The less socially motivated Sherlockian

 A couple of questions have come up lately that have related answers, so it seemed worth a post. The first was "Why not invited a guest on your podcast?" The second, "Do the Hansoms of John Clayton still meet?"

Here is the grand Sherlockian paradox.

A goodly share of our number are bookish sorts. Introverts. Readers who enjoy our own company as much as a group. And yet everyone wants a little company now and then, the validation of a community, the fresh ideas of others who know your field.

And over the years, if one gets involved in a hobby, an introvert might pick up a few social skills, lose some of that fear of public speaking, even organize a function or two. And yet there remains a distinct difference between being a true gregarious extrovert and someone who can sometimes pass as one.

So, the answers to the two questions: As long as either of those questions relies completely on me, my natural inclinations never draw me in those directions. 

Podcast guests aren't a problem, if time allows and it's someone I'm comfortable with from past association. Cold-calling someone brand new? Not in my zone, especially for a first meeting to converse over Zoom. And not the sort of thing I'm going to bite the bullet and force upon myself when there is so much other Sherlocking to do out there.

Do the Hansoms of John Clayton yet meet? Well, Sherlockians do meet in Peoria, together when we can, Zooming when we cannot. Gathering under the name of the Hansoms faded out in the 2000s, when things were slowing down and our meetings fell to three persons per, two of whom came from my house. We had a couple attempts at restarts since then, but the evenings were mostly filled with my friends who would have come over anyway and the one or two other Peoria Sherlock Holmes fans, if they had time.

The Sherlock Holmes Story Society, the name I came up with for our library discussion group, when it started a few years back, has been meeting monthly for four straight years now. We've got a good group of regulars, even after Covid knocked us down by half. Being public library based, however, we needed a name that advertised what we did without explanation. I could easily hand out membership cards or certificates to our group and claim the Hansoms of John Clayton still exist, but that seems like a bit of a cheat.

The Hansoms of John Clayton will exist in Peoria, at least as long as I do. It'll be one of those one-or-two person groups like the Solitary Cyclist or the One Fixed Point or the Shingle of Southsea until that day when someone with enough interest in classic Sherlockian society dinners or meetings comes along and has extroversion, energy, and time enough to try to build it up again. And I'll be willing to help that person. But for now . . . .

Some of us are just a little too comfortable with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, a book, and a laptop for some projects to get fully undertaken.

"Listen to the experts!"

 A phrase I enjoyed hearing the other day was "I will listen to the experts" with regard to the current pandemic. Medical experts have done a lot for the human race. And then my brain fell into Sherlockian mode. "Listen to the experts!" applies to scientific areas of human endeavor, but does it apply to our particular field.

My gut instinct said, "Nooooo, don't listen to the experts! Follow your own path." I've always railed against those classicists of Sherlockiana who claimed that every good thing possible in this hobby was done before 1950. But were those folks "experts?"

I've been called an expert on Sherlock Holmes. My late neighbor was called an expert on Sherlock Holmes. Practically every single Sherlockian ever written up as a feature in their local newspaper (back when newspapers were a thing and needed features) has been called an expert in Sherlock Holmes. Because compared to non-Sherlockians, who outnumber us by the thousands, if not the tens of thousands by my estimate, we are experts in Sherlock Holmes. All of us.

The thing about being a expert in Sherlock Holmes the man is that you really just have to be knowledgeable about the one book, where we find everything that is completely accepted about the man. You can go on and become an expert in Sherlockian film, in Sherlockiaan chronology, in Sherlockian fan fiction, but to just be an expert in Sherlock? One big fat book.

Read that one big fat book, and you don't really need to listen to the experts. Sure, they can tell you what has been done in the past inspired by Holmes, but as I said, expertise in what has been done in the past outside of that one book is a whole 'nother expertise that not every Sherlockian has. Your own inspired creation will surely find an audience among the other experts in your area . . . who didn't necessarily read the monograph William Buxley passed out as a table favor at a Baker Street Irregulars dinner in 1953.

If one enjoys listening to experts, Sherlockiana is a wonderful place. We have so very many experts.

But if one is a creative who wants to follow one's own path free of expert critiques, Sherlockiana is also a wonderful place. None of our experts is expert in everything Sherlockian, so you're likely to find a free spot to fly.

And if you want to do something between those two, listen to some experts and charge blindly into your own Sherlockian project without calling upon every other person who wrote about the wine Watson took with his lunch on a particular day, well, you can have at it. We'll still love to see what you come up with.

The larger Sherlockiana grows, the more territory it seems we have to explore. It's part of the magic of this hobby -- there's always more left to learn, to see, to do.

And, to become an expert in. Because we do love our experts, even if we don't always listen to them.

The true reason Mrs. Watson and Mr. Holmes didn't get along?

Some time back, my mind wandered to Mrs. James Watson, the wife of Sherlock Holmes's friend and chronicler in "The Man with the Twisted Lip." I'd like to refer to her as Mary Morstan Watson, or Mrs. John H. Watson, but going strictly by the evidence presented in that tale . . . well, she really is most accurately identified as "Mrs. James Watson."

