole Sherlockian-built town, which we immediately get back to as the next chapter starts. That crazy rich Irregular also had a tobbacco shop named "Bradley's" put in, a "Lomax London Library," a Northumberland Hotel, and a St. Paul's church. 

We then get to meet William W. McDonald, bank vice president and second-term president of the Master's Clients scion society. "He'd wandered into the society on the basis of twenty percent interest in the subject, eighty percent interest awareness of the opportunity to advance himself." In a Sherlock Holmes town like Doyle, Indiana, hell yes, you want to belong to that local scion society! McDonald is described as a hypocrite who hates the sort of riff-raff a Sherlock Holmes society attracts, being very in favor of limiting the membership. (Insert me making an angry cat sound and making claw hands here -- because J. N. Williamson is being very catty about someone, and I'd love to know whom, because gatekeeper Sherlockians didn't just exist in fiction in 1980!)

The annual meeting of the Master's Clients of Doyle, Indiana is coming up, and "Vincent Christopher Smith was flying in from the New York parent society, the money-loaded Baker Street Irregulars." (More money-loaded than the guy who built this whole Sherlockian town?) Smith can somehow nominate William McDonald for a third term as president of his local scion, over "Teddy Gerald, an idiosyncratic and overweight writer who fancied himself the soul of the Clients." (Dear me, Mr. Williamson, dear me!) Of course, McDonald puts on a deerstalker to think about all of this while he smokes a cigarette from Bradley's, but takes it off when our hero, Steve the sportswriter shows up to tell him that the psychic old man has predicted a bank robbery at McDonald's very bank.

McDonald pretty much blows the warning off, goes back to thinking about who will give the toasts to Irene Adler and Mrs. Hudson at his society banquet, puts his deerstalker back on and goes, "Deeper and deeper, Watson, deeper and deeper." (Which demonstrates what a fraud of a Sherlockian he must be if that's the closest thing to a line from the Canon he can imagine! Subtle, Mr. Williamson! Subtle!)

The bank robbery happens, and something about it makes the tulpa mad at McDonald, who is about to have his Master's Clients banquet at the Bagatelle Club. (Yes, that rich BSI built one of those in Doyle, Indiana, too!) The banquet at that fanciest of clubs costs $25, which McDonald thinks will keep the Sherlockian riff-raff from attending. (That's $101.31 in today's money, according to Google.) And Vincent Smith comes to the banquet. Who is Vincent Smith?

"A founder of the national Baker Street Irregulars but originally a native of Chicago, Vincent Smith was both a novelist and a book critic whose severest reproach tended to be a comment that the writer 'might try a jot harder, next time."

Smith wore a deerstalker, like a lot of the people attending the banquet -- a banquet with six tables, so .... something like forty-eight attendees? There's also a dais, so lets say fifty-some. Vincent Smith toasts with a cup of coffee, saying "To the best and wisest man I have ever known," which the members of the Master's Clients all follow with "To Sherlock Holmes!" The Master's Class plainly isn't a society where five minute essays are called toasts, as the next guy (McDonald's rival, Teddy Gerard) just goes "To the woman!" and the members go "To Irene Adler!" Why?

Because according to the author, "Meetings of the Irregulars and their diverse scion societies were sometimes known, on a good wet night, to toast half the characters in the the 'Sacred Writings' before getting down to the slightly alcoholic proceedings." (Word on the street is that there are like 800 characters in the Canon. "Slightly alcoholic?") The Master's Clients limit themselves to just five toasts, though, and banker McDonald gets up to read his paper on Moriarty actually being Satan. He's expecting Indiana University professor Ruthoffer to come in dressed as Moriarty and have some words with him as a dramatic surprise, but it isn't Ruthoffer/Moriarty that busts into the banquet . . .

It's the tulpa.

Chicago's own Vincent Smith knows an otherworldly critter when he sees it and books out of there, but William W. McDonald remembers the old man's psychic warning from earlier being like a quote from The Valley of Fear, and that The Valley of Fear had a police inspector with a name like his . . . and while McDonald is thinking all that instead of running for his life, the tulpa lifts McDonald up with psychic energy and . . .

[CONTENT WARNING: A guy is about to have his head removed from his body in a violent manner.]

Oh . . . well, I guess the cat is out of the bag on that. One of the members thought he was watching a Reichenbach Falls reenactment until that point. Some Sherlockians try to fight the tulpa, and really bad things happen to them. Picture the movie Carrie ending with a Sherlockian banquet. Yeah.

