Going back to when Watson didn't know things

Out of the ten people who met to discuss the first three chapters of A Study in Scarlet at our local library group (the Sherlock Holmes Story Society) tonight, a full 30% of them had read Boccaccio's Decameron, the book the corpse had in its pocket. I was very impressed. As a long-time Sherlockian collector, I own a copy, but as a lazy intellect, I can't say that I've read it. (But I read every page of Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, so don't write me off completely.)

In any case, it was a great discussion tonight, as ever, and one of the earliest points made was an observation by Mark of the similarity of some of the writing in chapter two of A Study in Scarlet to that of Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," pointing out that chapters one and three had slightly  different styles. It made me wonder if, perhaps, Doyle being inspired by Poe's tale, had put some of chapter two down before he had written chapter one.

Doyle's writing also came up in the question of whether he had an editor -- a point I don't think I've ever heard brought up before. Having seen manuscript facsimile's and their closeness to the printed text, we can safely say that Doyle pretty much had it down, and didn't need much help. (Which is also where is little issues with that wandering wound and Watson's married life come up.)

I was shocked to learn that Inspector Gregson appears a lot more times in the Canon than I remember him appearing. (We all like Lestrade better anyway, don't we?) But over all, the opening chapters of A Study in Scarlet being some of my favorite parts of the Canon, I just luxuriated in every part of the night's discussion.

Most of us come to Sherlock Holmes at some point other than when Watson does, and get to come back and read those first words with the joy of knowing how great Watson's life is going to get. The little mysteries of the new room-mate may have Watson wondering, but we gleefully watch him try to puzzle Holmes out. Comparing it to a love story, we never really have that defining moment where Watson realizes his full admiration for this unique individual all at once, but the path is certainly there, and just the fact that Watson is writing a book about the man says something.

Other notes: There are probably more descriptions of Holmes's fingers in STUD than in any other story. When your group just does the first three chapters, there are spoilers in chapter four and beyond that some people don't know yet. (Like Mormons!)  And I completely messed up the last name of a major player in a past Watsonian Weekly episode, so get ready for a correction this week!

Getting together to discuss Sherlock Holmes is always a great time, so if you don't have a local library group, I'd recommend stating one. It might take a year or two  to really build up some steam (our first year had a couple of "iffy" months when I was worried it wouldn't take), but I'd bet it gets there eventually, just by giving folks the chance to let their enjoyment of some very enjoyable tales come out.

The Three Tales of Mr. Barker

Those boys from The Final Podblem pack so many observations into a reading of a Sherlock Holmes story that occasionally the drop a thought that makes me go, "Somebody really should pick that up!" And most times I don't make a note, or don't get time to follow up, but this week they hit a particularly choice one, so I grabbed a piece of paper and made myself a note.

As they walked through "The Empty House" this week, Nick and Casey came to Watson approaching the part of Park Lane where the murder of Ronald Adair took place. Watson sees and small crowd has gathered and writes: "A tall, thin man with coloured glasses, whom I strongly suspected of being a plain-clothes detective, was pointing out some theory of his own while the others crowded round to listen to what he said."

"It sounded to me like the gentleman dressed like Dracula from 'The Retired Colourman,'" Casey observed.

"Oh, maybe it was him!" Nick promptly agreed. This is a slightly abbreviated version of the conversation, but only slightly. I was immediately going "Wait! Detective Barker! Let's discuss!" as one does with good podcasts, at least mentally, as the hosts move on.

Let's talk about that fellow from "Retired Colourman," "my friend Mr. Barker," as Holmes calls him.
"A dark man with gray-tinted glasses and a large Masonic pin projecting from his tie," as Watson writes him, as well as an earlier description, "He was a tall, dark, heavily moustached, rather military-looking man." There's even a third use of "tall" to describe him, so he definitely fits the bill of the tall detective-seeming fellow in "Empty House."

