Vacationing in the Land of Despair and finding Wiggins.

If you were going to take a vacation based entirely on Conan Doyle's description of a place in his tales of Sherlock Holmes, where would you go?

Norfolk, where Sherlock spent his long summer vacation, with sunshine, fishing, duck hunting, and a select library?

A little white-washed house on the grassy headlands overlooking "the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay," as Holmes and Watson vacationed in "Devil's Foot?"

Or how about "a grim district" with the main characteristic of "barrenness, inhospitality, and misery," a veritable "land of despair?" Sound good? Just cross the western state line of Nebraska, stay south of the Yellowstone River, stay north of the Colorado River, and don't go so far as California. Hey, make it so far as Greeley, Colorado, if you don't want to work too hard at it.

It's the magical place Conan Doyle describes in the opening paragraphs to the non-Sherlock second half of A Study in Scarlet, and it's where I wind up spending a bit of vacation time due to family ties. So far, I've been able to avoid the skulking coyotes, heavy-winged buzzards, and clumsy grizzly bears Conan Doyle has populating the area.

This particular trip, as we entered this "land of despair," I used the spotty cell service to check Twitter and found that Rob Nunn had found a twin to Mycroft Holmes's "hand like the flipper of a seal" in Danny DeVito's portrayal of the grotesque Penguin of Batman Returns, using multiple photos of same to torment anyone following the discussion. As the roadside scenery turned to barren scrub, the misery Conan Doyle saw here began to coalesce like some dour gray spirit.

Follow the right road into this land Doyle painted so grimly, and you will actually come to a town called "Wiggins," named after 1840s guide and scout in these parts, Oliver Wiggins, who helped set the trails that John Ferrier and his Mormon rescuers would take a few years later.

This brings up the thought that "Wiggins" of Sherlock Holmes's Baker Street Irregulars might not have been named Wiggins from birth at all. Given the exploring Wiggins that came before, Sherlock could have nicknamed his favorite urban scout "Wiggins" after Oliver P. Wiggins.

This thought was much cheerier to me than Mycroft having freakish Tim-Burton-movie hands, and coming upon Wiggins did a little bit to lighten this land Conan Doyle (or his friend Watson) visualized as such a depressing country.

Now if I can just make it through tomorrow without Rob Nunn posting pictures of Danny DeVito playing someone named "Wiggins" with foul prosthetic make-up.

(On a BBC Sherlock note, as Wiggins is now in a state of dispensaries for a certain herb, the town could easily start using the BBC guy as their new mascot.)

Waking up in a different timeline.

This morning began one of those days that you know is going to be a little different. Wake up slightly disoriented in a hotel bed, look at the usual social media suspects to find that spiritualist churches such as Conan Doyle championed still exist. Then see a commercial for The Baker Street Journal where a woman is typing her important Sherlockian paper on a manual typewriter. Manual! Not even an IBM Selectric!

And as it's the last day of August, I know the annual John H. Watson Society Treasure Hunt is winding up and think, "Did I stray into this oddly retro dimension because I didn't take that test this year?"

Waking-up brain is always a little more free-flowing than fully-awake brain. And it thinks about Mycroft Holmes's hands a lot.

Watson wrote that Mycroft had "a broad, flat hand, like the flipper of a seal." How does a person get a hand like that? We are to presume it is somehow tied to Mycroft's obesity, but it's flat, not fat. Was it that way Mycroft held it, with all the fingers tightly closed together? Is it more of a psychological indicator than a physiological one? Did Mycroft clap his hands together and make a honking bark before proffering it to Watson for a shake, mocking John as Sherlock's trained seal?

The Sherlockian mind is trained by Sherlock himself to go deep on the details, and that seal hand of Mycroft's is a detail one could definitely go deep on. (And then type it up on a manual typewriter to send to The Baker Street Journal.)

But I am just waking up and things still have yet to settle in my morning brain. It's also the last day of August, which makes me feel like I should make a reference to Brittany Cavallaro's The Last of August. Such a good title, and a reference to a character who gets a bit of two different Canonical villains in his name.

