Watsons through time and gender.

I was listening to a Baker Street Babes podcast of a panel from this spring's 221B Con today, called "Watsons Thru Time." It's a good podcast for anyone to listen to, but I'd especially recommend it to those who think the new Sherlockians are all airheaded Cumberbatch swooners. A lot of good thoughts can be heard there from the panelists and the audience, as well as the recognizable voice of Howard Ostrom, Sherlockian film expert extraordinaire.

Good thoughts, like I said, but despite the fact that Howard is there and there is a gentleman on the panel, I found myself noticing that the discussion was skewing hard in a traditionally feminine direction. Watson was being defined by his relationship with Holmes as much as any other characteristic, and I couldn't help but wonder if the charm of a given Watson didn't prejudice the view of that relationship just a tad.

Nobody seemed to care if Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were in a bromance. Consider that for a moment. While I'd argue the affection shown between them on screen was just as strong as any other, when the topic of Bruce comes up, the reactions to a Holmes/Watson intellect disparity overshadow any bonds the actors created on-screen between their characters. Honestly, would that reaction be entirely the same if Nigel Bruce were a just-as-stupid hunka hunka burning Jude Law? Or would the word "bromance" suddenly be back in play?

Somehow when there was more male energy in the Sherlockian room than female, I don't think we minded stupid Watson quite so much. Guys have all had stupid guy friends, and if they're good-hearted souls, you don't love them any less. And sometimes we have really smart guy friends, and we get our hand stuck trying to pull a really big cookie from a cookie jar . . . no big deal.

But if one of the members of the Holmes-Watson relationship is a stand-in for the female half of a male-female pairing . . . and sorry, Watson, you seem to always wind up the wife in that 221B prison relationship . . . it becomes less and less acceptable for Watson to be lesser than Holmes.

The alchemy of gender bias in our views of Holmes and Watson is a very complex thing, not always something we're conscious of, full of shadings and facets of all sorts. Comparing what came out of the fans of the forties, fifties, and sixties to what is in focus today would make a fascinating study, especially matching trends with changes in demographics of said fans.

Because what we're seeing these days sure isn't your grandfather's Sherlockiana, that's for sure. He had his own prejudices . . . why focus on the relationship between Holmes and Watson when Mrs. Neville St. Clair was answering the door in a nightie?  But hey, listen to the Babes podcast and come to your own conclusions. My sleepily babbling self needs to go to bed . . . .

Magnussen, eh?

This morning, I don't know if I love the way BBC Sherlock is keeping the flame alive with teasers or not. The word spread across the Sherlockian web like wildfire, season three is going to feature the villainous Charles Augustus Magnussen.

Those Sherlock fans who never read "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" can grab their Canon and see what sorts of thing may await. Those of us that know the story well can start going, "Magnussen? Why Magnussen?"

Sure, it could be as simple as not wanting to use "Milverton" now that Elementary grabbed that name first in their run. Or it could imply more.

My first thought was the Nordic association with the new name giving the tale a WikiLeaks twist.

My second thought was the mistaken notion that there was a character called "Magnussen" in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

My third thought, after a little Google searching, was, "Hey, Norwegian royalty! Holmes was headed for Norway at the end of 'The Adventure of Black Peter.'"

And that's just me. BBC Sherlock's fandom is a very hungry fandom, one that will analyze individual frames of their favorite show and milk every possible connotation of three individual words tossed their way by devious showrunners. Handing them a name like "Charles Augustus Magnussen" is very apt to produce entire fanfic stories before any of us has even heard the character speak a single word. Just look at how much lore got built up around Moran in the Cumberverse . . . Nature may abhor a vacuum, but Sherlock fandom is chock-full of eager godlings ready to create entire realities of Sherlock to fill even a potential void.

So now we have Charles Augustus Magnussen. Let the games begin!

No debate.

The subject of getting me into a pro and con debate on CBS's Elementary has come up again this weekend, forcing me to consider my position on that bit of Sherlock-play once more.

My friend Bill Mason originally suggested a debate last winter, as he's fond of the show, and Bill and I have had some fun conspiring on a thing or two in the past. (A script for a Hee Haw episode based entirely around Holmes and Watson being perhaps the most notable.) But we never found a venue where we could both be present at the same time, and . . . well, my journey with the last season of Elementary was far from done.

Originally, when Elementary was new, there were those who enjoyed the show and those who didn't. Both camps were watching the show, and Sherlock Peoria seemed to provide a nice voice for those who didn't, something they could read and go, "Yeah, that bothers me, too."

