Nor bury, nor wood.

The introduction to "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" is a little different. Remember the start of "A Scandal in Bohemia," when Dr. Watson goes on and on about Irene Adler, a remarkable character we'll meet in that story?  We get very used to all the introductions where Watson goes on and on about Sherlock Holmes later in the series, but Irene was first. Irene was special.

And outside of Sherlock Holmes, we don't get a Watsonian emphasis on anyone other than Irene at the start of a story, as the word limit of these short stories demands such a start means said person needs to be a very important part of that story. Which brings us back to "Norwood Builder."

In the opening to "Norwood Builder," we learn more about Professor Moriarty than any other story outside of "The Final Problem" and The Valley of Fear, both of which directly involved Moriarty's plottings and Holmes dealing with him.

"Petty thefts, wanton assaults, purposeless outrage -- to the man who held the clue, all could be worked into one connected whole."

"The faintest indication." "The smallest trace." Sherlock Holmes speaks of how subtle Moriarty could be in his machinations. That "purposeless outrage" as a tool of the criminal mind is something we're all becoming more aware of now, in 2019, but Moriarty was a century ahead of his time even in that. And while it was Sherlock Holmes who tells us the most about Moriarty in "The Norwood Builder," it is Watson who decided those words needed to be in the beginning of the tale, even though it is completely unrelated to John Hector McFarlane showing up out of the blue.

So why Moriarty? Did Watson just want to use Moriarty's name to gin up interest in a mediocre story to follow? Except "Norwood Builder" isn't exactly a mediocre story. It's a tale of . . .  [Okay, serious question . . . do we even do spoiler alerts at this point? Or do we just decide the freshness date of a given reveal and decide for ourselves? Anyway, back to Norwood.] it's a tale of a man who fakes his own death.

Let's repeat that, since I went off on that tangent: "Norwood Builder," which begins with the rare praise of Moriarty's remarkable abilities, is a tale of a man who fakes his own death.

Professor Moriarty is well known to be dead, thanks to John H. Watson and The Strand Magazine. And, according to Watson, when Holmes brings up London being more interesting with Moriarty around, the British public would much rather Moriarty remain dead.  If a man like Moriarty turned out to have faked his own death, and Sherlock Holmes could remove him from play a second time without the public's knowledge . . . and subsequent mistrust of any fact from Watson, Scotland Yard, or the public press . . . might Holmes not just go ahead and quietly remove the professor a second time?

Curious thing isn't it? Makes one wonder. Needs a little discussion.

Luckily, the Sherlock Holmes Story Society is having its monthly meeting at the North Branch Peoria Library tomorrow night at 6:30, and the story under discussion? "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder."

Podcast time!

I always blog a little less when a certain Peoria-based podcast is being produced. It's one more of those little points that always raising the question, why do so many people feel the need to do a podcast? There are an insane number of podcasts out there, all sharing the limited ear-time of the limited number of folks who have decided podcasts are a thing to listen to.

People have many motives for doing podcasts, but most probably also do it for one very basic reason: It's a broadcast medium that isn't hard to gain entry to. You don't have to join a network, be photogenic, have massive resources, or even that much skill. You don't have to be a talented writer if you've got a little personality or depth of thought. And the range of possibilities for podcasting is so very wide open.

I was really hit hard by this yesterday as I listened to Ron Burgundy talking to Deepak Choprah on a podcast. The former, if you don't know him, is a fictional news anchorman that Will Ferrell loves portraying at any given opportunity. The latter is a real person. So when an actor well known for playing Sherlock Holmes (at least this January) started crossing that fictional/factual line, my immediate thought was, of course, "Why doesn't Sherlock Holmes have a podcast?"

I was told there is fanfic of Sherlock being a podcaster, but like Barbie, fanfic Sherlock seems to do every job. I want to hear the actual voice of Sherlock Holmes doing an ongoing podcast, commenting on the world, interviewing real people, coming out on a regular basis that one can listen to like morning radio. (Which is how I take in most of my podcasts.)

Think about this: whoever played Sherlock Holmes on a podcast, as with radio, doesn't even have to look like him. Just get the voice close. (And if the accent on recent Sherlock or three is any indication, not even get the accent right for American audiences.)

The hardest thing about Sherlock Holmes doing a podcast would be for the producers to keep the cleverness level up, because a dullard Sherlock would be just . . . well, we've seen enough dullard Sherlocks trying to solve mysteries in pastiches over the years, and the first rule for any Sherlock Holmes is that he has to seem smarter than the reader/listener. And even faking smart can be a very hard thing for some. (Insert political comment here.)

But now that I've had the thought of Sherlock Holmes doing a podcast, and seen that the likes of Ron Burgundy can do it, I have a new item on my Christmas/bucket/wish list: I really want to hear Sherlock Holmes podcasting. It's way beyond my own meager podcast skillset, but surely someone out there has the skills to pull it off.

