The return of the Reichenbach Falls Lemming Society

 It was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, 1995. MediaWest*Con, that annual gathering of media fans of all times was being held at the Holiday Inn in Lansing, Michigan. Trek fans, Phantom fans, Rat Patrol fans, X-File fans, Highlander fans, you name it, there were fans of it there. And Sherlockians, especially fans of the Granada series

More than a few folks have seen the six-foot-tall Paget art that hangs out in my basement — a screen-dot print illustration enlarged multiple times using 1995 copy machine technology. This was the weekend it was created for and the “Sherlock Holmes Festival of Consulting Detection” — basically a room party with scones and other treats.

Anyone who showed up for the Sherlock Holmes festival of Consulting Detection was signed up for the Reichenbach Falls Lemming Society by our membership director Bonnie Bills, and they would receive the official membership kit with membership certificate, autographed photo of Reichy the lemming, and a cherry licorice pipe. We played whist, had a little bit of a Sherlock Holmes based game show, and just enthused about Sherlock Holmes.

Back in the 1990s, Sherlock Holmes didn't have his own convention, so MediaWest*Con was the closest thing to a con experience with Sherlock Holmes fan fun for the Lemmings to land. BoucherCons have always had a touch of Sherlock here and there, but that seemed more a "Last Bowcher" event that one with ties to "Final Problem." (Yes, that is a reason I just made up.) It any case, it seemed only right and proper that, at long last, the Reichenbach Falls Lemming Society move to 221B Con.

What does this mean?

Well, membership packets will be distributed at a meeting that will probably occur in or near the hotel bar at a time yet to be determined. Or at other random moments. And there might be a game of whist. And something else. In any case, the RFLS flag will figuratively be planted at this new con location for 2022.

Because it's 221B Con. And you just never know what's going to happen at 221B Con.

When Sherlockians gather, at whatever level

 Our little local Peoria library group of Sherlockians found its footing again this month, leaving Zoom behind and meeting in person with a healthy attendance. And it was a great discussion, with some insights on "The Man with the Twisted Lip" that I had never heard before, which is what I really love about our local group.

I didn't understand the value of the local group quite so much when I was younger, and the mad dedication of national-level Sherlock Holmes fans was so entrancing. Those of us who are deep into Sherlockian culture love our community, the familiar tropes, the verbal shorthand we acquire with each other, as in any familiar group. But we also lose a little something when we've all been taking in similar input and going over the same points time and again. There are things you just can't see when you're reading the same story for the sixth, tenth, or fifteenth time that someone coming at it fresh can see.

"The Man with the Twisted Lip" as a tale of male abandonment, for example. Isa Whitney abandons his wife for the opium den. Watson abandons his wife to follow Holmes. Holmes abandons Baker Street to stay at the St. Clair house. And what is going on at the end of the case? Is Holmes abandoning Neville St. Clair at the police station while driving off with the man's own cart and horse? And even if he and Watson are taking Neville with them, all three of them are heading to Baker Street for breakfast when two of the three have wives at home really wondering what has happened to their husbands.

And let's not get into whether Isa Whitney ever actually made it home or not -- "Hey, cabbie! Forget what that guy said, drop me back at the Bar of Gold!"

After our meeting, a few of us went to the local pub to chat a little more, where I got to tell of the recent Dayton conference and explain how such things worked. As a part of that, I extolled the virtues of gatherings of any like-minded set of hobbyists, be they Sherlockian or otherwise, as we come together and focus on that one thing. In a time of bizarre culture wars, opinion lines in the sand being drawn, and team politics, Sherlockians still come together and just be Sherlockians for a couple of days. We get to feel connected, rather than feeling the fortifications of social media algorithms walling us off from the rest of humanity.

And Zoom has helped us keep those connections strong. Some of the best parts of Dayton were getting to hang out with folks I've gotten to know on video chats, and confirm that they are just as delightful in person as they are on a little computer screen. After all this time, it wasn't really necessary, and I think I'd still enjoy their online company as much without Dayton, but it was a nice reminder.