If all this is a bit rambling, it is probably because I'm on the road to a place whose blog-post is being held back a little longer, as it's a place Conan Doyle did no favors for as a tourist destination. But more to come . . . .

"It's not for you."

Modern decor doesn't feature framed needlework quotes hung on the wall so much any more, but if it did, there is one stated truth I think I would have to hang: "It's not for you."

The saying hasn't been around all that long, as I don't think it was necessary fifty years ago. Or maybe it was, we just were trying to get past some bigger issues back then and didn't have extra time to fine-tune. But, as the internet gave all of us a broadcast platform, even if it was just our Facebook feed, and pundit/critic licenses suddenly came with birth certificates, those words became a very necessary reflection.

It's not for you.

And, boy, does that apply to the hobby of Sherlockiana.

You see, we only have these sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes. And people are living a very long time now. As a Sherlockian about to hit sixty who came to the hobby in college, I've got over forty years in this field of focus now, which means I've looked at those same stories way too many damn times. Yes, yes, evergreen prose, blah, blah, blah, but come on now . . . nothing is that magical.

At this point, listening to a new Sherlockian podcast or reading some new article that spends half its time going down a path I've been down literally hundreds of times before, my first thought has to be "It's not for you." Because it's not.

This is the trap of becoming an elder Sherlockian: Thinking you're the same person you were when you started. Thinking your happy memories from the 1970s can be entirely useful to a Sherlockian minted in the 2010s. Thinking your boredom should be everyone's boredom.

I don't review things that much in this blog because I don't have the ability to any more. This morning, for example, I sampled a Sherlockian entertainment that I really wanted to like but it was just too same-old, same-old . . . for me. To someone who just joined the club last year, it would have been great. But to someone with hundreds of Holmes books already on their shelves? Been there, done that, done that in the winter, done that in the spring, done that on the Fourth of July . . . .

When we hear the phrase "It's not for you" we're so often talking about gender perspectives, cultural perspectives, generational perspectives, etc., but the biggest difference that sneaks up on us all over time is just the "having been at this a while" versus "excitement of the new" perspective. Our love of the idea of something can last a lifetime, like a movie that brought us great joy upon first viewing. But actually enjoying that thing itself repeatedly?

Nostalgia only goes so far. It's why new adaptations of older stories take their worst beatings from the diehard fans. You can't recapture your youth or your first time, no matter how much you'd like to, and the best you can do at some point is just to enjoy watching the new kids have their own first time moments and all the crazy fallout that first infatuation brings with it.

Because, like that saying goes, at some point it's not for you any more at all. It's for those who come next.

Did Sherlock Holmes collect trophies?

During last night's look at "The Speckled Band," I noticed something odd about the corpse Sherlock Holmes discovers.

"Beside this table, on the wooden chair, sat Dr. Grimesby Roylott, clad in a long gray dressing-gown, his bare ankles protruding beneath, and his feet thrust into red heelless Turkish slippers."

Outside of A Study in Scarlet, "The Speckled Band" is the earliest occurring recorded case of Sherlock Holmes that we know of, coming before all the others. And it has certain details that we see repeated, which some might say are part of an author going back to the same creative trough, out of habit or laziness. That is, if you're taking the train of thought that an author was behind all of this . . . .

If you're taking Watson's memory for detail as Canon, however, the occasional familiar bit may make you go, "Hey, wait a minute . . ." as that line above did with me this time out.

Grimesby Roylott has a long gray dressing-gown.

Sherlock Holmes had a long gray dressing-gown. Watson just called it "mouse-coloured" when Holmes dresses his wax dummy in it in "The Empty House."

Grimesby Roylott has Turkish slippers.

Sherlock Holmes has Persian slippers. Given that Persia, a.k.a. Iran, and Turkey share a common border, these are pretty much the same kind of slippers. And yes, I refer to "a" Persian slipper that Holmes kept his tobacco in, mentioned in "The Musgrave Ritual." As well as "the Persian slipper" he offers Watson tobacco from in "The Naval Treaty." Plainly, a pair of Persian slippers. How can I be so certain of this? Well, as Watson showed preferences for ship's and later an Arcadia mixture, it should be plain enough that one slipper had Holmes's tobacco of choice and the other held a supply for visits by Watson.