And what was the notable characteristic of Mrs. James Watson?

"Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a light-house."

Grief, like all emotions, can be very hard to deal with when it comes on, most commonly brought on by the loss of a loved one. In "The Man with the Twisted Lip," the loss of a loved one is in the "misplaced" category rather than the "death" category, but the way Watson describes his wife and the reason people came to her, it seems like the latter might have been more common than the former. While folks whose loved ones were missing might come to Doctor Watson, folks whose loved ones had died would not need his services. So they came to his wife.

But why?

We know Watson spent more of his time in the company of Sherlock "No ghosts need apply!" Holmes, but the good doctor also had a certain literary agent in his social sphere, and therefore in his wife's social sphere. And when it came to a particular way of dealing with grief, said literary agent was hardcore headed down a certain questionable path. So let's just cut to the chase:

Was Watson's wife a medium?

Did folks in grief come to her to contact their recently passed loved ones?

Mrs. James Watson being a practicing spiritualist, holding seances, doing spirit writing, etc. makes that light-house line a very interesting thing, setting up a more direct conflict between Mrs. Watson and Mr. Holmes, explaining why the doctor might have been going for periods without seeing his best pal.

"Birds to a lighthouse," Watson wrote, and the symbolism of the souls of the departed being attracted to his wife's aura just adds to the idea of Mary Morstan, medium.

Sherlock Holmes, of course, knowing the powers of observation needed for an expert in cold reading (one technique for the con artist playing at spiritualism) would almost confirm Mary Morstan as such with his assessment of her as "most useful in such work as we have been doing." Sherlock's own displays of his powers of observation were basically cold readings -- which makes if odd to think that Watson's literary agent would have fallen so easily into such a trap at some point.

And yet John "James" Watson's association with devout spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle makes the idea of his wife Mary being deeply involved in the practice as well even more likely . . . with her husband constantly caught between worlds.

Ah, but if only someone could contact Mrs. James Watson's spirit and let us know the truth, eh?

I think I'll stick with Sherlock Holmes, though, and when it comes to Sherlockian scholarship, say, "No ghost wives need apply."

The clumsy fabrications

 "How do I know they are lying? Because it is a clumsy fabrication which simply could not be true."

-- Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear

We hold the methods of Sherlock Holmes in pretty high esteem in these Sherlockian parts. The man was a genius, who studied hard, kept a mental library of recognizable details, and performed feats of observation and deduction that seem beyond most of us . . . usually.

Yet this week, I don't think one particular method of Sherlock's is beyond most of us, the one he uses in the quote above. How does he spot a lie? Because it's so badly concocted that it just couldn't be true.

That has been a growing trend of the U.S. president over the past four years. Yes, I'm going "political" because reality isn't just an opinion, as much as some would like to deny facts as it suits them by dumping them in the "political" bucket. The man lies, again and again and again. Clumsy fabrications that anyone who is paying attention to the world about them knows are lies the minute they come out of his mouth.

It quit taking a Sherlock Holmes to spot that a long time ago.

His sycophants lie to him to keep him happy, he lies to keep his fans happy at their little fan-fests, and then his enablers lie to try to massage his lies into something closer to palatable plausibility. The circle of fiction just feeds itself, 'round and 'round it goes. It becomes very tiring to the rest of us, having to hear the clumsy fabrications day after day, to the point where the news has to just shut him off.

Before the last few years, it's hard to imagine a major network just shutting down a presidential speech just thirty seconds in, but here we are. Just that tired of the clumsy fabrications.

The loyal team players dutifully stand by him, for whatever reason. Many have just been trained to fear some other group so much they'll put up with incompetence, just to protect themselves from that group they're frightened of. There are other reasons, some more valid than others, some as nutty as a flat earther with a magic bean.  But, y'know, I'm writing a Sherlock Holmes blog here.

And you know what a Sherlock Holmes blog is about? That guy who had no time for "a clumsy fabrication." The guy who sought truth, honest, science-based, provable truth . . . it was his whole end goal, every time. Justice could be administered or not. Lives could be saved . . . or not. But at the end, always at the end, no matter what he could or could not do, was the truth. Even if Sherlock Holmes was just revealing the truth behind his own less-clumsy fabrication, as in "Dying Detective."

We need more Sherlock Holmes right now. And a lot less clumsy fabrications.

Because, damn, they get old fast.

Let's talk about Irene Adler.

Let's talk about Irene Adler.

If any character in the Sherlockian Canon has been completely screwed with in the years since her creation, it's Irene. Yes, yes, Nigel Bruce Watson, blah, blah, blah, but you know what? People have always complained about him not being up to Watsonian snuff. Watson has always had champions pushing forward to go, "That's not the true Watson!"

But Irene?

Secret Montenegro rendezvous with Sherlock just so he can father Nero Wolfe?

