For the last time? Oh, no, definitely not.

Sometimes, we just enjoy treading familiar ground one more time.

Steven Moffat got a few good quote on Entertainment Weekly's site this week with the lovely headline: "Sherlock co-creator: For the last time, Holmes is not gay!"

Moffat goes on to explain that his particular incarnation of Sherlock Holmes has a very Victorian mindset about asexuality helping keep his mental powers at his peak. "He's not gay. He's not straight."

Billy Wilder, in his classic film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, had fun playing with that issue, raising the question of Holmes possibly being gay then using it as a springboard to explore why it was that Sherlock didn't care for women.

In a way, the question goes all the way back to William Gillette, who caught Conan Doyle in an "I don't give a damn about Sherlock Holmes" moment and got permission to have Holmes fall in love and marry him off, in his 1899 play Sherlock Holmes. It's almost like Gillette wanted to give him a beard to just ignore the question entirely.

As long as Sherlock Holmes abstains from romantic involvement of any kind, a key point in the original character's make-up, there will be those who want to fill that void. The black market of stories, fanfic, has always been quick to head there, as that genre has long been about scratching itches that the more mainstream channels held back from. And some more clueless creators will always just blindly give Holmes a relationship because they don't fully understand the character. (And yes, I will include William Gillette in there, along with Rob Dougherty. Clueless does not mean unpopular.)

Will the question of "Holmes, gay or straight?" ever be resolved?

It can't be. Because it's not the real question. Just an answer that some of us like to see played out now and then.

The kayfabe of Sherlockian scholarship.

My fondness for Sherlockiana and my fondness for professional wrestling are almost a matched set in my life. Both glimpsed as a child, taken up whole-heartedly in college, and occasionally combined in writings as an adult.

On the surface, the two interests would seem mutually exclusive -- the raw physicality and simple conflicts of pro wrestling versus the bookish intellectual nature of detective literature. But one doesn't have to to dig to deep to find the commonality that makes me love both areas of endeavor when they are performed at their best level.

In wrestling, they call it "kayfabe." In Sherlockiana, we call it "playing the game."

In wrestling, it's the happy illusion that the events and outcomes of those dramatic battles between "faces" and "heels" is real. In the late 1970s, when I first saw live professional wrestling in a local high school gym -- Bobby "the Brain" Heenan versus Dick the Bruiser -- there were still a lot of people who actually still thought the illusion was real, even though my friends and I enjoyed the fact that it was obviously not. (And in one special moment with wrestling newbies, I even won a battle royal betting pool by just working out the best plotted result instead of gaging actual physical prowess.) But as time has gone one, almost every modern wrestling fan knows for a fact that the "sports entertainment" is scripted and staged . . . and they don't care. They still love it.

In Sherlockian scholarship, the happy illusion has always been that Sherlock Holmes was real, that Dr. Watson wrote those biographical tales about him, and Conan Doyle was merely Watson's agent. In Sherlockian circles, the worries that came up were always the opposite of those in wrestling kayfabe -- many a more serious fan thought that pretending Watson wrote the stories would actually discredit Conan Doyle, because some people actually would believe Watson wrote the stories. Having some more determined (and sometimes less artful) Holmes fans steadfastly stick to the "Watson wrote the stories line" even seemed to give evidence to that worry.

Attempts to push Sherlockiana as a serious "literary" pursuit and not just a fun fandom have intruded on the great game of Watsonian authorship over the years as well. Gleefully diving into Watson's work as an author without at least one aside to pay respects to Saint Conan just wasn't done as much, and Sherlockiana's entertainment value, for at least this commentator, suffered as a result. The early days of Sherlockian culture, when Doyle was current enough to still be viewed as a bit of a wacky celebrity instead of a revered historical figure,  was a part of what created the Watsonian authorship game, and the best humor always contains a measure of frank disrespect, the needle to keep the too serious at bay.

As wrestling has evolved, the general agreement that it is "sports entertainment" and not "sports" has not hurt it at all, and its rise and fall in popularity depends solely upon the scripting and plotting of current shows. When I see the fun newer Sherlockians are having with "disapproving Doyle" snapshots and comments, it seems like the evolution on our side of the coin might be working in the favor of "scholarship entertainment" as well.

Me, I just like playing in constructed realities. Pro wrestling. Sherlockiana. Not all that different, really.

Which lap is yours? A quiz built with pre-internet technology.

One of the newer innovations on social media has become the "Which [Insert Popular Media Set of Characters Here] person are you?" quiz. You answer a bunch of indirect multiple choice questions and the web page's mechanism seemingly computes which character is the most like you based on your answers. We don't know how those quizzes work behind the scenes, whether they are well-built or fraud, but we delight in finding ourselves identified as some favorite character.