New to the hobby or here forever, online or in person, we are wealthy in what we gain from our fellow Sherlockians. I know I don't have to blog about this as almost everyone who might read this already knows it. But it's just nice to get it out every now and then. On to the next gathering!

When did the first wave of Sherlock truly start?

 We all know when Sherlock Holmes first appeared to readers in A Study in Scarlet. We also know when his readers were devastated at the unexpected series finale of "The Final Problem." But somewhere in between those points, a whole lot of Victorians had a moment where they went "Hey! I like this Sherlock Holmes! When does the next story come out?"

Ever wonder when that moment occurred?

I mean it had to be during The Strand Magazine short story run. The Sign of the Four was a standalone novel, inspiring no real expectations that any of the characters would return. (Mary Morstan sure didn't.) And readers of "A Scandal in Bohemia" didn't just go, "I love the first episode of this new series! What's next month?" with the expectations we have of a television show. No, like any series, it had to pick up steam.

Was there a turning point story where the Strand's circulation suddenly shot up with the next issue? Was there a tipping point of public opinion on Holmes?

It's not like stories in The Strand Magazine got weekly ratings numbers like a TV series. And there was no social media to pull engagement numbers from. Yet you know there had to be a point where Strand readers turned to their friends or family and went, "These Sherlock Holmes stories are cool!" (Or whatever Victorians said in lieu of that.)

I checked Mirror of the Century: The Strand Magazine 1891-1950 by Reginald Pound, but found nothing about that other than the delight the editor had in getting "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Red-Headed League" on his desk. Did it take the readers just two stories to get excited? Or was it a few more in, like the month "The Man with the Twisted Lip" came out? The new practice of releasing some new TV shows first three episodes to hook viewers might indicate three is a magic number, but I somehow don't see "A Case of Identity" as the turning point.

If you look at those first six stories -- A celebrity scandal, a goofy con, a domestic oddity, a murder mystery, a cultish horror tale, and a disappearing act -- you can see it was the sheer range and variety of Holmes tales that helped draw readers in. Didn't like "A Scandal in Bohemia?" Here's "The Red-Headed League?" Didn't fancy that, here's something else entirely. Yet every step of the way, here is your old friend Sherlock Holmes.

It's quite ingenious, and something locked-room murder mystery sloggers missed about Sherlock's success. Holmes's variety was key, and it took a few stories to really put that on display. At the end of those first six -- and then that lovely little Christmas carbuncle as the seventh -- readers definitely had to be hooked. For us now, reading A Study in Scarlet or The Sign of the Four, knowing that a whole lot still awaits us, we don't have nearly that same short-story-by-short-story introduction to Holmes. But back in the day, someone did.

And those someones are a bit intriguing, especially now as our print archeologists unearth new reports every few weeks. I'll be curious to see what else turns up.

Sherlock Holmes reads "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"

 I was checking up on something in the Canon tonight when a detail caught my eye, as they often do when reading those original tales of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes hasn't seen Watson in a while and is telling the doctor about his new ring.

"It was from the reigning family of Holland though the matter in which I served them was of such delicacy that I cannot confide it even to you who have been good enough to chronicle one or two of my little problems."

"And have you any on hand just now?" Watson asks.

"Some ten or twelve, but none present any feature of interest. They are important, you understand, without being interesting."

That last line stopped me in my tracks, because multi-tasking is all we seem to do any more, and I've become painfully aware of just what my limits are in terms of the number of simultaneous projects I can carry at once at work, without losing focus on one or the other. I know, I know, we're talking about Sherlock Holmes here. But twelve? TWELVE?

Keeping twelve different investigations separate in your mind, without any of the details slipping from one case to another, forgetting something, or just missing something entirely is a much more superhuman feat than simply unbending a bent fireplace poker. In fact, the thought that Holmes could accomplish such a thing without some noticeable system went beyond my personal suspension of disbelief. No way, Holmes, no way!