Sherlock Holmes refers to Barker as "my hated rival upon the Surry shore," which makes one wonder if Barker didn't decide to take up Holmes's profession after Sherlock Holmes "died" in 1891, putting him in just the spot to be theorizing about the Adair murder to try to advertise his detective skills on the streets. But we needn't stop at that simple origin.

His name is Barker. He's tall. He has dark features. He's buddies with a detective. He would be keenly interested in Moriarty's demise and inspired by Holmes's sacrifice.

And that's a guy we have definitely seen before.

Cecil Barker of The Valley of Fear. Tall, with a fighter's face, strong black eyebrows and "masterful back eyes" . . . just no moustache as yet. He understood a crime scene, even then. And both Barker of The Valley of Fear and Barker of "The Retired Colourman" are described as looking "stern" as some point in each narrative. This has to be the same guy!

Checking the Annotateds, there seems to be no note of anyone going "Hey, Barker is Barker!" but probably just trusting that a.) Watson doesn't recognize Barker in "Retired Colourman," and b.) Holmes actually says, "You had not met Barker, Watson." Both points can be easily discounted because a.) It's been over ten years, Barker now has a moustache and sunglasses, and Watson didn't even remember him in "Empty House," and b.) Remember that whole thing about how Watson heard about Moriarty in The Valley of Fear and then forgot about it in "The Empty House?"  Well, if he can forget about Moriarty, he can certainly forget the face of Cecil Barker.

The full life story of Mr. Cecil Barker and his rise as a detective would make an excellent read, and I'm probably a complete fool for writing this blog post and not a novel series featuring the man. But, hey, such things take time! Feel free, anyone with the time to take up that task. I'll buy your book!

The real Sherlock Holmes test

What makes a Sherlock Holmes a Sherlock Holmes to you?

When a certain adaptation came along a while back, certain critics of said adaptation referred to it as "Sherlock Holmes in name only," a cutting critique, and one that more than a few disagreed with. But it brings us back to that question with which we approach every new Sherlock: Is he recognizable to us as Sherlock Holmes?

I was reminded of this lately when the good Carter and I disagreed over a particular Star Trek offering. One of us thought it definitely wasn't what they defined as "Star Trek," but the other accepted it as a worthy bearer of the name. The difference, as we discussed it, was in what those two words meant to each of us . . . and that was two different aspects of the same show.

As I continued thinking about it, while we tried to define what we each saw as objective reasons for our case, I realized that defining what "Star Trek" meant to me wasn't something that one could define coldly and replicate as easily as a mathematical proof. It was an emotional trigger.

And the same applies to Sherlock Holmes.

I can say "A Sherlock Holmes must be clever, he must surprise us with a solution we never saw coming, and do it with a touch of dramatic flair," as well as go on for hours with descriptions of every characteristic I hope to see in a Sherlock, but in the end, I just have to like the guy. And who knows how that chemistry works for any of us.

Jeremy Brett didn't do it for me, nor did Jonny Lee Miller. Basil Rathbone and Benedict Cumberbatch did. Peter Cook didn't. Will Ferrell did. Roger Moore didn't. Christopher Plummer "kind of" did. And when we get into odd shades of Holmes, I don't even know how Robert Stephens sold me as Holmes, but damned if he didn't pull it off. (Maybe it's just that opening monologue on how Watson has readers thinking he's different from what he is. A perfect set-up!)

In any case, as much as we all like digging into what a particular actor showed us about Sherlock Holmes, I'm now very curious as to what all those actors say about us. We now have a vast enough array of Sherlock Holmes actors that if you used every one of them on a "Yes/No" test of "Is this guy Sherlock Holmes to you?" I'd bet a sovereign that you could create a personality test with reliable results based on all the Sherlocks a person thought worked, and those that person thought didn't. (And when I say, "bet a sovereign," I'm not talking about the coin. I've got a leader I'm more than willing to lose on a bet.)

Our Sherlocks are so varied and so plentiful that one could easily work up a matrix by running some other personality factor questionnaire concurrent with a massive Sherlock favorites study. (Well, if all the subjects knew all the Sherlocks -- kind of an important factor. Probably have to show clips, and add some unknown Sherlocks just to make the test more valid.) But it could be done, in any case.

