"John Watson's Island"

Okay, new Sherlock Holmes TV show idea . . . and it all starts with a song!

Just relax now

And you'll hear a tale

A tale that you shouldn't quote,

That started from this London port,

Aboard this tiny boat.

The mate was an army doctor man,

And Sherlock set the pace.

Five passengers set sail that day,

For a three hour case,

A three hour case.

The river started getting rough,

But the tiny boat was tossed.

If not for the courage of the fearless two

The police-boat would be lost.

The police-boat would be lost.

The boat set aground on the shore

Of this uncharted river isle

With John Watson,

His Sherlock too.

The Government and the Yard,

An opera star,

The professor and Mary Morstan,

Here on John Watson's Isle.

Still with me? That's just the opening lyrics. You get more at the close of the show.

So this is a case that has gone astray,
they're here for a long, long time.
They may not solve a case each week,
please send them a lime.

John Watson and his Sherlock too
will do their very best,
to foil Jim Moriarty troubles
in their weird Thames island nest.

No wires, no gas, no hansom cabs
not a single luxury
just like the Grice Patersons,
it's primitive as can be.

So join us now, Sherlockians,
E'en if you're full of bile,
for seven stranded characters
here on John Watson's Isle!

Get it? Got it? Good! A show that gets to the very core of pastiche, centering on Sherlock, John, Mycroft, Lestrade, Irene, Moriarty, and Mary Morstan. (Because who else do you need, right? Mrs. Hudson? Well, yes, but Gilligan's Island only had seven castaways, and Mycroft and Lestrade make a better pair of Howells.)

This, of course, is really just the opening. I cut my teeth on Gilligan's Island reruns as a kid, so you're going to get at least one more day of John Watson's Island. Crank up your cocoanut and palm frond laptop for tomorrow's next bit of summer vacation fun!

The Adventure of the Canonical Wonder-Woman.

The year is 1902. The place is London, England. Three men have gathered at the will of another, who prefers to remain in the shadows, to attempt to steer the course of a young woman whom they don't feel has the capacity to make what they consider the correct choice.

The matter is recorded for posterity as "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client." And yet, within its text is a phrase that a modern reader might see as the key to an entirely different reading of the tale . . . a reading that could turn the facts as we think we know them completely on their head. That phrase?

". . . Violet de Merville, young, rich, beautiful, accomplished, a wonder-woman in every way."

A wonder-woman. Seventeen years before a similar phrase would create the super-heroic Wonder Woman, we have a wonder-woman involved in a matter that also involves Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

But we ever truly stop to consider that Miss Violet de Merville might have truly been that "wonder-woman" her male meddlers describe her as?

In the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Violet gains the attentions of a man whose hobby is destroying women, the Baron Adelbert Gruner. Onlookers describe her as "obsessed with him," and say she ignores their every warning as to his true, evil character. They put these facts together and conclude that she is blindly in love with him, and must be protected through a coalition of male interference.

But we're talking about a wonder-woman, here, right? "Accomplished in every way."

When Sherlock Holmes finally meets her, he describes her as "demure, pale, self-contained, as inflexible and remote as a snow image on a mountain." Her voice is "like wind from an iceberg." This is not a woman in love. This is a woman on a mission.

Our filter for the entire interview is the mind of a very emotional Sherlock Holmes. "I use my head, not my heart," he tells Watson, "But I really did plead with her with all the warmth of words that I could find in my nature." This is a part of Holmes we truly wish Watson would have witnessed . . . and recorded . . . for us.

In his passion to defend this poor "innocent," however, perhaps Sherlock Holmes missed the appropriate context or quote for a particular line Violet de Merville said at last:

"If his noble nature has ever for an instant fallen, it may be that I have been specially sent to raise it to its true and lofty level."

Could it be that Violet de Merville had her own agenda for putting Baron Gruner in his proper place, and was just playing her role with some subtle sarcasm? And could it also be that Kitty Winter wasn't the only hand of justice swinging for this villain -- just the cruder of the two?

We never hear of what finally happened with Violet de Merville, or even that she was the one who cancelled the wedding. When her father finally showed up with Gruner's diary, he might have gotten an earful of what her true plan was and how this meddling bunch of men spoiled a plan to obtain true public and legal justice for the women Gruner had ruined, setting an example for other men of his ilk. Watson is much more focused on his relief that Sherlock Holmes didn't wind up in jail. (A crime Watson himself was also technically complicit in!)

Given the limited point of view in "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client," and the fact that we never actually hear from Violet de Merville when the case seems to end, one can't help but feel there's a second tale to be told here, one of a wonder-woman who had some ideas of her own. And maybe even carried them out, eventually . . . when the men involved had gone back to their other concerns and had ceased to meddle.