Sportwriter Steve hears about the tragedy, almost immediately has unsatisfying sex with his wife, then sets about trying to solve the mystery of the tulpa. He learns what he can about the Master's Clients bloodbath from an old nudist Sherlockian who was there, then calls Chicago's own Vincent Smith, who tells him, "If you're going after the monster, Neal, let me commend to your attention a few words from The Hound of the Baskervilles, possibly the finest Sherlock Holmes book. First, 'The devil's agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?' And these words of Mr. Holmes himself: 'It's dead, whatever it is!'"

Plainly, asking a Chicago Sherlockian for monster-hunting advice is not your best course in a tulpa situation. A movie theater screen and a policeman both take serious damage before sportswriter Steve's psychic father-in-law, whose stroke-brain created the psychic Frankenstein, decides to die and the tulpa disappears. No more Sherlockians are harmed, and the books ends without any more tours of Doyle, Indiana and its Sherlockian businesses.

J.N. Williamson's The Tulpa is a pretty readable book, but definitely of its time. It's that kind of cheap paperback novel that is disappearing today, and it will be harder and harder to find a copy as the decades pass. The guy was definitely cranky about a lot of Sherlockian goings-on in the late 1970s, and I'm looking forward to going to the Master's Clients . . . excuse me . . . the Illustrious Clients' 80th Anniversary celebration to hear more about Williamson and the history of the club he founded as a teen.

I just hope no one loses their head at that banquet.

Ronald Howard's Final Problem

 Sometimes, even a complete fool can point you to facts you never saw where there . . .

I don't know if you listen to a podcast called Sherlock Holmes Is Real, being the sort of Sherlockian with a level of intelligence that are the typical readers of this blog, but their latest episode "The Footage of the Tyrant's Daughter," called my attention to something I had never realized before. And maybe you hadn't noticed it either.

I was never a tremendous fan of the Ronald Howard TV series, Sherlock Holmes, that ran from October 16, 1954 to October 17, 1955, with thirty-nine half-hour episodes. The show was as much comedy as drama, with Watson and Lestrade played for laughs, as well as a lot of Holmes's clients. Like all shows of the time, there wasn't much continuity, and Sherlock Holmes featured more original scripts than adaptations and a whole lot of pretending France was England.

The final episode The Case of the Tyrant's Daughter was the focus of the Sherlock Holmes Is Real "experts" this week, and I think there was something that they missed completely as they became distracted by the show's end credits and some lower case letters there. And that was that they were dealing with the final time that viewers saw Ronald Howard's version of Sherlock Holmes.

One might even say it was that Holmes's "Final Problem."

For the very last time TV audiences saw that Sherlock Holmes, he was sitting looking sick to his stomach after accidentally drinking tea mixed with a rare Egyptian poison.

He has poisoned himself, and the last thing we see on screen, the last image from the whole TV run of the show is Watson's panic.

Was this season cliffhanger, which was never resolved, this Sherlock's "Final Problem?" Was "The Case of the Tyrant's Daughter" secretly the "Dying Detective," only this time he really dies?

Perhaps the tone of the show was just wacky enough that audiences took Holmes's self-poisoning as just another comic riff to get Watson over-excited, but Holmes doesn't seem to be faking internal issues from the poison. There's not Professor Moriarty in this TV series. No arch-villain other than Sherlock Holmes himself, who seems to have done himself in. With no second season to rectify matters, Sherlock Holmes leaves us like this year's CBS Watson -- with the thought that the main character may now just be dead, and no official assurance that things were otherwise.

I hope the folks on the Sherlock Holmes Is Real podcast take up this issue, though I shudder to think what nonsense they'll be coming up with to pile on it. But I do have to thank them for pointing out Sherlock Holmes's self-poisoning end to that series, which I certainly hadn't noticed before.

Sherlockian Writings: Our Limits

 I stumbled across an old letter from 2010 in some cleaning this morning, in which a Sherlockian friend was writing to me about some recent doings and what they enjoyed about it all. I'm going to keep them anonymous, but something written fit so well into some other current thoughts I've had that I have to quote them here, from their thoughts sixteen years ago:

"It seems that we drift more and more into BSI history, tributes to Sherlockians, bibliographic inventorying, collection analysis, library overviews, etc. All of that is fine and interesting, but I perceive that there is less and less of the old-fashioned Sherlockian 'scholarship' and the whimsical fun that makes it all worthwhile."

