The Most Important Day in Sherlockiana!

 I'm going to do something unusual this week and give you the words that I am going to be speaking into a microphone on the Watsonian Weekly podcast on Sunday night, because I think you need the forewarning to prepare for Monday -- the most important day in all of Sherlockiana! And, no, it's not "Hug A Holmesian Day" on March 11, a week later. In fact, we should really celebrate this entire week ahead of us with all the fervor of that arbitrary January business . . . or more, actually. Why? Well, let me tell you, as I'm going to actually tell those blessed few who listen to the Watsonian Weekly at the start of each week.

So here goes . . . 

March Fourth is here, and I don’t know why we don’t celebrate this day more than some made-up birthday date or Reichenbach Falls day. for March Fourth, most likely the one in 1881, is the day that John H. Watson meets the real Sherlock Holmes for the first time. Not the day he met the man, not the day he met the chemist, but the day Watson meets Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first and foremost consulting detective as they embark upon the case Watson would first call “The Lauriston Garden Mystery.”

Sherlock Holmes has finally explained to Watson what he does for a living over breakfast on March Fourth, and as they finish that conversation, a commisionaire brings Holmes a letter from Tobias Gregson, whom Holmes calls “the smartest of the Scotland Yarders,” with Lestrade coming in a close second as “the pick of a bad lot.” 

Watson reads the letter, and what is his immediate reaction?

“Surely there is not a moment to be lost. Shall I go and order you a cab?”

Watson isn’t even thinking of going along with Holmes, but his first instinct is to help. Not as a partner, not as a chronicler, just as a guy in the same room who knows immediately that what Sherlock Holmes does is important.

Holmes hustles about, getting ready to go, and tells Watson the most critical words in the entire Canon, three words we sadly overlook in favor of that Afghanistan line when the two first met. And what are those three words?

“Get your hat.”

That’s all it takes. The trigger for the creation of the Sherlockian Canon as we know it.

“Get your hat.”

“You wish me to come?” Watson asks politely to confirm the implied invitation. And Holmes, being Holmes, gives a casual, “If you have nothing better to do.”

And he knows Watson has nothing better to do. He also sees how excited Watson is about the whole thing. And we next read those wonderful words: “A minute later we were both in a hansom, driving furiously for Brixton Road."

It is a beautiful, wonderful, glorious moment and one we should all celebrate March Fourth for, by . . . I should think . . . at least following Holmes’s command as Watson did on that day.

Get. Your. Hat.

March Fourth, a date and a homonym that need to be celebrated. March forth, it’s March Fourth! But get your hat first. Because it's the day that all our Sherlockian adventures truly began.