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.