Being a decidedly low-tech blogger, this morning, I have created a quiz of my own, where you can see which character from the original Sherlock Holmes stories is closest to you, just by identifying what is most likely in your lap. It's pretty straightforward, and has just one question. That question, of course, is:


"What is most likely to be in your lap?" (Like I said, straightforward.)

Pick one . . .

1. Handcuffed hands.

2. Needlework.

3. A dog whip.

4. Just your hands.

5. A worked antimacassar.

6. A horse's reins.

7. The metaphoric fruit of a solution.


Decided on what would most likely be in your lap?

I wandered into this thought because I had a cat on my lap this morning and was thinking about Martha from "His Last Bow." But Martha's big black cat, it turns out, was on the stool beside her and not in her lap, so she didn't make the quiz. (Which is really too bad, because I wanted to pick her.) The answers that did make the quiz are below, and instead of letting a web page cipher it out for you, you can just scan the list for what character your answer above ties you to. (Like I said, low-tech.)


Jonathan Small, with his handcuffed hands on his lap,  in the The Sign of the Four.

Mrs. Watson, with her needlework on her lap, in "The Man with the Twisted Lip."

Dead Grimesby Roylott, with a dog whip on his lap, in "The Speckled Band."

Mrs. Rucastle, with just her hands in her lap, in "The Copper Beeches."

Mrs. Susan Cushing, with a worked antimacassar in her lap, in "The Cardboard Box."

Dr. Watson, with a horse's reins in his lap, in "The Solitary Cyclist."

Sherlock Holmes, with the metaphoric fruit of a solution falling into his lap, in "The Veiled Lodger."


Surprised at your result? Proud to be akin to the Canonical character whose lap contained the thing most likely to be in yours? Go ahead and post it on your favorite social media, but you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, as there are no buttons here for that either.

Just words, which in there way are perhaps our oldest technology.

Giant Sherlockians.

One oft hears it said, in certain Sherlockian circles, that "there were giants in those days." People like to do a little hero-worship of their forebears, and giving them a metaphoric increase in physical size is a traditional way to do it. But they really don't mean they were giants.

The subconscious mind, however, works slightly differently.

Last night, I dreamed I went to a grand Sherlockian function, a mutant hybrid of the Sherlock Holmes Birthday Weekend in New York and 221B Con. It was a grand event, with hundreds of attendees in one large room, and eventually, some plucky souls said, "Hey, let's get a picture of everybody!"

In the dream, everyone crowded together to get in the picture, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by Sherlockians two to three feet taller than me, and I come in at a little over six feet tall. One of those nearby was apparently Chris Redmond, about whom I remember thinking, "He wasn't short the last time I saw him, but he had to have grown!"

Eventually Scott Monty saw the issue and rearranged everyone with the shorter people in front, where I wound up, and a second picture was taken.

As we near 221B Con, and all of the circumstances that have kept me from getting to Sherlockian functions in recent years are lining up to try to prevent me from attending this one as well, I guess my subconscious is making a pretty obvious statement on my feelings about being away from the community for so long, and existing solely in the Sherlockian world as an online spirit.

There weren't just giants back in those days, apparently there are quite a few out there now. At least my subconscious thinks so.

Sherlocks no matter what the age.

First we had Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller as two peers in a Sherlock (or Sherlock-ish) role in a position to comment on the other, and now Sherlocks of another generation are in a spot to say a word or two about the other's Holmes.

Christopher Plummer has been commenting on Sir Ian McKellen's performance as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movies, and with one of those actors playing Holmes in an upcoming movie, while the other has played him in the past, it makes one also wonder how things would have played out had history been reversed.

What if Ian McKellen had somehow gotten the part of Sherlock Holmes in Murder By Decree? (And the short Silver Blaze.)

And what if Christopher Plummer had held back on Sherlock until the upcoming Mr. Holmes?

Two actors of the same generation, coming to Sherlock Holmes at different points in their career just show how, unlike James Bond, Harry Potter, or so many other characters, Sherlock Holmes isn't limited to one age or one point in his life. He can be Sir Ian McKellen's age in Mr. Holmes, or he can be Nicholas Rowe's age in Young Sherlock Holmes. He can be Benedict Cumberbatch's age or Tom Baker's age or . . . well, have we hit a limit yet? I bet a good director could get Sherlock Holmes out of any actor of an age that can speak. (And if we want to go the Look Who's Talking telepathic baby route, a good director isn't needed at all.)