Instead of asking what makes a Sherlock Holmes to you, maybe we should be asking what makes you from your Sherlock Holmeses?

Okay, so I can't know it all. But I can keep my eyes open.

A curious new thing happened to me this morning. A Sherlockian I know posted something to several social media lists I follow, and what I saw was this:

I could pretty well deduce the causes for that post not appearing, reflecting upon my own settings and administration of social media, but it reminded me of that new part of our hobby that I've been thinking a lot about lately, the fact that we're not seeing all of Sherlockiana any more.

Did we ever see all of Sherlockiana? Well, if you want to go to absolutes, we never did. If one teenager in one small Iowa town handwrote their own story of Sherlock Holmes, and than teen never met another Sherlockian, nobody was seeing that work. But the obsessive completists and collectors of our world always pushed hard to make sure we knew it all existed. Ron DeWaal's bibliographies, Peter Blau's newsletters, The Baker Street Journal's quarterly "Baker Street Inventory," and the legion of Sherlockians who fed such efforts all prided themselves on catching everything that referenced Sherlock Holmes that they could.

Enter the internet. The search engine. The social network.

Tools that, at first, were amazing in their simplest forms. We could search the Canon Holmes for a single name and have it pop up instantly, instead of painstakingly reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes one more time just to see how many times shoelaces were used (bootlaces, as something to draw personal inferences from, in "The Yellow Face" and "A Case of Identity" -- and also Milverton's killer mentions her husband's "boots I was never worthy to lace." Wow, fancy boots!).

But eventually, as happens with all software, everything was built and rebuilt so that it was no longer in its simplest form. Behind the scenes, hidden Clippy the Paperclips started tailoring our experiences to both aid and persuade us using their arcane algorithms, and suddenly my internet search of "Sherlock Holmes" and your internet search of "Sherlock Holmes" started bringing up different results, even fighting with us at times. ("Are you sure you didn't mean the more-popular item that's spelled similarly? Here are those results!")

There are more Sherlockians than there even were, and we're starting to find ourselves splitting into denominations. It fits the pattern, as the hobby has long been likened to a religion, and we now have our Catholic church and our Protestant variations. We all choose the way we want to view Sherlock Holmes, old or young, gay or straight, Canon-copy or extrapolated fresh, and the digital majicks can create a world around us based on those choices.

Copyright law didn't manage to hold Sherlock Holmes down to a specific commercial entity, but we've seen enough to know that the next major Sherlock Holmes could have enough trademarkable variation to make that version of him a super-popular, corporate-controlled character. A large enough corporate interest deciding to work its will in promoting that character could, without our knowledge, make sure that new Sherlock Holmes is the Sherlock Holmes for a generation. Or two. Or . . . .

Here's where one could just leap, arms spread wide, into an apocalyptic fantasy of underground Sherlockians huddled around a surviving copy of the Doubleday complete, reading those original words by fire-light. But even apocalypses are rarely that simple. We'd probably have a sheltered corner of a huge landfill where some collector had dumped his library at the very least. There are always those who prefer the apocalypse, as it limits the range of things they have to think about. If the whole world just becomes five Sherlock Holmes books, hey, we can be complete again! We can see it all!

The trick, I think, to any social change, to any paradigm shift, is simple awareness. Maybe we can't ever know it all. But when we at least know there's something out there we don't know, recognize that it exists, and maybe have some idea as to the reasons for the gap, and ways to correct it if we so desire.  And what was Sherlock Holmes always about?

Being aware of what was actually going on in the world around you.

Our hero has become more pertinent than ever.

Sticking with "baritsu" and Barton-Wright can suck eggs

"We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanaese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me."

-- Sherlock Holmes, "The Final Problem"

"You say 'bartitsu' and I say 'baritsu,' You say 'Bar Tits Sue," and I say 'Barry Tzu.' Burbeebee, bratyty, burrbeebee, oh why-why . . . let's just hug and dive right off!"