So was he just lying, puffing up eight or nine letters he had skimmed to investigation level? Or was it something else? Let's look at that context again:

". . . you who have been good enough to chronicle one or two of my little problems."

"And have you any on hand just now?"

Is Watson referring to "problems" with his question . . . or "chronicles?"

Had Watson written up his first bunch of short stories and given them to Holmes, and that is the "some ten or twelve" that Holmes has on hand? Did Watson want to know if Holmes had read the stories, not if he had any investigations in progress?

Holmes, as usual, isn't very enthusiastic about Watson's works. "None present any features of interest," his first thoughts come out, but then sees Watson's lips start to frown and goes, "They are important, you understand." Yet he remains Sherlock Holmes, adding ". . . without being interesting." He just can't help himself.

The conversation makes perfect sense as one about Watson's writings. Even more sense, actually, given that "ten or twelve" business.

Sure, the story in which that exchange occurs is "A Case of Identity," which is a part of the first twelve stories that we saw. But Sherlock Holmes definitely got to read them first.

And Watson's inclusion of the silly little business of Mary Sutherland so early in the Adventures series could actually have been part of a reaction to Holmes's words documented here. "You want to see a case of little interest? Here you go. Also, I'm putting that time Irene Adler beat you as the first story." (These decisions, and the first set, were all determined before Holmes went up and died in 1891, of course. At that point, a grief-stricken Watson just let Doyle pick them up off his desk and take them to the Strand.)

I really think that what we're seeing in "A Case of Identity" is Holmes after he's recently read Watson's first attempt at a short story collection, a first draft of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Because that twelve-jobs-at-once thing is, well, a bit much.

Watson versus the Rugby Superfan

 Studying the chronicles of Sherlock Holmes and digging deep into their details has always involved a certain level of trust. At its most basic level, trusting John Watson as much as Sherlock Holmes did is a part of our Sherlockian DNA. While we might occasional indulge ourselves with flights of headcanon fantasy, the facts are the facts as Watson presented them, even when we have to adjust our point of view to see them as they truly are.

One issue that comes up time and again is trusting Watson's words over that of a client or someone else in the Canon. The first article I ever had published in The Baker Street Journal made that point with Jabez Wilson, and how his skewing of the facts made Watson's dates look off. As I recently looked at the work done with "Missing Three-Quarter" by Sherlockian chronologists. 

Watson tells us that "The Missing Three-Quarter" started on a gloomy February morning. Cyril Overton comes running into Baker Street claiming his friend was going to go missing for the big Cambridge versus Oxford rugby match. Respected Sherlockian scholar Jay Finley Christ (the guy who came up with the abbreviations) wrote that Oxford and Cambridge only ever played rugby against each other in December.

Of those three people, Watson, Overton, and Christ, there's one that I trust least. And his name is Cyril Overton.

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson don't know or care about rugby. Holmes doesn't have rugby players in his commonplace books. And when a guy comes in claiming, "I am the skipper of the Rugger team of Cambridge Varsity, and Godfrey Staunton is my best man. Tomorrow we play Oxford," well, even if they think he might be a little crazy, they're probably just going to go, "Okay. Go on . . ."

Lord Mount-James doesn't seem to know or care much about the supposed "rugby star" role that his nephew has been cast in. Dr. Leslie Armstrong only refers to football when Holmes mentions the match that he himself only knows about because Overton told him there was such a thing.

In fact, Cyril Overton's entire story seems like some trumped-up fantasy meant to inspire Sherlock Holmes on just how important it was that the detective find his missing friend -- and in Overton's world, nothing could be seen as more important than an Oxford-Cambridge football game. 

Holmes asks Watson about the whole football game thing late in the adventure, and Watson reads something he found in the evening paper about some "Light Blues" being defeated by the absence of "the crack International, Godfrey Staunton." 