But I digress.

The point I'm trying to make here is that Grimesby Roylott's personal effects seem like they might have wound up in Sherlock Holmes's sitting room. We know Holmes saved a sovereign to remember Irene Adler by, and coins from the treasure chest the Musgrave ritual led to . . . he did like his souvenirs. Did he take one in every case he worked on?

"Our chambers were full of criminal relics," Watson wrote in that same "Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual."  But are we to think that Holmes might have even robbed a corpse of a decent pair of slippers and a dressing gown in his little obsession with criminal relics? Well, the man was extremely comfortable in dealing with bodies in his work. And in 1883, a younger Holmes working apart from the police on a case like he was in the Roylott matter, a case where he wasn't going to make much money, the line between "crime scene" and "yard sale" might not have been as solid as on some other occasions.

It's definitely something worth considering. And maybe time we looked around 221B Baker Street for a few other "freebies" that came as returns on Sherlock Holmes's "invest"-igations.

You never know.

The man who was as odd as his snake.

Sherlockian studies have been shifting gears of late, with fan fiction pointing its magnifying lens on the relationships of the Canon. And nowhere is a gear shift  more needed than when we look at "The Speckled Band," as Peoria's local Sherlockian study group did this week.

So much of our considerations of that case have been over the way the *BARELY NEEDED SPOILER ALERT* snake doesn't make any sense. It hears whistles. It drinks milk. It climbs a rope. It has an unprecedentedly fast-acting poison. But with that speckled distraction out front, we never really look hard at the fellow behind the snake and how he makes no sense.

Grimesby Roylott is like something out of a comic book or a cartoon. He beats up everybody in the nearby small town. He bends fireplace pokers. And he tries to kill someone completely under his power through an absurdly complicated method that gives them a chance to escape.

I mean, think about it: Why doesn't Grimesby just take a pillow and smother his step-daughter?

The snake scheme is supposedly there because it kills without marks (if no one notices the fang puncture wounds), but that effect isn't all that hard to produce in a murder. Especially for someone who was an experienced medical man, which Grimesby Roylott was.

The isolated manor house he and his victim lived in only had one other occupant, as reported by Roylott's intended victim: "We have a housekeeper now, but she is old and foolish, and I could easily get her out of the way." That's the victim tallking, so a true villain is going to have no probably manipulating that one potential witness.

Grimesby Roylott is one of those fellows portrayed as such a definite villain that we never really try to understand where he came from or why he did the things he did. Why the violent rages? Why the time spent with the gypsies? Why the spare little bedroom furnishings? Why not take up some form of medical practice so far from his criminal record as to render it moot? He is characterized so much like Bluto from the Popeye cartoons that he might as well tie Helen to a railroad track and require Sherlock Holmes to smoke three pipefuls, swell up his biceps, and punch Grimesby into the stratosphere.

It's a pity Roylott didn't make it more heavily into BBC Sherlock so that he could get more exploration and character development in fan fiction, like Sebastian Moran (who wasn't shown in the show, yet is so tied to Moriarty that he benefited greatly). But we have many a Sherlockian decade ahead of us, so who knows? Somebody just might make sense of him one of these days.

Because people are much more interesting than snakes. Holmes and Watson's friend Stamford knew that well, quoting Pope's "The proper study of mankind is man" in his brief time on the Canonical stage. But Stamford is another guy with depths that could be more fully explored, so I'd best not get started on him here . . . Grimesby Roylott, though! What was going on there?

History isn't always all it's cracked up to be.

History is a funny, funny thing.

Sherlockians have long done research to find Sherlock Holmes's place in history . . . "the Game," as it is sometimes called. We have to call it a game, because sometimes the too-literal, simpler folk fear we are promoting some sort of revisionism to bring what we are all certain is a fictional character into the history books. And, perhaps, denying Conan Doyle his due. Though I'm sure Conan Doyle would be even more famous were we to suddenly discover that Holmes was real and he kept the secret from us all this time.