I should be interested in hearing that tale one day.

Out of the city.

Writing under the heading of "Sherlock Peoria," I'm well aware of the impression Peoria can give to the unenlightened. Corn fields, rustic small town folk, and none of the urban culture of our Chicago brethren to the North. One of my ex-employers used to specifically route visitors so that they would enter town from the East, coming down the interstate to a lovely view of a riverfront crowded with big buildings and the aspect of an actual city of size, rather than state highway approaches from the North, which are all fields and little river towns.

I mention this to illustrate that even for a Peorian, there's much deeper in the country one can go, which I did this weekend, heading to a destination wedding that took us on a long drive down smaller and smaller roads eventually spending many miles on  a one-lane gravel road leading to a hunting lodge, then out to a wedding by a pond and a reception in an actual barn built in 1887 . . . the year Sherlock Holmes was created/investigated many a case.

Getting away from the city is a great break in your routine, but it doesn't come without a touch of discomfort, being disconnected from the web we urban Moriartys sit in the center of. But it wasn't Moriarty I was thinking of at such a remove -- it was John H. Watson, in "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman." Now there was a guy who had some discomfort.

We often talk about the abuses Watson occasionally suffers at the hand of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, but that subject doesn't usually bring up Little Purlington. Even with our lack of mentioning it, it seems such an abuse that one can imagine that in the final years of their partnership, it wasn't "Norbury" that John whispered in Sherlock's ear when he wanted to chide him, but "Little Purlington."

Their client in the case, the crabby old miser Josiah Amberly receives a telegram beckoning him to see the vicar of the village of Little Purlington -- a telegram that even sounds like Sherlock Holmes wrote it: "Come at once without fail. Can give you information as to your recent loss." And, oddly, Sherlock Holmes shows no interest in following this apparent clue in a murder investigation. But he's glad to send Watson with Amberly to follow up on it.

"Little Purlington is not an easy place to reach," Watson wrote, long after the trip was done. "My remembrance of the journey is not a pleasant one, for the weather was hot, the train slow, and my companion sullen and silent, hardly talking at all, save to make an occasional sardonic remark as to the futility of our proceedings."

Of course Amberly thinks it's futile, because  . . . SPOILERS! . . . he's the murderer.

When they get to little Purlington, "what seemed to me to be the most primitive village in England," Watson eventually finds a phone and calls Holmes to tell him it was all a wild goose chase. Holmes's response?

"I much fear, my dear Watson, that there is no return train tonight. I have unwittingly condemned you to the horrors of a country inn. However, there is always Nature, Watson -- Nature and Josiah Amberly -- you can be in close commune with both."

And then Holmes laughs.

He just sent Watson off to Timbuktu with no sense of the facilities or lodgings available there and knowingly has set John up to spend the night with an old murderer, apparently out of doors if he doesn't like the local lodgings. (And Amberly is a miser after all.) We hear nothing of how that night passed, or where, but you can be sure it wasn't one of Watson's better overnights.

Later, when Amberly is locked up, Holmes explains it all to a Scotland Yard inspector who calls Holmes's work "masterly." And what was that masterly plan? "I sent an agent to the most impossible village I could think of, and summoned my man to it at such an hour that he could not possibly get back. To prevent any miscarriage, Dr. Watson accompanied him."

Sherlock Holmes has burgled other people's houses without sending Watson to an "impossible village" to spend the night with a killer. Or warning him ahead of time about it.

"You can file it in our archives, Watson," Holmes says after tossing Watson a newspaper whose story gives neither he nor Watson credit. "Some day the true story may be told."

But Watson, generous soul that he was, never tells us the full true story of his awful night dragged out of London and dropped in Little Purlington ("The Most Primitive Village in England!" probably being added to its welcome sign after it got mentioned in The Strand Magazine thanks to Watson). But you know from his "primitive" line alone, it wasn't a good one.

 My own weekend in parts unknown was much more pleasant, especially being surrounded by generous family and friends and not a murderous miser like Watson was. (I had full cable access, plenty of pizza, and Mexicokes.) But I could well imagine how he might have felt, given the remote location.

Poor John Watson.

15 years in the ether.

Forgive me for a little self-indulgence today (I know, in blog-land that's really every day), but as it's Sherlock Peoria's fifteenth birthday, it seems a day to pause and reflect.

Fifteen years. Yikes.

Here's a link to the original post. It seems barely worth the read, but if you've started reading these in more recent years, a sort of timid start, back when just putting the HTML for the site together was taking up a lot of my focus. The next two blogs were on antique malls and assembling a Sherlockian journal, subjects that were definitely more prominent in the early 2000s -- before the internet took a lot of the steam out of both those endeavors, even though the strongest specimens of each still exist.

