What If We All Just Did Clickbait Headlines?

 By now, most of us are probably used to it. The headline reads "11 Years Later, I'm Still Mad About What BBC's Sherlock Did To This Beloved Book Character." The photo underneath it in your news feed results shows Martin Freeman as John Watson. They don't tell you what character, so you'll click to find out. They show you Martin Freeman so you'll click if you like him. They tell you they're mad about BBC Sherlock so you'll click if you want validation in the emotion you still feel about that show.

Click. Click. Click.

Now, in our Sherlockian world, some areas move much slower than the rest of the world. We don't have a click-baity website of our own, luring engagement to any fandom entity. Heck, the traditional faction of our hobby still revolves around a printed journal. And it sure doesn't use headlines like "One Hundred and Seventeen Years Later, I Can't Believe Conan Doyle Used This Dead Character in Wisteria Lodge." You either already subscribe to the journal or you don't, and nobody is picking it up off a pharmacy magazine display.

But what if we did use teaser headlines to lure people to our works. Take the winter 2024 issue of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, for example, just grabbed up randomly from a shelf.

"Even Jack the Ripper Should Have Known This Hat Was Just A Mistake"

"The One Act Play That Caused Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson To Do These Favorite Things"

"One House Shows What All of England Thought About This Country"

"The Weapon That Changed Everything And Sherlock's Part In It"

"Did Conan Doyle Just Copy Sherlock Holmes From This Old Book?"

"How Sherlock Holmes Made Me Do A Hotel Rendezvous"

"Holmes Fans Won't Stop Battling Fans of This Literary Character!"

"Going To College For Reasons You Won't Believe"

Am I going to explain what those articles were really about? Of course not, because as with all clickbait, the tease is the thing. Just trying to force you to do something you wouldn't normally do. And if you did pick up that issue of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, your ultimate reaction, as with the clicking of any clickbait headline will probably be "Oh, it's just that. I knew about that." Not to say there aren't facts in the SHJ you might not have known. But the topics are not nearly as remarkably outside of your current knowledge as the headlines might cause you to hope.

Teaser headlines have been with us a very long time. But thanks to digital media, we now have more than ever, and my lame attempts above don't nearly do justice to the art form its become. And clicking on the link is definitely less profitable than ever as well.

"I'm not interested in that."

 We're all about having opinions these days, thanks to that great concert hall of a billion stages that we call the internet. Blogs, podcasts, videos long and short . . . putting our opinions into a public space for validation or hoped-for entertainment value is what we do now. Occasionally, however, it might be good to just leave things alone.

So here's my review of CW's "Sherlock and Daughter."

I'm not interested in that. Watched enough to learn I wasn't interested, probably not going back. And as Stan Lee used to say "Nuff said!" 

[Weeks pass.]

But then my companion, the good Carter, watched the entirety of the first episode and went "It wasn't too bad." And then HBO Max decided it was worth putting on their service, and it started popping up on promos there. And CBS Watson is now well in the rearview mirror, no more distractions.

"London 1896" -- that date is going to haunt me. Sherlock Holmes comes in bossy, making basic deductions, looking like David Thewlis, he then sees a red piece of thread on a boy's wrist, gets freaked out and runs frightened from a crime scene. There's not a part of that sentence that is anything that makes me want to watch this particular Sherlock. Cut to New York City and a girl named Amelia Rojas gets suckered by the worst cast crime boy, then tries to buy a ticket to England without money in an exchange that's just hard to watch. 

A still-bossy Sherlock Holmes abuses Mrs. Hudson's sister, who was just in the hall talking to someone who looked like a poorly cast Watson, but then we hear what might be a Moriarty voiceover of a kidnapping paste-together note threatening the kidnapped Watson and Mrs. Hudson, and there's a finger in a box that apparently used to belong to Holmes's maid? Ugh. I don't know if I can take much more.

Amelia Rojas meets a rich American girl destined to wed a random aristocrat on the ship to England, shows what a good artist she is. But the rich girl's mother is very unpleasant and hates poors, even though Amelia sure doesn't dress or look all that poverty-stricken. At this point I'm wondering where the happy part of this show is, or if the creators are of the "fiction is all character abuse" school.

There's a metal disc with a hole in it that moves across a map of London as Amelia makes her way to 221 Baker Street and its basement servant's entrance where she is instantly mistaken for the replacement maid in the giant kitchen of 221 Baker Street. Did I mention that 221 is huge inside? London of 1896 apparently had more available space pre-blitz.

Amelia meets unpleasant Sherlock. (Ohhh, the metal disc is her belt buckle. I see it now.) Things go about as well as one would expect. Sherlock deduces she's American from her accent, and calls out her belt buckle as Californian craftsmanship. Weak sauce, man. Weak sauce.

OMG, Holmes's burst-in clients are the parents of Amelia's ship-friend, and that makes Amelia  an unwanted assistant to crabby Sherlock.

Okay, I seriously don't understand what I'm supposed to enjoy about this. I tried. I really tried. But it's so unpleasant across the board to my particular tastes. Twenty-seven minutes in and I'm out.

It will probably have its fans, as everything does. And good for them! I mean, a lot of people gave up on CBS's Watson after one episode while I found enough fun in even its goofy bits to continue finding some joy there. But this one . . . definitely not my cuppa tea.

So let me know how it goes. Hearing about it second-hand might be my best way to enjoy Sherlock & Daughter.

The Ritual

Okay, let's talk about scary, cultish things. Like chants. And rituals.

So forget everything you know about the words below and just read them in your head, with the voice or voices the words compel.

Whose was it?

His who is gone.

Who shall have it?

He who will come.

What was the month?

The sixth from the first.

Where was the sun?

Over the oak.