It would be fascinating to see a graph of all the ages of all the actors who played Sherlock Holmes at the time they played Sherlock Holmes . . . and then cross referenced with the year they played Holmes. As time goes on, we know he's getting younger in some productions . . . and yet, we still have Sir Ian McKellen coming in at age seventy-five.

Interestingly, our female Sherlocks are starting their chart a bit younger than the males did. And that will be a whole 'nother graph of interesting, but like the boys, I bet there won't be an age restriction there either.

Waffles for Ettie.

Sometimes the concerns of career and community draw one away from Sherlockian pursuits for a few days or weeks, and one has to find a re-entry point to get one's head back into the game. But sometimes that re-entry point doesn't come easily, especially when it needs to fit a certain personal standard of blog-worthiness.

Yes, yes, I could review one of a billion stories in a myriad of mediums, but that would just lead to a possible less-than-positive experience. So many personal versions of the Great Detective out there that getting one to match one's own is never easy. The best thing, then, is to just head back to the Canon for a spoonful of original Canon.

But where to head for that?

Well, today, it turns out, is Waffle Day in Sweden.

And we all like the occasional waffle. But what has that to do with Sherlock Holmes?

Well, James Mortimer of The Hound of the Baskervilles was a member of the Swedish Pathological Society, but surely that doesn't rate waffles. So we turn, very quickly to another novel, The Valley of Fear.

John Douglas, the seeming murder victim of that tale, had a Swedish first wife. And when we get to the extended flashback of his former life in America, we find out what a wife . . . .

"It was a woman, young and singularly beautiful. She was of the Swedish type, blonde and fair-haired, with the piquant contrast of a pair of beautiful dark eyes, with which she surveyed the stranger with surprise and a pleasing embarrassment which brought a wave of colour over her pale face. Framed in the bright light of the open doorway, it seemed to McMurdo that he had never seen a more beautiful picture . . ."

Yes, Miss Ettie Shafter was that classic Northern European fairy princess old school standard of beauty that gave us such cultural touch-stones as the "Swedish bikini team." She has a touch of a Swedish accent, but not a full-on one, as she is second-generation Swedish. Her father came from there, but apparently she had never been. Her contrasting dark eyes surely came from her mother, whose origin is never told.

Ettie Shafter became Ettie Edwards after marrying Birdy Edwards in Chicago, with her Swedish father as a witness. From there, the couple moved to California under assumed names, and it was there she died of typhoid and her husband changed his name yet again to "John Douglas."

So this morning, now that I've finally got a little break in the concerns of day-to-day life, I'm headed to Peoria's finest waffle-serving restaurant for a waffle in honor of the late Ettie Edwards, nee Shafter.

Except I'll have to do so under an assumed name, as a tribute to that adventurous lady of Swedish extraction. 

Postscript: And while I was enjoying my caramel apple cinnamon waffle, Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" starting playing over the restaurant's sound system. Sherlockian Waffle Day was complete.

Here's to you, Ettie!

The Breakable Mr. Elementary

I was watching another episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix this morning and marveling at the pure genius that went into constructing that particular half hour of television, as has happened more than once with that show. (The simple touch of a Cosby sweater! Genius!) When I was done, I checked my normal internet channels and was brought back to Elementary-land by an exchange I'd been having with Rob Nunn about that fiesty post on Rick's Cafe Texan from January.

The sudden mental juxtaposition of Elementary and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was fascinating, in that it revealed in stark contrast, the two New York Citys we're given in media.

In Elementary, we're given that bleak, uncared-for urban sprawl, where it often seems like there must be no paint stores, as everything looks dingy and abandoned, even where people live. (Unless, of course, they're very, very rich and a suspect.) And it's winter a lot of the time.

The New York of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a different place, the sunny New York City of opportunity and colorful characters, where visits to Central Park are an integral part of life, and spring and summer prevail.

The song "New York, New York" famously declares, "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere!" and in Kimmy's case, one feels she is going to make it. In Mr. Elementary's case? He came there broken and is all about just managing to barely hang on. The seeming message: "Yes, New York is so big and bad that it actually can bring London's greatest detective down to our level."

And that's the message I often hear in praise of Elementary over other Sherlock Holmes adaptations. He's painfully flawed, and thus relatable. We should not aspire to better things, like the true Sherlock Holmes who was at the top of his field for a reason. We should content ourselves that life is hard and we can't see we're sleeping with Moriarty or that we may or may not have killed someone in a drug-addled haze. The dingy loser version of movie and TV New York is the perfect city for someone like that.

But the opportunity-filled city, where the hopeful come to win, that we see in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? I'd like to see the Sherlock Holmes who was created to exist in that town. Of course, that guy probably never had to leave London.