-- Me, being silly

Okay, just between you and me, I've never really bought into this Barton-Wright "Bartitsu" scam that emerged in 2001 when a martial arts website stumbled across an old Pearson's Magazine article. It's probably just me having a "Don't spoil my childhood!" fan moment after twenty years of Sherlocking before anyone in the world discovered such a thing existed, but it also demonstrates an issue that Sherlockiana has dealt with from the start: Sherlock's reality versus history.

The grand game of Sherlockiana begins with the premise that Sherlock Holmes existed in our own past. Enough Canonical detail lines up with history that it seems an easy enough proposition to play with and have a little fun. But here's the quandry: If Sherlock Holmes is real, wasn't Irene Adler also real? And if Irene Adler was also real, why isn't there any record of her outside of the Sherlock Holmes stories?

In the past, Sherlockians have tried to say Watson used pseudonyms and found historical people to identify as the Canonical ones. "Irene Adler" was surely Lillie Langtry, that sort of thing. But by shoe-horning a figure in the Holmes Canon into history, they always lose a bit of their individuality, their own luster. As cool as you may want to say Lillie Langtry was, she was no Irene Adler.

And on top of that, if you're saying Irene Adler wasn't Irene Adler, how are we to trust that Sherlock Holmes was Sherlock Holmes and not an actor standing in for Crime Doctor John H. Watson who was really doing all the work? Or Conan Doyle himself, actually being Holmes and Watson and having all the adventures? That way lies silly-town.

If you want to play the Conan Doyle game and go "Oh, Doyle saw that Pearson's Magazine article and didn't spell it right," sure, I'll buy that. But to go "Sherlock Holmes, the greatest detective hero of all time, defeated the greatest criminal mastermind in the world by using some shlocky martial art a guy named after himself that didn't actually survive until the modern day," I say thee "Nay!"

Sherlock Holmes gets to have his own martial art. Watson gets to spell things correctly. Tinkerbell resurrects when I clap my hands, and screw you if you want to argue that she doesn't. Baritsu, as Sherlock Holmes used it and Watson wrote it was being used by other heroes like Doc Savage and the Shadow before anybody re-read an old article and a movie fight choreographer stumbled across it for Robert Downey, Junior.

Personally, that's my line in the sand. If you want to come at me with not-so-elegant Barton-Wright Bartitsu to change my mind, I'm afraid you're going to have to fight Sherlock Holmes. And he knew baritsu. And baritsu? Nobody beats baritsu.

Fans, Stans, and Fancy Dans

Define "Sherlockian."

Merriam-Webster defines it as "adjective: of or resembling the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes especially in the exercise of unusual powers of deduction."

Google's primary source says, "adjective: relating to or characteristic of Sherlock Holmes, especially in showing great perceptiveness" as well as "noun, informal: a fan of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle."

There we go. "A fan of Sherlock Holmes."

Yet for the entirety of my forty-plus years as a Sherlockian, there have been those who insist that while they are a Sherlockian, they are not a fan. They're an enthusiast. Or an aficionado. Or something else far too scholarly to be called merely "fan." And yet fans there are, or else why are they focusing on this single subject? How are they attracted to it without being fans? Some cold, machine-like logic that mathematically directs them toward the study of Sherlock Holmes?

C'mon, you sillies. You're fans.

Since a certain Eminem song has come out fans have a new way to elevate themselves above the worst of our lot. Now instead of going all "aficionado" we can just single out those misbehaving fans as "stans." (Definition, for those who don't know: "an overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity.") Some of us might freely self-identify as stanning for Sherlock Holmes, but for the rest, that term is always there for that "Jeez, I'm not that bad!" moment.

Can a doctor be a fan? Yes. Can a lawyer be a fan? Yes. Can a literature professor be a fan? Yes.