"Personally I am in agreement with Dr. Armstrong, and football does not come within my horizon," Sherlock Holmes replies after hearing that. Holmes has no idea what Watson read him from the paper, and doesn't really care. And the next morning, Watson freaks out when he sees a hypodermic needle in Sherlock Holmes's hand.

What was it Watson said at the beginning of this story?

"Things had indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion's brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping."

Watson was desperate for Holmes to take any case. Stanley Hopkins sent this missing sports buddy case over because he thought it "was more in your line than in that of the regular police," when a missing person is still a missing person . . . normally. It's almost like Hopkins was dismissing this as a real missing persons case and wanted to give Holmes at least a slight distraction.

And Watson welcomed it. Watson had every motive to play along with Cyril Overton's fantasy February rugby match, and even read some other tripe from the paper and insert Staunton's name just to keep Holmes on the scent. From Watson's point of view this might have well have been the cut-for-time "Case of the Upside Down Room" from Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, a case invented purely to keep Holmes away from the needle.

Did Watson have any reason to lie about it being the February doldrums when the case occurred? No. But did he have reason to prop up the validity of a delusional sports fan whose buddy was missing? The evidence is there.

And Cyril Overton, well, how much do we really know about that guy?

The Monstrum Opus of Sherlock Holmes

 Do we need yet another collection of Sherlockian stuff?

Well, I'd say that depends. Depends upon the writers. Depends upon the subject. And it depends upon who's collecting. And even then . . . you have to wonder, right?

Yeah, me too.

But then somebody starts saying the right words. "Essays, instead of stories."  I like essays. I like articles. I like Sherlockians explaining how there were things in those sixty stories that we didn't see, despite the obvious clues being there. For some reason I've always found that more headcanon-expanding than pastiche, which is more of a tour of someone else's headcanon. Good for one kind of enjoyment, but I like seeing if someone can twist my own headcanon.

So when Rob Nunn said he wanted an assist in doing a collection of essays on the monsters hidden in the original Holmes Canon, I forgot for a moment that I'm a writer and not an editor, and went, "Okay." And now we already have a goodly number of writers already lined up with a monster and a Canonical story attached to their monster, and The Monstrum Opus of Sherlock Holmes is underway.

But Rob and I weren't sure who all to ask to write an article about a monster in the life of Sherlock Holmes. It's hard to say what anyone's view of that combo would be. And we don't know everyone. So we're opening up the invitation list, to see if anyone else out there might like to join in the mad monster party. We'll be publishing it through Amazon's little publishing arm, with any profits going to the Beacon Society helping teachers out with their lit programs. There are only a couple of rules:

No ghosts need apply, as our hero flatly stated.  (Also, not monsters.) Second, no vampires, as Holmes seemed to make a special point that those weren't real. Like the Batman, the sometime-batty monsters have been a bit over-exposed. The werewolf was checked off our list before a single writer was asked, thanks to a certain presentation that put the thought in Rob's head. So what's left?

Maybe Martha the bee-woman from "His Last Bow?"

A living voodoo doll from "Wisteria Lodge?"

A shape-shifting step-father from "A Case of Identity?"

"Black Peter" really being a were-whale?

Nobody picked any of those, nor any of my other suggestions (hey, they asked). And some of the writers who have jumped in thus far went even more imaginative than those. So many monsters out there!

Interested in contributing one of your own to our Monstrum Opus? Rob and I would love to hear from you. As I said, essays, not fiction. And we're very probably not moving from our "no ghosts, no vampires"  position, because . . . well, the former was Conan Doyle's turf, not Holmes's. And as much as I truly love vampires -- well, that's kind of the problem isn't it? They're just a little too sexy and lovable these days. 

But I digress. (And we won't even get into how the thought of the song "Monster" by InVader just triggered a vision of Stapleton and butterfly aliens. Monsters can be anything. And so many things.)

Seeing monsters in the Canon Holmes? Let us know.

