Emmy and the Sherlockian crank.

My descent into Sherlockian crankdom continued today.

I use this blog to self-monitor my patterns as a Holmes fan, among other things, and this aging Sherlockian seems to grouse about everything Sherlockian, to the point one has to wonder if I could be positive about anything. If there was ever proof of that theory consider this reaction to today’s news:

BBC’s Sherlock garnered thirteen Emmy nominations, a fact that should thrill any Sherlockian or fan of the show, of which I am both. I love the fact that Sherlock Holmes is making his way into the award show circuit, having loved Robert Downey Junior’s Holmes reference on the Oscars a while back, and the fact that we now have a full-blown Sherlock incursion into the top U.S. television awards.

And that’s the bug in my bonnet – although the Emmys is primarily an American television institution,  it sometimes awards those few BBC television shows that are bought by some American channel and shown here. Some American channel, in the case of Sherlock, that made me wait five extra months to see the specific program that got nominated. While a great show like Luther gets an appropriate “BBC One” listed as its producing network, Sherlock has “PBS” following its name in the nomination nod.

We don’t call Sherlock, “PBS Sherlock.”  We call it “BBC Sherlock,” as the BBC is the responsible party. If an American network wants to claim Holmes, let’s see how CBS’s Elementary does. FOX’s House, ever so close to Holmes in so many ways, did fine, but just wasn’t the genuine article.

While I would love to see Sherlock take home all thirteen of its honors, the idea that those calcified dinosaurs at PBS should get any congratulations for that wonderfully British show has me at odds with myself.  So I guess I’ll just hope Sherlock wins and that someone from the BBC knocks any PBS folk off the stage when acceptance time comes.

And if that isn’t the mindset of a crank, I don’t know what is.

Irene Adler in a pile of naked ladies.

A female person named Sarah Masters has made the Sherlockian wires buzz by adding gay romance scenes into Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s text of A Study in Scarlet. Never mind that instead of writing her own novel and doing all the work, she flat-out plagiarized Doyle’s work to create her own. (Does giving him credit make it better? Ask yourself this: would any living author tolerate such literary vandalism?) Never mind that I have no problem with male homosexuality, even if it is Holmes and Watson. (Done well. We have too much of them done badly, all over the place.) But here’s the thing:

I’m a feminist. Been one since I was thirteen. Never a doubt that women shouldn’t have entirely the same rights as men, even when my Sherlockian elders claimed our hobby should remain otherwise at its upper levels. But part in parcel of that belief is the opposite view: Men should have entirely the same rights as women.

So if Holmes and Watson are going to be gay, which has happened before, I would like to submit something that I don’t remember happening before: Irene Adler in a big ol’ pile of naked ladies. Take it away, Dr. Watson!

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. And that fact was never as plain to me as that morning I arrived to visit my friend in the old Baker Street rooms and found Miss Adler swimming in a enormous pile of naked ladies.

Holmes sat in his familiar wicker chair, fingers steepled in concentrated thought. “Come, Watson! No finer opportunity to test your skills of observation shall present itself than this. Make your way around the edge of this writhing mass of feminine pulchritude and make yourself comfortable. We may be here a while!”

As was my habit, I followed his directions silently and swiftly. My senses seemed to sharpen to the level of Holmes’s own in an instant. My dainty blonde fiancée, Miss Mary Morstan, was the first to catch my eye, even though her face and attentions were neither one pointing in my direction. Former clients, Mary Sutherland, working close in her near-sightedness, and Violent Hunter, showing far more freckles than on previous occasions, were intertwined with Mary and limbs which I believe belonged to Mrs. Neville St. Clair, Kitty Winter, and Beryl Stapleton. The Stoner twins, Helen and the pale vampire Julia, combined to form a human throne for Miss Adler, as Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. Turner tended to the adventuress’s every request. A group of musicians called Massive Attack were playing a tune which I recognized as “Paradise Circus.”

Need I have Watson go further? And in less family-friendly detail?

Being males, it might seem that Holmes, Watson, and I were objectifying the ladies of the Canon for our own amusement. (Yes, I’ll admit it . . . the musical selection in the last line was mine and not Watsons.) But I assure you, all of the ladies involved in the passage above had very deep feelings for each other, as unwritten in earlier chapters, just as Ms. Masters surely gave to Holmes and Watson in her work. Is there really any difference?