And I hope they do.

P.S. I hope John Watson is on the podcast, too!

Conan Doyle, as a baby boomer and science denier?

Here's a question that treads upon all sorts of dangerous ground: If Conan Doyle were alive today, would he be a celebrity anti-vaxxer? How would he feel about climate change?

The answers are impossible to make with any certainty. T'were Conan Doyle born in 1959 instead of 1859, and a Baby Boomer at that, he would not have come out nearly the same man he was back in the day. The whaling adventures would have been off his resume, and his medical training would have been a very different thing. We would hope he would still be a doctor and writer, and not a child who succumbed to watching Gilligan's Island incessantly at a young age.

So why do I pose this question?

In looking for some entirely different information, I came upon a couple of lines from Doyle at the end of the sixth chapter of Daniel Stashower's Teller of Tales:

"For what is science? Science is the consensus of opinion of scientific men, and history has shown it to be slow to accept a truth. Science sneered at Newton for twenty years. Science proved mathematically that an iron ship could not swim, and science declared that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic."

Admittedly, these are the words of a narrator whose sole purpose is to convey a certain feeling in the reader at the story's end, empowering the mystic threats of faraway lands. They are the words of a character Conan Doyle created, just like John Watson, Charles Augustus Milverton, etc., and as Conan Doyle himself wrote in "To An Undiscerning Critic," "The doll and its maker are never identical."

But as Stashower used those lines to lead into the subject of Doyle's transition to spiritualist beliefs, that context does leave one to wonder.  But there are a great many aspects to Conan Doyle's personality that make one wonder what he would be like as a contemporary. Leaving spiritualism and fairies behind,  trying to guess what form Conan Doyle's socially active nature would take, what causes he would champion, what investments he would have poured his profits into . . . this was not an easy man to predict, even in his own time.

A Conan Doyle born in 1989 would be far different from even the same man born in 1959, and a Conan Doyle who could take selfies by age eight? Who knows where that kid would be headed?

It makes interesting dinner conversation, if nothing more. Each of us can only attempt to live our best lives in the era we're born into, and we have to trust that Conan Doyle did that very thing. The celebrity gossip machines of our current era, however, would surely have love that guy whichever direction he went.

"Holmes and Watson" wins a "Lazzie" award

Walp, it's awards weekend, and bad comedy is in full bloom. Whether it's the badly-read cue card jokes of Oscar presenters or the announcement of the Golden Raspberry awards by some ex-UCLA film students. And the latter, known as the "Razzies," for short have targeted our friends Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson this year.

More specifically, the Razzies named the Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly comedy Holmes and Watson as their "Worst Picture of the Year," along with calling John C. Reilly "Worst Supporting Actor," director Etan Cohen "Worst Director," and giving the movie "Worst Remake, Rip-off, or Sequel."  The only reason Will Ferrell probably didn't get the win for "Worst Actor" was that he was up against Donald Trump, and Trump-hatred understandably trumps everything right now, even in parody awards.

Some Sherlockians will surely agree with the Razzies, but some Sherlockians don't go to the movies all that often, and don't really have a complete view of what movies appeared in theaters throughout all of 2018. To say that Holmes and Watson, a to-your-tastes comedy that only showed up in the last six days of 2018, was the worst movie of that entire year is plainly a symptom of either no long-term memory, strong anti-Ferrell bias, or both. 2018 had some really awful movies in it.

Looking at various top ten "worst" lists for the year, one sees some very different results. WatchMojo gave Sherlock Gnomes a dishonourable mention, but ignored Holmes and Watson. The Rolling Stone completely ignored both Sherlockian movies and only put one comedy on its list, The Happytime Murders, which made a lot of lists, and actually made this Sherlockian walk out of the theater for sheer boredom and the chance to spend the remaining minutes doing something more entertaining like shopping for groceries. Time ignored Holmes and Watson. CBS News placed Sherlock Gnomes at 29th worst movie of 2018 in a list of sixty-one bad movies that didn't include Holmes and Watson. And IMDB even made Sherlock Gnomes its 19th worst movie of 2018 in its list of ONE HUNDRED MOVIES, and ignored Holmes and Watson.

The Golden Raspberry people plainly jumped on an internet bandwagon at year end, as they attempted to come up with the most click-baitable nominations to get attention, rather than fully considering the year's full menu of bad films. If one were to hand out a "Lazzie" award for laziness in award-giving, they would surely be nominated.