The talk we didn't hear in Dayton

 After a good Sherlockian weekend, you come home with a lot of things: new books, inspirations for new projects, new acquaintances . . . maybe even a new friend or two. And now, a week after the "Holmes, Doyle & Friends" conference in Dayton, I can safely say I didn't come home with that other thing. You know the one.

We all heard about the precautions taken in New York in January of this year: vaccination cards, masks, limited events/attendance . . . all the hallmarks of the Coronavirus pandemic. New York City had learned some hard lessons at the start of this thing, and the easily transmissible Omicron variant was spiking hard after Christmas gatherings. Most of the Sherlockians who went came home healthy, but those of us who stayed home didn't feel too badly about the choice.

Dayton, however, was an entirely difference thing. The Omicron spike was over. Masking rules had been taken down in most places at the end of February. And a lot of the midwest was a lot more casual about the disease than New York City. Attending Holmes, Doyle & Friends in Dayton, Ohio this year, you might not have thought the pandemic ever existed.

The first social event of the weekend was a crowded cocktail hour in someone's hotel room, where just walking up to the open door you felt the warm humid air of a crowded, enclosed space. I stayed in the hallway until someone suggested the adjoining room with far fewer people, and even then was a little nervous about my first maskless socializing in a very long time. At this point, those of us who have run the gauntlet and never had Covid (that we know of -- with that mystery symptomless option for the vaxxed folks, you never know), well, those of us who have avoided it would kind of like to stay that way.

It was the first indication of where the weekend was headed. The full-on reception that followed at a nearby hotel was entirely maskless, as was the following day. We talked about concerns in small, private conversations with those whose sensibilities we know and trust, but we knew we were going with the hopeful herd and rolling the dice with the sixty or seventy other Sherlockians who were just delighted to be back in the world we had missed for so long.

Was the mild sore throat I had earlier this week just from Saturday night's karaoke or possibly some milder bug just from being around other humans again after so long? At this point, that's what I'm going with. Is the pandemic over? Well, given the news out of China, I'd say "most probably not," but as we saw last year, when summer vaxxed fun turned into variant surge autumn, seasonal cycles could be our new normal. 

Given the patterns I've seen with places I've gone, we'll probably see more mask-wearing at 221B Con, for sure. Major city airport hotel with a lot larger attendance, and my casual observations at local stores seems to indicate that masks are being used more often by younger folks and more females than males -- which is a goodly chunk of the 221B Con demographic. I've got some good masks I feel comfortable in at this point, and have been sitting in movie theaters wearing them since new movies first came back to theaters, so it's just a part of life now, a mode as easy to slip into as buckling a seat belt.

But I'll admit it, my love of Sherlockiana did override my sensible caution brain in Dayton. I don't think it was peer pressure -- more like just seeing someone else cannonball into the chilly pool and going "Okay, I guess we're doing this!" And we do love and trust our fellow Sherlockians more than random folks at the local Menard's.  (Although those places are so big and airy, it became a favorite place to shop, even in Covid times.) Working for a hospital system, I was very aware of the current numbers, and the odds were very good compared to January, even if the risk was still there. But even with that excuse, it still felt a little foolish . . . but, hey, I'm the guy who will sing karaoke with no decent singing voice.

Which makes it a little funny when you consider how many people are more frightened by karaoke than spreading a disease. Back in Peoria, I masked up this week when around folks at stores, etc., just in case I was carrying the virus, so no one else paid for my Sherlockian indulgence. St. Patrick's Day was this week, and fans of alcohol and cabbage are basically having the spring fling Sherlockians had in Dayton. (Did fans of alcohol ever stop flinging without an actual lockdown? My friends who caught covid pre-vax all got it in bars.)  These days, it's very hard to predict where we'll be in a few months, or even weeks.

Events are being planned, some "normal" is being attempted, yet Zoom and masks are something that a lot of folks have gotten very used to as a new normal. Let's hope we all stay healthy, whatever it takes.