In the months that followed, I was putting out a bi-monthly journal and weekly website updates, filling sherlockpeoria.net with all the content I had at my disposal, along with some great contributions from that Sherlockian fireball we call Don Hobbs. Looking back from the present day, when The Holmes & Watson Report ended in 2005, and the weekly website updates ended in 2011, each step seems to have just been stripping off more of the ancillary activities involved with putting words into the ether and just doing the words.

"I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather," a great man once said, and when it comes to putting out the words, I will claim that title as well. Write a novel? Been there, done that, three full times. First drafts are fun. Re-write, edit, seek a publisher? Too much effort. (These, of course, were non-Sherlockian, or else I might have made that final push. Sherlock always gives me a bit more energy.) Blogging is pretty much all first drafts, hence, fun. Just doing the words.

And words give us so much. Even temporary ones.

After fifteen years online and over 1700 blog posts, I am very much aware of the ephemeral nature of this ether I'm pouring words into. If I stop paying my website fees on SherlockPeoria.net, those first nine years of writings go away. If Google decides to kill Blogger and all its contents, the last six years of writings vanish as well. But that's okay. It all will have served its purpose. It doesn't need to be eternal.

"Never has so much been written by so many for so few," Christopher Morley once quipped about the 1940s The Baker Street Journal. Sherlockiana has always been a world of small audiences for most of us, and yet we write anyway. We write for the love of Sherlock Holmes and that chance to have our thoughts connect with another's about that emotion. It doesn't matter if you're blogging, writing fanfic, working up a talk for a club meeting, or something for one of those solid print media. The words just want to come out, like fireworks in celebration of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson.

And yet, it isn't all just party balloons and confetti. As we order our thoughts to consider matters detective and literary, entering into the specialties of both Holmes and Watson, we can't help but gain something just from the mental exercise. Like body-building of the verbal muscles. And a relief from the tensions of the day, as the mind roams from the daily chores to pathways of a Sherlockian nature.

After fifteen years of this, I seem to have much more energy for writing and not less. The blogs come more often. The words have better moments. And I hear from people.

As so many folks out there know, Mr. Sherlock Holmes can contribute some very worthwhile things to your life. Conan Doyle did his part, and I thank him for that. But Sherlock Holmes is so much more than one man's entity at this point -- so many contributors to the discussion and the legend. And all of that is what makes Sherlock so easy to write about.

For fifteen frickin' years. (And to quote a favorite not-quite-raccoon, "And he didn't say 'frickin'!")

And I'm happy for that. Thanks, all.

A pip of a summer project.

Okay, this one is going to be hard for me to write.

Remember "The Five Orange Pips?" The whole story where John Openshaw comes to Sherlock Holmes about a sort of family curse that killed his uncle and father and is coming for him? And does come for him?

You know, the one where that same John Openshaw is actually then killed before Sherlock Holmes even starts investigating his case, other than looking up something for Watson in the encyclopaedia? I was just writing about our library group discussing it, a couple of weeks ago.

Well, since that last reading of the case, something's been bothering me, and that something is this: Sherlock Holmes didn't actually solve the case.

Sure, he comes home to 221B Baker Street after a busy day and explains his theory of the whole thing to Watson. He puts some seeds in an envelope and addresses it to a ship. (A ship. Let that one roll around in your head for a minute or two.) But Sherlock Holmes does nothing to confirm his theory. We have no criminal apprehended and then confessing his full story. No Inspector Lestrade appears to follow up on things.

All we have is a theoretical deduction by Mr. Sherlock Holmes that seems to satisfy him enough that he can put the tragic failure out of his mind. Apparently Watson must have eventually asked him about the matter later, at which time Holmes fed him that shipwreck story, but this was a period when Watson had left Holmes for a wife. And Holmes is moody even when Watson has come to stay for a bit. I always hate to suggest drug use, but this is not our best period for trusting everything Holmes says.

Like I said, this one is hard to write.

So if Sherlock Holmes didn't solve "The Five Orange Pips," it seems incumbent upon those of us that follow him to make up for that deficiency. Summer is pretty much here and we all need a summer project or two, so why not solve "The Five Orange Pips?'

Stay tuned.

So let's talk one-gender-only events . . .

So apparently there's outrage now over "women-only" screenings of a movie that will be readily available everywhere at the same time? And about a movie that features an island of only women, at that? I really have to laugh.

Now, I'm sure there is some clever lad out there who's going to go straight for the "Gee, Brad, you were always against men-only Sherlockian functions. You have to be against those women-only screenings, right? Otherwise, you're a h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e."