The fine Sherlockian scholar who wrote those words was quite right about that drift . . . the last few Sherlockian books I've purchased fall completely into those "drift" categories. I've even written a Sherlockian history book myself, as has my friend who wrote those words. And there are very good reasons for that . . . if you're a writer and you love writing about Sherlock Holmes and all the fruit falling from that great tree, and you keep writing, you tend to wind up in places you never thought you'd go. Because eventually, walking around the same part of that orchard gets so familiar that you want to branch out.

Just before discovering the letter I mentioned, I sent the draft of another issue of Sherlockian Chronology Timelines off to associate editor Rob Nunn for his pre-publication scrutiny. Now in our sixth year of filling a mostly-monthly newsletter with chronology articles, I'm starting to wonder if we've hit the outer limits of that topic. It the opening editorial, I even started to cross a line that most seem hesitant to cross.

The "old-fashioned Sherlockian 'scholarship' and whimsical fun" in the quote above is that great old game of working from the premise that Watson's records of Sherlock Holmes are real historical works. Sherlockian chronology has its feet firmly planted in that chosen delusion. But if we start to use our own historical calendar, and the notion that Watson was publishing his stories in the Strand Magazine, with the assistance of a literary agent named Conan Doyle, suddenly Conan Doyle's personal history comes into play. 

Is that out of bounds in playing the game? Off limits? Is pairing Watson and Doyle together, even without changing facts in Doyle's life, disrespectful to the latter author? Or to Watson himself, in suggesting that Conan Doyle had to rewrite so much of Watson's words that he got the writing credit?

Those rare listeners to the Watsonian Weekly podcast know that an occasional feature of the podcast over the years has been "The Literary Agent's Ten Percent" where Conan Doyle's history and Watson's history intertwine, so they know I'm definite not afraid to go there. Not many do, though, choosing to stay either on the "fact" side of writing or the "fancy" side of writing. 

The limits in our Sherlockian hobby are completely based on your personal choices. A specific editor or publisher might have different limits, but in a hobby where so many have just written and privately published for their friends from day one, you can definitely do what you want to do. And your own version of "the fun that makes it all worthwhile" is yours to choose as well.

Just try to clean up after yourself, which is what I have to get back to doing!

Cleaning Up A Sherlockian Life Spent In Paper

 After having a few Sherlockian friends at the house a while back, I have a very tidy Sherlock Holmes room. Call it a library, call it a study, call it a personal archive, it's the room where this little hobby took up residence from the day we moved into this house. And it took a bit of cleaning to prep for guests.

Cleaning, at this point in our house, typically involves moving things from the location being made to look presentable to a location whose door will be closed to visitors, or basement storage. Which means, when the guests have left, one is left with a room that has a lot of odd things in it, things that don't really fit in with the rest but, for whatever reason, seem like they can't be thrown away or donated to some charity. And so much of those things, at this point, are paper.

Not books. Books fit on shelves. Books are easy.

Letters. Newsletters. Pamphlets. Flyers. Monographs. Quizzes. Presentations that were handed out on paper before or after they were spoken. And every bit of it, about Sherlock Holmes.

The literal paper trail of a life as a Sherlock Holmes fan well spent. History, one might say.

But does all history need to be preserved? When a guy named Tom Simpson wrote a quiz on "The Lion's Mane" for the March 1979 meeting of a Peoria, Illinois scion society and another person who didn't put their name on the quiz paper scored a 72 out of 80 questions . . . does that need to be placed in a library archive and preserved for all eternity? Or even scanned and kept somewhere digitally?

So much of the joy of Sherlockiana is the doing. Concocting a quiz on "The Lion's Mane" is much more fun than taking a quiz on "The Lion's Mane," and future Sherlockians should have that joy. If there was ever only one quiz on "The Lion's Mane" that we kept passing around, in all Sherlockian venues, whenever the tale came up, what a dull place the world would be!

Because here's the hard question about culture, history, and humans that becomes more pertinent in the later years of one's life: Does everything need to be preserved? Sometimes we aren't losing a thing -- we're gaining the opportunity for some future person to do a thing. Because doing that thing is fun. And maybe, without hurting anyone's feelings here, that earlier version of a thing might not have been the best attempt at it. That's life. Each generation replaces the last and takes up a mantle that has been patched, re-sewn, darned, replaced in places, and wears it anew.

 So what do we do with all of the by-products of a Sherlockian life? How much is just waste that needs to be disposed of? How much should be handed off to the next generation?

Tough questions, but ones that must be dealt with.

Doctor Watson's Xanadu

 Long have Sherlockians puzzled and conjectured over Watson's marital situation, and the wife who is there, but not there, proposed to as "Mary Morstan" and never spoken of by name again. Such mysteries live on for years, decades even, in our minds . . . until some little thing, just one little innocent thing, triggers the answers that were there all along.