No matter how serious or learned you may be in one aspect of your professional life, you have to do something for entertainment, and unless your Sherlockian activities account for 100% of your sole, sustaining income, there must be a fan in there somewhere. But, of course, here in America, we know one thing -- anything English is fancy, and Sherlock Holmes, therefore, is a fancier's hobby. (At least here in the U.S., you folk of other nations can speak for yourselves.) We can sip our hot tea, listen to Vivaldi, and dramatically turn the page of our leather-bound Literary Fancier's edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles.  The aficionado is a sort of role-play, really, just as the wine connoisseur is something of a role as well. Remember the days when beer drinkers were common folk? They got fancy on us, too.

Fans can be Stans, and Stans can be Fancy Dans. And that's okay. Fancy without going "true fan" or gatekeeper can be pretty cool. We all get to play our own game our own way. And since the origin of the word "fancy" is as a contraction of the word "fantasy," it fits most of the creations of the fan, being all fancy like that.

And we all should be able to fancy that, even the least fan-sy of us.

Final versus Final versus F . . .

If you've ever tried googling "The Final Podblem," you might have encountered the problem with naming something so close to something else with a very prominent and similar name.  This issue also recently occurred with the Doyle's Rotary Coffin book No Holmes Barred, as dropping the "m" out of that line is apparently a very popular search for porn. But this week, "The Final Podblem" finally got to "The Final Problem," and it brought forth all sorts of thoughts from the lads, as well as all sorts of thoughts from the aged Sherlockian listener.

It was a joy to hear someone discovering "The Final Problem" for the first time, wondering about so many things that Sherlockians have debated for nigh on a century. It brought out how much you can know about Moriarty without having ever read the Moriarty Canon, and what someone might think is in those tales just from all the times large chunks of "Final Problem" are used in movies or television when Moriarty shows up. And even I'm not sure where Moriarty having an air-gun cane is from at this point, though it sounds mighty familiar. It's a pity that "The Final Problem" occurs in the middle of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, too, as even a first-time reader knows immediately that there's a whole lot of this Sherlock Holmes book left that surely must have Sherlock Holmes in it.

About two-thirds of my way through the podcast, however, I had to wait for the supper I'd been working on to cook a bit, took a look at Twitter, and found a concern about the episode, which got it pulled down and then put back up. Not sure exactly what that concern was, but while I find great joy in hearing folks new to the Canon Holmes discussing it, there's an "F" word that I know can be a perilous stroll by the edge of a cliff in any discussion: "fandom."

Whether you're talking about the older part of Sherlock Holmes fandom (which is a fandom, despite some hoity-toity arguments to the contrary) and the newer part, there are some third rails that nobody should touch. As editor of The Watsonian (which I am working on, by the way), I've had to warn at least one writer away from a certain subject, and as long-time Sherlockian, I've raised the ire of a few folks in decades past with a flip or fiesty comment about their holy of holies. Fandom is a place where you're welcomed and loved for your common interest, but along with that comes making the thing such a part of your being that you can react as if physically harmed if some aspect of it seems disrespected.

And as much as we might feel the holy fire of righteous anger and virtuous indignation, part of being a long-haul fan is knowing not to hurt the younglings and frighten them off the thing they're just getting into, even when a little guidance might be necessary. Certain topics are usually best saved for one-on-one conversations with other Sherlockians, though when you do something like podcast or blog on the regular, you are going to get to those on occasion, if no other Sherlockians are handy to vent to. Trust me on this, there's a certain Big Sherlockian Institution that I always need to bite my tongue on and let bygones be bygones. But we're all humans, we all fuck up on occasion. (That "f" word? Not as troublesome as some others.)

Anyway, I was very glad to see that "The Final Podblem" got their footing back and re-released the episode this morning, no matter what the issue. And I'm not the saying this for the lovely plug they gave 'The Watsonian Weekly" at the end of this episode. (Why do we care about Watson so hard? Decades of fanning Holmes and needing a change of scenery without leaving the pleasant countryside of Canon.) Give it a listen, if you haven't tracked it down yet.