Two concepts, here, straw man I just created. First, situations that have a similarity are not necessarily the same. And second, have you ever heard of the concept of "punching up?" And a free, bonus third thought: That "hypocrite" label is the sort of ad hominum argument you use when you've got no actual arguments on your side so you just go directly for discrediting the opponent.

In a world where men are still doing actual physical damage to women with no equal and opposite reaction, I think the male ego can stand the iddy-bitty slap that is a female-only movie showing. And it's not even intended as a slap . . . it's an act of bonding and empowering at a time when it is sorely needed.

No all-male Sherlockian society ever met to celebrate masculinity during a time when female leaders were controlling the government and ignoring the needs of half of humanity.

I know, I know, social media is all about the outrage. Somebody somewhere we don't know starts saying something totally stupid, possibly in their own outrage, then comes the counter-outrage, and etc., etc., and why can't we just go back to the sixties, when a handful of college girls politely protested in the cold outside a big men-only Sherlockian dinner in New York City. There was no outrage then. Just a letter delivered upstairs by friendly male emissaries that was promptly torn up by the man in charge. And then, thirty years later, things changed when a man decided they should.

A man still decides what women get to come to that Big Sherlockian Ingestion. It's a fine point, but here's the thing: There's still a lot of issues between the genders we're still working out. Parity has yet to be achieved. Points still need to be made, discussions still need to be had, and a women-only screening, along with the outrage that follows, moves that discussion along.

There's a quote from the Canon that we definitely have to use this week as the new Wonder Woman movie premieres. It's almost t-shirt worthy, taken from its "Thor Bridge" context and given a Wonder Woman spin, so that's what I'm going to close this little rant with.

". . . and the heat of the Amazon was in her blood."

That, is not always a bad thing. Not bad at all.

There are soundtracks and then there are soundtracks.

After you've been collecting Sherlock Holmes memorabilia for about forty years, there are times when it's almost like walking through an antique store in a distant city. Unless you've had reason to revisit every item time and again, there are things that turn up that need to be experienced or researched to recall just what it is you have.

Last night's re-org work brought me into a stack of record albums I don't think I'd flipped through for well over a decade. Since I don't keep my Sherlock Holmes records with the other old records that do occasionally get some play, this particular stack was always moved en masse, without really considering what lay in the middle.

The stack has its more unusual records, like the music to A Study in Terror or an audio comic book where Batman meets Sherlock, but the thing that caught my eye was the three-record box containing "ORIGINAL MOVIE SOUNDTRACK -- SHERLOCK HOLMES -- THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES & THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES" from Murray Hill records.

I didn't remember having records of the music from those first Rathbone movies, so I took them down to the stereo to give the "Adventures" a listen. And I found that I don't have records of the music from those films.

The soundtrack records that Murray Hill put out are actual recordings of someone running the original Fox films and just picking up all the audio. Think of what the sound from an old-school, projected-from-film movie sounds like and add all the minute pops and crackles of playing that from a vinyl record -- there's an audio quality level you just don't hear any more!

But back in the day, it served its purpose. I knew I wasn't going to get through this blog without using "back in the day" or "in those times" or some other Sherlockian grandpappy lingo. ("Lingo" is definitely a Sherlockian grandpappy word.) And what purpose did it serve?

The same as our cassette recordings of our favorite TV shows (or just the theme music -- I loved recording TV themes on my cassette player) . . . before streaming, before DVDs, before video cassettes, this was the way those of us not lucky enough to have a projector and copies of the film itself got to replay the movies.

And Sherlock Holmes movies do pretty well in audio-only mode, if you've seen the actual thing once or twice. Moriarty getting cleared of charges at his trial in a scene that inspired Moffat and Gatiss starts The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, followed by Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty sharing a cab back to Baker Street, which is still weird to this day. That spooky flute music by the mysterious figure who only knows one tune is quick to pop up on the soundtrack, creeping out even Moriarty's henchmen. And Nigel Bruce is still Nigel Bruce, even when you take his image away, something that made him perfect for radio.

It made me consider putting on DVDs of BBC Sherlock, just to play the audio, and one day I might. But I would definitely have to turn the screen off, cover it up, or something . . . because it that video is accompanying the audio, I know it will be just too tempting to watch. But you know . . .

Pitting our TV and movie Sherlocks against one another in audio-only competition might be an interesting experiment in itself. Which suffer most when dialogue is all that's carrying them? Which have the most interesting non-dialogue, non-music audio bits? And always . . . always . . . who has the best composers aiding their efforts? All of those factors would weigh in.

Rathbone's first films hold up pretty well, well enough that Murray Hill could once sell records of their audio tracks. I'd be curious to see who else can measure up to that challenge.