I have Max Magee to thank for this. During a recent film festival game of collecting four Sherlock Holmes movies to create a Sherlockian film festival, Max decided to make his film fest be:

1. Hound of the Baskervilles
2. Sherlock Gnomes
3. Xanadu
4. Heaven's Gate

The last two may seem plainly due to Max's roller skating fetish and his desire to make "Prince's Skating Club" from "The Adventure of the Red Circle" of Canonical importance. However the movie Heaven's Gate takes place in 1890, and features Ellen Watson, a Wyoming bordello manager who very well have been a cousin of Doctor Watson's should one remember certain authoritative treatises in The Baker Street Journal on Watson's American origins. But Xanadu, a 1980 musical filled with the fashion and music of the day?

Xanadu is the tale of a pretty blonde woman that skates into a man's life and inspires him to follow his creative dreams. And, it turns out she's a full on daughter-of-Zeus muse, who appears on Earth to with the sole purpose of doing that inspiration, something she's done throughout time.

So let's stop for a moment and think. John H. Watson met Sherlock Holmes in 1881, and worked with him for six years before he thought of writing and publishing his adventures with Holmes. No, that didn't happen until 1887. And what else happened to John Watson in 1887, according to so many notable Sherlockian chronologists?

He met a pretty blonde woman, whom even inspired Holmes as someone "who might have been most useful in such work as we have been doing."

There is a vision in the movie Xanadu of the muse Kira, in another era inspiring another artist four decades before. It makes it very easy to imagine yet another scene missing from the movie of Olivia Newton John in 1887, showing up in Baker Street with some pearls and a fever-dream of a case for Holmes and Watson. A pygmy with poison darts, a one-legged escaped prisoner, a treasure lost in a maritime (well, river maritime) battle . . . why wouldn't anyone start thinking of writing such things down?

But muses do not stay around forever, being magical creatures with a job to do. And after Watson seems to lose his writing spark in the mid 1890s, what is it that brings him back to taking pen in hand? 

"The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association. I was alone."

Technically, one always has to wonder over those words "only selfish action," as Watson seems to have deserted Holmes for a wife twice. With a long gap in between which makes it hard to see as a gap in a single marriage to a normal woman in that era. But a muse, who would return to Mount Olympus and then one day return to inspire Watson again when the need seemed dire?

Mary Morstan . . . perhaps not the Terpsichore of Xanadu, but her sister who appears in the opening muse dance, Melpomene, whose name also features the double "M"s . . . the muse of tragedy. For isn't so much of Watson's work inspired tragedy? Murder, loss, love gone wrong?

Sherlockian chronologists have long watched Max Magee try to inspire Sherlockians to mix Back to the Future into the Sherlockian mythos somehow. Perhaps this time, however, he has hit upon the real vein of gold and the movie Xanadu finds ties to the Watson works that really do work . . .

Your Top Five Sherlock Holmes Movies

Before and after our weekly recording of The Watsonian Weekly podcast, Madeline Quinones, Heather Hinson and I always have some other Sherlockian gossip and chat that goes unrecorded. An occasionally there's some chat that might have been worth putting on the podcast. Tonight it just occurred to me to ask a simple question: "What are your top five Sherlock Holmes movies?"

Fifty years ago, there were nearly the smorgasbord of Sherlock Holmes movie choices we have today, and we've all had the pleasure of seeing the right movie at the right time in our lives, which might give a particular choice more meaning to us that to our friends. And there are generational favorites at this point, as well. The Great Mouse Detective would definitely be on the list of one Sherlockian we know, while another would point to The Seven-Per-Cent Solution . . . and neither of those made it to any of our top five lists.

So, without further adieu, here are the top five Sherlock Holmes movies of the Watsonian Weekly podcast crew:

Heather's Top Five:

• Young Sherlock Holmes
• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
• The Return of the World's Greatest Detective (Larry Hagman as Holmes)
• Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Junior as Holmes)
• Sherlock Holmes (and Dinosaurs)

Madeline's Top Five:

• Game of Shadows
• Without A Clue
• Murder By Decree
• Enola Holmes 2
• Her imagined unreleased pro-shot of the Ken Ludwig Moriarty premiere.

Brad's Top Five:

• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
• Holmes & Watson
• Sherlock Holmes in New York
• Sherlock Holmes (Downey)
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Rathbone)

There you have it. Make of it what you will. And, you know, there is a comment section below this for your own top five, should you feel so inclined! (And our comment moderator will try to remember to check the approved comment list this week to make sure they get added ... at some point.)