All this does bring up a burning Sherlockian question, however, once one considers such 2018 classics of badness like Uncle Drew, Gotti, and A-X-L: Was Sherlock Gnomes quietly the actual worst Sherlock Holmes film of 2018, overcome by the volume of the Holmes and Watson lynch mobs? I certainly don't think I could have sat through it six times in a few weeks and had as joyous a time as I did with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. (And, just so I don't miss this point: Calling an American treasure like John C. Reilly "worst anything" is just sheer foolishness.)

Still, any year with two theatrically-released Sherlock Holmes movies in it is still a banner year for Sherlock Holmes fans, no matter what the final judgment on those films winds up being. And for that, I'll give 2018 Sherlockian cinema a big thumbs-up.

The Sherlock Holmes part of your identity

There's a viral sort of ailment that has reached epidemic proportions of late, and interestingly, one that Sherlockians have carried longer than almost anyone. It's there in the word "Sherlockian," so we can't even come close to denying it. The ailment? Attaching one's self to a product or other commercial entity so closely that it becomes a part of one's identity.

Okay, okay, one immediate argument against that statement would be "but Sherlock Holmes is not a commercial entity, he's a literary one." If one happened to save the receipts on all the money one spent based on one's love of Holmes last year, that defense goes right out the window. And Conan Doyle got paid, The Strand Magazine got paid, even Columbia Pictures and the other producers of that beloved film Holmes and Watson got paid . . . something.

But what's the harm in letting such things become a part of one's identity? Hobbies bring us pleasure, right? And fandoms bring us community, right? Good things!

The danger comes when one cedes any part of one's identity to an entity completely outside one's control. Take the fanboy attacks on any major film franchise that goes a direction said fanboy doesn't like. It isn't just that our example fanboy didn't like the turn a new movie in his fave franchise took. It's that the turn involved felt like an attack on his identity, that part of him built around the tropes and original elements of an earlier part of that work. And out comes that crazy-looking rage and ridiculous statements like "They ruined my childhood!" or "Anyone who likes this isn't a valid human being!"

When the battle over character rights started freeing up Sherlock Holmes, many a Sherlockian felt a sense of relief for just this reason. No corporate entity would have the potential to command Sherlock's story to their choosing. Yet even at that point, Sherlockians had developed a certain immunity toward the pains that come when one makes an external creation a part of one's identity. So many Sherlocks have come and gone over the last century or so that no single Sherlock Holmes, not even the one in Doyle's sixty stories, commands complete control over what any of us feels Sherlock Holmes is. Ideally, we can headcanon Sherlock all day long and not feel too threatened by any other variation, because we should have been inoculated by a thousand other Sherlocks over time.

But that's not always the case.

Newer Sherlockians may not immediately have this immunity. Season four of BBC Sherlock hit hard because, despite all of fanfic's beautiful variety, it was a painful hit to versions of Sherlock internalized from previous seasons. Older Sherlockians aren't automatically immune either -- and often the worst ragers of all when a new Holmes dents the view of Sherlock Holmes they've made a part of their identity. (Have I lost my anti-Elementary reputation yet? Surely not, because I still could go off at any minute, even though the therapy seems to be working.) Any time a person confines themselves to a strict diet of one kind of Sherlock over the years, or even just a personal views that they've built up over time, they are also going to feel very vulnerable when Sherlock Holmes starts doing something he never did in their identity-221B.

The slogan "All Sherlock is good Sherlock" might seem a little naive at first, but at least attempting it as a credo is like getting an annual flu shot so your body can adjust itself to viruses it might encounter down the line, so you don't spike a fever of outrage when an unexpected and unwanted Sherlock comes along. You can go into a little quarantine group of folks who adhere to exactly your identity's Sherlock Holmes and try to hold out as long as you can, tucked away from the world, but that just does not seem like a healthy strategy. Eventually, we all have to leave the house.

Because there are some really good Sherlock Holmes bits out there. Really good. Good enough that we can't help making them a part of our inner and outer lives. We just have to be prepared for the inevitable infection of those other Sherlocks, Sherlocks we might be allergic to, and the carriers of those Sherlocks, who could be pretty nice people.

Starting with The Sign of the Four

You'll have to forgive me as I blunder through this particular blog post. The subjects involved just make me a little stupid with their looks, a failing many of us have.

We come to Sherlock Holmes via many different doors. And this week, a Sherlockian of note pointed out another one, even though his focus was on something fascinatingly non-Sherlock, yet totally a part of what made Sherlock Holmes what he was.

I'm speaking, of course, of the second episode of Mattias Boström's podcast Talk About Sherlock. I'll let you discover the fresh insights Mattias has to offer on your own, but suffice it to say that it sent me digging through my own little collection of ancient volumes, looking at title pages, dates, etc. with new eyes. One particular little volume I'd forgotten about caught my attention, a pretty little edition of Sign of the Four, as the cover reads.

Which, it turns out, wasn't even the edition I wanted to write about. But I have to show you anyway, so you can see how this might not be my best attempt at writing a blog. Anyway, there was this other attractive little number.