I’ll leave the results of the experiment above to you. And if any of you boys out there want to take the ball and run with it, just to balance out Sarah Masters a little more substantially, go for it!

Popularity of Sherlock Holmes 2009 thru 2012

Steampunked Holmesians.

My paper-and-ink copy of the much touted Steampunk Holmes Kickstarter project arrived today.

The box it came in was book-sized, about two inches deep. The book itself wasn’t filling up that space more than the packing peanuts around it – the total page count, including illustrations, blank pages, credits, and ads: a slim 144 pages of non-justified type. An envelope might have served the slim tome as well, but I suppose I appreciate the care in getting it through the mails intact.

The slender feel of it was a daunting enough start, but when I started reading it and went, “Hey, this is Bruce-Partington Plans!” . . . that was when my first glimmers of disappointment started. (There is even an acknowledgement that it’s an adaptation of “Bruce Partington” on the copyright page . . . and yet that fact was none too plain in the Kickstarter proposal.)

The first fifty pages were an extended “Bruce-Partington” with a name or two changed to protect the innocent original, and B-P was never my favorite Holmes tale. In fact, it's one of my least favorites. When it suddenly became a comic book without pictures, full of overblown action and cannon-embedded bionic arms, I was already starting to doze, and the action-chaos didn't really help.

At some point the phrase “over-produced fan fiction” came into my head and just wouldn’t leave. I realize that the whole point of the Kickstarter project was to create a nifty iBook for the iPad, and not an actual nifty book for the bookshelf. But after the steampunkish success of two Sherlock Holmes major motion pictures and the modern day success of Sherlock on the BBC, we’re starting to expect better things from this new wave of Sherlock, and  I don’t think this was it.

We always expect great things from Sherlock Holmes. He's a great character, whatever sort of universe he's in, and I suppose that's why we develop such a distaste for bad pastiche. If you go into a lame vampire book expecting lame vampire drama, how can you be disappointed? But if you're expecting a fresh new take on Holmes and find "Bruce-Partington Plans" with a few motors and weapons of mass destruction thrown in . . . well, there's further to fall.

Here's to better Sherlock days ahead!

He sees, but he does not observe.

"Moving forward, we'd like to contribute our own stories and our own material to the canon," Elementary star Jonny Lee Miller said at Comicon of his Sherlock Holmes show.


Whenever anybody talks about adding their Sherlock stuff to the Canon, it's a huge red flag that they don't quite get what we mean by "Canon."

Week, Sherlock Holmes. Week.

Word over the wires is that “the first annual Sherlock Holmes week” is coming July 30 and running until August 5. And according to press releases that have been feeding this story, “millions of Sherlock Holmes fans worldwide” will take part, and “the week is backed by the main societies and organizations in the world.”

That sounds quite lovely. A bit too lovely, in fact.

Yes, we’re in a major surge of Sherlock popularity, but still . . . millions?

Find the most popular Sherlock fan activity you can – say, something simple like following the Twitter feed of the Baker Street Babes – and you will find about 6,000 fans. Look for attendance at even the most major Sherlockian event, and you’ll find a few hundred people. If anyone out there has seen 1,000 Sherlock Holmes fans in one place, they had better have photos to back it up. Holmes fans do not fill arenas.

Since Sherlock Holmes Week is “by the fans, for the fans,” it could, in theory, be enormous – if every fan jumped in and put on some part of it, if every main society and organization actually did put their hearts and souls into it. (Though what fans would be left to attend if all the fans were putting it on . . . well . . . .)

The most worrisome part of Sherlock Holmes Week is the reason it’s taking place July 30 to August 5. Those dates were chosen because it is when the Olympics are taking place in London. The OLYMPIC Olympics. In hopes that anyone coming to town for that major world event will take some time out to go to a Sherlock Holmes Week event or two.  Yes, instead of tying it to Sherlock’s birthday, Watson’s birthday, the date A Study in Scarlet was published, Reichenbach day, or any other day of significance in Holmes’s existence, somebody decided, “Hey, let’s just make Sherlock Holmes compete with the summer Olympics!”

Well, here in Peoria, we’ve long known that part of being a Sherlockian is sometimes going along with some just plain batshit crazy ideas. So, what the heck? Check back here on July 30th  and see what Peoria’s contribution to Sherlock Holmes Week will be. It’s not like we were planning to watch the Olympics anyway . . .