Five Weeks Until The Dangling Prussian, But Let's Talk About Poe

 Five weeks out until virtual pub night at the Dangling Prussian, our little virtual soiree for those left adrift on the night of the New York dinners in honor of Sherlock Holmes. We know the limits of Zoom, which serves up neither the intimacy of a party, where even in a crowd you get little breakout conversations, or the proper audience feel of a theater where you hear all the reactions of your fellow patrons, laughing and clapping together. But we still gather and make do as best we can.

Why the "Dangling Prussian," that hypothetical inn proposed by Sherlock Holmes after the threatened lynching of Baron Von Bork in "His Last Bow?" 

Because it's Sherlock Holmes being imaginative and clever, and, c'mon, there's a bit of a bawdy way to look at that pub name as well. And if one is claiming a pub night can exist on Zoom, hypothetical is completely it. And it's a bit like the box holding Schrödinger's cat, isn't it? We don't really know if Von Bork was alive or dead after that trip back to London, now do we?

So, he wrote, about to change the subject, I finally pushed my way to the end of The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix tonight, just because it needed to be done. Grim, dark, weaving Poe's story bits into a modern tragedy of wealth and power, it was all about reminding you of what Edgar Allen Poe is most famous for.  The reliably solid Carl Lumbly (I watched all of M.A.N.T.I.S. back in the day.) plays a character named C. Auguste Dupin, who bears the same name as Edgar Allen Poe's detective, once called "a very inferior fellow" by Sherlock Holmes, but The Fall of the House of Usher is no detective story.

The darkness of Usher, representing Poe's work, makes one think hard on the contrast between the works of Poe and the works of Conan Doyle, who was inspired by Poe. Doyle wrote some horror, to be sure, but it was never what he was most famous for, just as Poe was not most famous for his detective. And even though his inaugural mystery, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" delves in analytical reasoning used to solve crime, that murderous orangutan that turns out to be the villain seems quite the horror in his way.

One comes away from a Sherlock Holmes story in quite the opposite mood of a typical Poe horror tale. We want Sherlock Holmes to leave the world in an ordered, sensible state for us when all is said and done, whatever darkness was passed through along the way, be it family demon hound curse or creepy country estate with snakes in the vents. And that's what we hope for from any Sherlock Holmes tale, which makes those supernatural Holmes pastiches a little less attractive to some of us.

The night of the Dangling Prussian virtual pub night, we'll be seeing a Sherlock Holmes mystery play out, as four recruits demonstrate just how Holmes, Watson, Gregson, and Lestrade might work their way through a murder mystery, Dungeons and Dragons style. And when it's done, hopefully we won't be in as dark a mood as if we'd done Edgar Allen Poe role play. More details and a link can be found here.