Inside the front cover is Mrs. W. Miller's name, along with some initials, and a date of Xmas '94.

After listening to Talk About Sherlock, I came to muse upon how many Americans may have actually started their reading of the Sherlockian Canon with The Sign of the Four and not A Study in Scarlet or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. There was that period of time, in the early nineties, when one was very apt to just discover that single book, The Sign of the Four, without realizing that Sherlock Holmes had already appeared in another novel, or that short stories of the detective were being published in periodicals. Matching sets of Sherlock Holmes books were not as common as they would later become, and the character Sherlock Holmes? A fellow in "a" book, to so many who encountered him. Yes, Mrs. W. Miller's book was given to her in 1894, after Holmes was starting to bloom and boom, but could Mrs. W. Miller have been one of those folks who came to Sherlock as a character in The Sign of the Four first?

To my mind she had to be.

But, as with all minds, we are often given to cherished non-proven theories before all the facts are in, and, apparently, I once organized my books by title. A little further into my library dig I discovered this:

What? Had Mrs. W. Miller been given a set of Holmes books in 1894 after all? Well, not entirely ...

It looks like A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four were a "couples" gift. Mr. W. Miller got the first book of Holmes, while Mrs. W. Miller got the second. Since I probably picked up both books at the same place, the chance that they were split up in a divorce settlement isn't very likely.  But did the Millers know that there was an order to the books? Or did they sit down one evening a couple days after "Xmas" and each start reading their own gift ... in which case Mrs. Miller did read The Sign of the Four first. And what an interesting conversation that would have been between the Millers, with one meeting Holmes in STUD and one meeting him in SIGN, simultaneously. I'd have loved to be a fly on that wall, back in the day before anyone's knee-jerk reaction was to scream "SPOILERS!" and shut down a conversation to protect their own novel virginity.

It's hard to imagine just what encountering Sherlock Holmes was truly like in the early 1890s, but I'm very appreciative of Mattias Boström's latest musings upon Holmes and the lights it shined on that era. Now I finally understand why I have this stack of what I thought was a minor Doyle novel called Micah Clarke. (If a keen eye spots the Longmans in the stack, that's something like the eleventh edition from the four years following 1889.)

Tiger-men of the Canon

It would seem that Victorian London . . . and maybe the world . . . was once populated by tiger-men.

One need only look to the evidences of the Watsonian record to see that it must be so. San Pedro had a tiger of a man ruling it for twelve hard years. A ferocious youth named Tiger Cormac prowled the mining country of Pennsylvania. Yet less obvious are those fellows with the tiger-spring in their legs. Jack McMurdo, Philip Green, and, of course, Sherlock Holmes.

That later set of tiger-men serve the side of good, and at least two of them bring out their tiger-springs due to caring for a woman. The other for the love of a friend, and also for justice, as do all three, really. The latter of those tiger-man even uses his tiger ability to take down another whom he recognizes as a tiger-man . . . perhaps a case of the younger, stronger cat taking down an old rival.

"The empty house is my tree and you are my tiger," Sherlock Holmes said to Sebastian Moran after leaping upon him like a tiger himself. Moran is a known killer of tigers, it is true, but we see the tiger-man metaphor used so much in the Canon of Holmes that one has to wonder if Moran's prey weren't fully bestial at all. When he's caught in "The Empty House," he's stalked and killed at least one two-legged prey and is attempting to take down another.

John Watson, whose military career met setback after setback in the land of tigers seemed to connect himself more with the tiger cub than the fully grown version of the beast, and when Sherlock Holmes quotes "There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub . . ." one must wonder if he is musing upon Watson's departure from Baker Street. The second part of the quote, ". . . and danger also for whoso snatches delusion from a woman," might be Holmes cautioning himself against revealing some truth to the woman who took Watson from Baker Street, and nothing to do with Miss Mary Sutherland at all.

Watson is well aware of the tiger-men of England, as he lets on in his write-up of their night-time vigil in "The Adventure of Black Peter."

"What savage creature what is which might steal upon us out of the darkness? Was it a fierce tiger of crime, which could only be taken fighting hard with flashing fang and claw . . . ."

Does Watson see himself with those fangs and claws, or is it his companion, the man he has already spoken of as a tiger, knowing that Sherlock Holmes is the alpha tiger in whatever may come?

The use of men described as tigers in the Canon of Holmes happens enough that it is no mere happenstance. And the tiger-man who appears most often is easy to see -- he's the star of the show, as such a tiger should be. It makes for an interesting meditation, as we don't see nearly so many of that sort these days. Being a tiger-man probably isn't the most conducive thing to having tiger-babies, as a quick survey of the Canon will also tell you.

But at least we have some prose evidence that they did once exist.