Where was the shadow?

Under the elm.

How was it stepped?

North by ten and by ten, east by five and by

five, south by two and by two, west by one and by

one, and so under.

What shall we give for it?

All that is ours.

Why should we give it?

For the sake of the trust.

Now, you and I know that those words are the Musgrave ritual. But we don't think of it as a ritual, Sherlock Holmes having showed us the truth behind it. Yet it was, when encountered by generations of Musgraves, a ritual. Something performed as a regular ritual observance, with no other meaning than what the listener derived from what was plainly a responsive reading. Perhaps the head of the family asked the questions and the family responded in unison. Perhaps someone new got the honor of playing inquisitor every Christmas or New Year's or some other significant day of the year.

But ritual, it was, ritually observed. 

The thought of passing something from someone long gone to someone still to come. Something so important that one should give everything that one owned so that "he who will come" shall have that sacred thing, that was entrusted to the family in some bygone age. The ritual does not say who is coming, or what he'll do when he gets here, but we know his gender. Musgraves of a more religious bent could have imagined it was the second coming. Darker minded generations might have feared this mysterious "He." Perhaps early readers of the ritual had been told who "He" was, perhaps not.

The symbolism of sun and shadow. "The sixth month" instead of June, like "the first" might not be January. The possibility that "sun" is a play on "son," like in that one old Star Trek episode. A square that goes from ten feet wide, to five, to two, to one, rounding down on fractions as it halves itself to the infitesimal microcosm of "so under." 

One could build a cult around those words, easily enough. Rituals have their own ordered appeal. And for many centuries, that's what the Musgrave ritual was . . . just a ritual, for a family with a cultish mission. 

But at least is wasn't a curse, like those poor Baskervilles got!

Our Own Singular Addiction

 Of all the things that author and publisher Jack Tracy might be known for, perhaps my personal favorite is that he had a good standing line for signing his cocaine book.

"In celebration of our own singular addiction," Jack wrote in my copy, as he surely did in many a copy of that book.  It's just perfect, and I have never signed a book of my own with anything that matched it. "Our own singular addiction." And lest you mis-interpret that, let me tell you that it wasn't a shared love of cocaine or anything else illegal. It was, of course, Sherlock Holmes.

Entire talks have been given comparing our Sherlockian hobby to an addiction. And we can chuckle at that idea, like one of those funny memes about never owning enough books. (You're not going to re-read every one of them -- move some along to other readers! At some point you're just a hoarder.) But it truly can be an addiction that affects our lives just like a drug addiction.

We get a taste. We like it. We start chasing that high. Our tolerance increases. We start getting disappointed that doses aren't giving us the same high they once did. We spend more money, chasing that high we remember. We get grumpy when dosing still doesn't match what we remember. We switch to a different form of the thing. We switch to yet another similar thing. A few of us go cold turkey, but there are no interventions, no surgeon general's warning, no near-fatal crash that puts us on the straight and narrow.

We ride the highs, we wait out the lows, we stay on the Sherlock train because we know what pleasure it can bring. And all our friends do it, because . . . oh, yeah, that's how we met those friends.

"Our own singular addiction." While Jack Tracy's ghost may not haunt me -- thank goodness -- his words still do. And the addiction, now a lifestyle choice, continues.

Conan Doyle at the American Oddities Museum

There are moments of happy discovery as a Sherlock Holmes fan, letting the master detective lead you into places you'd not have thought to go. And this past Friday night, that fannish urge led me to Alton, Illinois, a river town on the banks of the Mississippi near St. Louis.

The promo read "Join Master Magician Carlos David at the American Oddities Museum as he presents a chilling parlor show base on those traveling mediums, mystics, and mind-readers of yesterday. . . a night of magic and mystery, inspired by the kinds of parlor shows that were practiced by fraudulent mediums when they took advantage of people like Sir Arthur." As we don't often focus on the "wacky celebrity with questionable beliefs" side of Conan Doyle in the Sherlockian world, it seems like a rare opportunity.

Entering Troy Taylor's American Oddities Museum, one finds the nicely curated work of a man enthusiastic about his interests. Troy Taylor is a name that might be familiar to an Illinois Sherlockian who was around in the 1980s, when he was running Decatur's local Sherlockian group, Ferguson's Vampires. I had corresponded with Troy a little bit at that time, and even commissioned some art from him for the Dangling Prussian, so it was pleasant to see the business he's built up following his passions, having written over one hundred and twenty books and doing an incredible number of ghost tours and events, enough to make you wish Sherlock Holmes was as popular as ghosts!

Rob Nunn in his native environment, surrounded by books.

The largest room in the museum was set up as one would for an author's reading, several rows of chairs in an intimate setting, but also lights dimmed with electric candlelight and some excellent light background mood music, nice to listen to with an interesting eerie feel, not too creepy, but not too normal.

Carlos David is a very experienced, very good magician, well versed on Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, and the balance of mystery and reality woven into his show was spot-on. You could see how someone who wanted to believe in active spirit communication as much as Conan Doyle did could have their beliefs enhanced and justified by tricksters with such impossible feats that could be attributed to ghosts. In the Sherlockian world, we get a lot of talks and presentations by folks who aren't skilled professional entertainers, so if was a joy to see someone who was very good at what he does connect it with Conan Doyle.

I'm not going to go on about the show at length, as my friend Heather Hinson will be writing it up for the Parallel Case blog soon. (Also, I'm tired after a week of travel.) Heather was touched by the ghost of Kingsley Doyle at one point during the show, so I'm sure she's going to have a lot of thoughts! But it was a lovely evening, in good Sherlockian company, and another reminder that letting that one great spirit -- the spirit of Sherlock Holmes -- lead you on adventures can be a whole lot of fun!