You never know. Because, like I said, history is a funny, funny thing.

Looking at what I've experienced of the world, Sherlockian and non, and what history is liable to record of those events, it seems very possible that Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson could have existed out there in the cracks somewhere.

History favors the wealthy and powerful, and if anyone had a reason to quash that there was ever any truth to certain points in the Sherlock Holmes stories, it would have been the wealthy and powerful. I live in a city whose own history has been whitewashed more than a bit . . . a wide-open town of all sorts of vices like Peoria once was has its share of family wealth passed down from illegitimate sources. Heck, my favorite local church even took money from the rackets once upon a time, and it wasn't alone in that.

History has so many little hidden gems that die with its participants. Things done for love unspoken, no-talents coming to the fore out of sheer resolve (which is a talent in itself, I guess) to stand in place of genius, incredible moments that never passed beyond word of mouth before all the mouths passed away. There are not only cracks in history, but gaps, gullies, and great gaping voids.

Plenty big enough for 221B Baker Street and all its occupants.

With all of the wicked little conspiracy theories out there, aimed at tearing down or discrediting, what would it hurt to slip a more positive one named Sherlock Holmes into the mix? True, Sherlock is every bit as real as Russell's teapot, evidence-wise, but hey, if you have to go down a rabbit hole of crazy, at least we have clubs and cons with some very charming people who will still hang out with you if you do.

So make a little history. Whether it has you or Sherlock Holmes in in, someone will enjoy it, I'm sure.

A rare moment for Sherlockians to gather,

Well, I'm now one up on Alec MacDonald.

Sure, Inspector MacDonald got to meet Sherlock Holmes, John H. Watson, and Professor Moriarty. I don't see myself ever being able to check that box. But I did get to see a total eclipse of the sun, which it is very, very, very unlikely that MacDonald did. I know this, because Janet Bensley, the new "Waxen Image" (vice-president) of the Occupants of the Empty House, explained those possibilities in detail as the moon started to move in front of the sun today.

A great migration of Americans headed down, up, or sideways to see the total eclipse today -- a fact that became frighteningly clear when they all decided to go home at once, or so it seemed. But even with something as once-in-a-lifetime as a solar event like that, it is vastly improved by doing it among Sherlockians at their old home base.

The Occupants of the Empty House, Southern Illinois's regional Sherlockian society -- a special rare thing as no major city can lay claim to it -- have been gathering at Alongi's restaurant in DuQuoin, Illinois for a very long time now, and the owners and staff know them well. So it was a very happy arrangement that allowed the Occupants to take use both the banquet room and the patio for a few hours today to have lunch in comfortable air conditioning on a hot and humid day, then step out on the patio as they liked to take in the eclipse.

We debated Moriarty's place as top villain in the Canon -- and voted he was not, based on a case I pleaded for another, whom you will hear about another day. But Moriarty's eclipse by another was just part of the fun. I took some pins and cards so we could make pinhole eclipse projectors in a "patriotic V.R." or other Sherlockian pattern of choice. Bottles of eclipse wine were both opened and auctioned, and a general camaraderie of everyone there just made the special moment in time all the better.

A "V.R." of eclipses.

Occupants and friends viewing the oncoming totality.

When the "diamond ring" first appeared as the sun blotted the moon, the temperature had already cooled noticeably, the streetlights came up, the cicadas and crickets sang, a weird 360 degree dusk took over the world, and there we were. The Occupants of the Empty House became the Occupants of the Empty Sun for a couple brief minutes.

Sherlockians have an ability to make anything be about Sherlock Holmes, even though this was kind of an easy one, as Professor Moriarty did explain eclipses to Alec MacDonald using a globe and a lantern. (Which was good, as MacDonald surely never saw a complete one in person.) Following Sherlock Holmes is a hobby that will take you places you might never have otherwise gone, or appreciated nearly so well when you got there, and today was definitely one of those days for me.

And, as weary as I now am after the long journey home, I still have to give Holmes a big "Hoo-RAH!" for that.