But as time went on, those who didn't like Elementary wisely quit watching the show. Except for me. When you're blogging and the reader numbers shoot up whenever you express your opinions on a certain topic, you tend to be motivated to express your opinions on that topic. And writing a blog week after week, a weekly television show is natural grist for the mill. By the end of the first season, two kinds of people seemed to be watching Elementary: the fans of the show . . . and me.

I've been told I make people who like the show feel stupid. I've been told I like to rain on people's parades. And those were the nicer comments. But, oddly, those were the ones what made me feel worst.

If a rabid fan of Elementary gets on your case, well, you can write that off. They're rabid fans, and going a little nutball is their prerogative. This blog demonstrates that little fact all the time. But when you start to feel like you're bringing down some fairly normal, happy-go-lucky Sherlockians, well, then you start to have doubts about the merits of what you're doing.

Debating the merits of Elementary, at this point, isn't something I can just do for fun. I'm not a sociopath, I do care about my fellow Sherlockians more than a little bit. Sure, I can give an honest reaction to a new episode or news bit, but those are just reactions, not the basis for a political campaign. (One of a politician's greatest skills seems to be NOT giving their initial, honest reaction.) And occasionally I get lured into attempting to validate those reactions here in the blog. But actually just going up against someone who likes Elementary and arguing, "No, your show sucks, and you are wrong, wrong, wrong!" . . . . well, that would just be mean.

Maybe I've been mean to Elementary fans in the past, and maybe I'll be mean to them again. The rabid ones can get a little annoying in their delusional insistence that Elementary is good TV. See, I just did it again. And that was mean. In the blog, I can try to edit that stuff out. But in an open debate format?

So for now, when it comes to Elementary, I'm going to have to say there is no debate. Once the show has been over for a few years, and we can all step back and calmly and rationally discuss it, then I might be game for it. The interest in such a thing will have surely declined by then, but that, I think, might not be a bad thing.

Not a bad thing at all.

The Canonical View of Elementary

All other considerations of its merits aside, for the traditional Sherlock Holmes fan, a Canonical  analysis of the CBS TV show Elementary is a bit of a puzzlement. As the series is more of a total rewrite than an actual modern adaptation, certain familiar touch-stones seem to be missing and possibly going to stay that way.

Take Reichenbach, for example. Downey faced a literal, if exaggerated, Reichenbach. Cumberbatch faced a more metaphoric Reichenbach, but still, plainly, Reichenbach. And Miller?

In the Bizarro Sherlockian world of Elementary, I would have to argue that Reichenbach took place before the show even began. We like to use Watson as our main marker for the beginning and end of the story-cycle of the Sherlockian Canon, but in this case, it would seem we have to let that one go. Because in Elementary world, the Holmes character meets Moriarty long before he meets Watson.

He meets Moriarty. He grapples with Moriarty (in the sheets, yes, but it's still grappling). Moriarty "dies."

Elementary, then, seems to take place during the hiatus, when Mr. Elementary has left London behind following the death of his greatest challenge.

In old school Sherlockian terminology, that post-hiatus place in his career would make Mr. Elementary the Deutero-Holmes, the Holmes who comes back after Reichenbach not quite the same. As he was described by one Sherlockian writer in 1993, Deutero-Holmes "doesn't care for the violin, isn't addicted to cocaine, and breaks the law whenever he feels like it." Sounds like Mr. Elementary to me.

Deutero-Holmes, however, is one of the first theoretical spin-offs of the Canon, a "He's not the real Sherlock Holmes!" who came back from Reichenbach and was called out by Ronald Knox in 1920. So we can't give him any more Canonical status despite those similarities that Rex Stout's theoretical spin-off Watson from his 1941 essay, "Watson Was A Woman." Hmmm . . . .

But where a Canonical analysis of Elementary is concerned, one does quickly find one's self in a theoretical area that seems to be in need of quantum physics and a few other higher disciplines.

In the Canon of old, Holmes meets Mrs. Hudson, then Dr. Watson, then Professor Moriarty, in that order. In the first season of Elementary, we learned Mr. Elementary met Miss Moriarty, then Miss Watson, then Miss Hudson. Time itself runs backwards where the female gender is concerned, even queen bees, a young Mr. Elementary takes up a hobby eventually gotten to by an older, retired Sherlock Holmes.

But then ones looks at Inspector Gregson, whom Sherlock Holmes obviously knew before the Canon began. In Elementary, Captain Gregson was also on board before the stories take place. Does that make Gregson a paradox? His traditional role as the smartest of a group of stupid men (in Holmes's eyes) is slightly paradoxical.

At some point in such considerations, it almost begins to seem that Elementary is a Canonical adaptation for the Stephen Hawkings among us, or possibly the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred.

That is all strictly theoretical, too, of course.

Those cousins-by-ink.

I went looking for something in my library tonight, turned a corner and found . . . four more Christopher Morley novels. I felt like someone who had happily cleared the house of ants, only to find a new line of them marching into the kitchen. Pesky Morleys!

Now, I don't mean to malign ol' Kit, as occasionally this blog is seen as the poo-poo-er of all things beloved by  fellow Sherlockians, but I feel like I've put in my time with that consummate man of letters. I've read his essays, poems, and a good share of his novels, and don't see a burning need to revisit them before I bite the dust. There's more Richard Kadrey I have to read, more Lyndsay Faye, and more soon-to-be authors we haven't even heard of yet. And it's not like Christopher Morley got into my library sheerly on his own merits.

When a fan runs out of new material to fill their fannish time, their energies can go in a lot of directions.  Reading-wise, this usually means moving from Doyle's Sherlock to pastiches. And as hard as it is to imagine in this day and age, a mere twenty-five years ago, it was possible to run out of pastiches to read.

So what do you do when you've read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories available, all of the Mr. Mycroft stories available, all of the Solar Pons, Schlock Holmes, Herlock Sholmes, etc., etc.? Well, you start reading Doyle that didn't have Holmes, if you haven't already. You start reading Doyle's brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung. And eventually you work your way to Doyle's cousin-by-ink and the first Sherlockian super-fan, Christopher Morley.

Once you get to Morley, you can fill a whole lot of time, once you start hunting up his stuff. He wrote constantly, and he wrote everything there was to write. I always enjoyed his short essays the best, but his novels weren't bad, and his poetry . . . well, it's poetry. Your mileage may vary.

He's a lively and interesting fellow, and you can get to know him through his works. But in my life as a Sherlockian, I've met a lot of lively and interesting fellows of both genders, so my bonds with Morley didn't stay unique enough to keep him in shelf space for his non-Sherlock Holmes material. So this past weekend, all my Morleys went to live with a fellow Sherlockian who is enjoying him anew . . . well, I thought all my Morleys had.

Pruning a library can be a bit like pruning vegetation. Past a certain point, it can take on a life of its own. So I'm back to pruning.

Going nonverbal in a time of plenty.

Well . . . .

Usually, I can pull a topic out of thin air. Usually, the blogging is quite the relaxing moment after a long hard day. Usually . . . .

But, let's see, what happened in the last five days. Nothing to write about there, right? Only:

• The third meeting of Peoria's restarted Sherlock Holmes society, some major authorial news from one of our members, and the return of the Suellen party favor, a Hansom tradition that dates back to the late 1970s.
• An Irish pub lunch with the current king of Indianapolis Sherlockians, Mr. Vincent W. Wright.
• The moving of a mass of Sherlockiana to an undisclosed location by the everyday transport that would not draw attention to itself.
• "The Adventure of the Medium, the Waterfront, and the Unmarked Bills."
• The San Diego Comicon announcement of the next three Sherlock episode titles.
• San Diego Comicon.
• "SherlockeDCC," the party whose Indiegogo fundraiser I happily donated to, which turned into a Twitter-trending fan triumph, complete with Actual Celebrities.
• Kristina Manente being Kristina Manente. I want to get a Bill and Ted phone booth time machine and get Kristina and John Bennett Shaw together with some of their friends to stage a weekend event. And then we'll all just go there when we die.
• A summer repeat of the Elementary episode, "Lesser Evils."

Sure, there was all that to blog about . . . in fact, there was too much too blog about . . . and a necessary bit of overwork and a resultant head cold. But it looks like the internet had enough to fill itself these past few days, so I don't feel too badly about not keeping up. May have to revisit some of that one day, though.

Too soon?

This week, The Sherlock Files: The Official Companion to the Hit Television Series by Guy Adams came out in America. It's been out in Britain for a good long time under the more tidy title, Sherlock: The Casebook, but, hey, this is America. When it comes to Sherlock, it always seems like we're dependent upon things crossing the Atlantic on a slow boat.

It got raves in its UK incarnation, it looks like a beautiful, beautiful book, and yet I hesitate . . .

Why?

Because I've bought books on popular television shows before, and when is a show most popular? While there are still new episodes to be seen. And if there are still new episodes to be seen, there's a goodly chance that the book will require a second edition with all new material! With any cult show, the market is usually going to hold up for that second book, and given that Guy Adams has done other books on Sherlock Holmes, I'd bet he's going to complete this one once more episodes come available.

Still, Sherlock isn't like the standard American TV series in that we don't just have a three month summer hiatus to wait through. We've got yea . . . oh, I don't even want to think about it. So a booster shot of Sherlock may be just what the good doctor ordered, and The Sherlock Files seems like a handy thing for that. We shall see.

I said I was hesitant, after all. Not crazy.