Working for Professor Moriarty until he decides to kill her?

Shoved into a re-envisioning of Gillette's play just to make Sherlock having a love interest slightly more Canonical?

Or just turned into female Sherlock Holmes with a female Watson. Surely that's not so offensive, right?

But is it Irene?

An American singer who worked her way up to prima donna of the Imperial Opera of Warsaw, the sort of career path one doesn't just flim-flam one's way into. Being an American, she didn't have the proper respect for social distance with Bohemian royalty and wound up in one of those entertainer/prince relationships that doesn't ever seem to end well. And it didn't.

The King of Bohemia slanders her with the word "adventuress," which at the time meant "gold-digger" not "Laura Croft, tomb raider," and even "gold-digger" probably has a nicer connotation to it than what the king was trying to say. Sherlockians, notably female Sherlockians, have taken that word, as folk do with offensive terms, made it their own . . . yet it is not Irene Adler either.

John Watson, claiming that Sherlock Holmes singled her out as "the woman," has set imaginations aflame, but what does even that really mean? And expression of irritation at being bested? Admiration for a quick and clever mind? Being the best looking woman in her neighborhood, according to the locals? There's just not much there either.

Irene Adler, sadly, has always been shaped by male perspectives. The king's words. Watson's words. Holmes's words. Her resume in Holmes's index and her own words never get quite the focus given those three men, especially by the men who led this hobby for decades. Just getting past the creaky old Holmes/Adler ship and its barnacled hull is not enough. Figuring out who Irene was to Irene is the real place our attentions should surely lie.

And then we might even be able to start discussing Godfrey Norton, because that guy . . . well, that guy must have really had it together to be the man for Irene Adler.

The friendless

 The last gathering of Peoria's Sherlock Holmes Story Society focussed on the story "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax," and whenever one wanders through that story, one particular line always comes up:

"One of the most dangerous classes in the world is the drifting and friendless woman."

Sherlock Holmes goes on to preach hard on how Lady Frances Carfax is a sort of migratory chicken who is just begging to be victimized. Add that to Watson's wandering Europe and basically just getting confirmations of how good looking the missing woman is, and the level of Victorian sexism on display in this story starts to measure pretty high. We never get to actually meet Lady Frances, get a display of her true personality, or even be assured that she survives her ordeal with no brain damage.

But amid all that, the word that always seems to jump out for me is "friendless."

Sherlock Holmes seems sure that this nice traveling lady has no friends. We know she writes letters to her old governess, which seems like a really kindly thing to do. We know she meets people in her travels and establishes at least short term friendships. Why is Sherlock Holmes so quick to judge the lady as "friendless?"

If one does the ever-popular word search of the Sherlockian Canon, one quickly sees that only two other persons in all of Watson's records are described as "friendless." And just who are those two folks?

Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson.

Watson, of course, makes his statement early on in his cohabitation with Holmes: "During the first week or so we had no callers, and I had begun to think my companion was as friendless a man as myself."

People start showing up, but they are Holmes's clients, unless one counts Lestrade as a friend. And he very well might have been. So perhaps Watson was wrong about Holmes being friendless. But Watson definitely considers himself among the friendless at that point.

Before meeting Watson, Sherlock Holmes states in "The Gloria Scott" that he himself was friendless in college. Holmes meets Victor Trevor and "it was a bond of union when I found that he was as friendless as I." Being friendless seems to be the temporary state leading to friendship for both Holmes, who found Trevor, and Watson, who found Holmes.

But even after he has Watson, Sherlock Holmes can't get past that looming spectre of friendlessness.

"And now, my poor Watson, here we are, stranded and friendless in this inhospitable town . . . ."

It's an interesting note that Holmes is describing Cambridge, "an old University city," as that inhospitable place where even with Watson he feels friendless. Is he revealing his own alma mater here, and echoing the feelings he first had there as a lonely student? It's very likely, I think. College towns have usually seemed friendly places in my experience of adult life -- is Cambridge that different, or was it just Holmes's past haunting him?

And also, does his use of the term "friendless" about her indicate a certain sympathy and kinship with Lady Frances Carfax? Might she have been a cousin, that he seemed to have such a feeling of who she was and what she was about, having such worry about her wandering Europe?

For a single word, "friendless" is one that will always raise questions, no matter who uses it. Even Sherlock Holmes.

The champion of objective reality

 In preparing for an non-Sherlockian discussion this week, I came up with a question to muse upon that led to a very Sherlockian train of thought. The question: "If the thing you're a fan of stayed in the public consciousness for a thousand years or more and evolved into a religion, what's one thing it would involve?"

If you go beyond the superficial ("The followers of Sherlock would all wear deerstalkers!"), the question gets to the very heart of our love of a thing and what makes that thing distinctive from all others. A thousand years of wear and tear could strip away all the superficial outside "paint" of a thing and get it down to its true make-up. So wear would that leave Sherlock Holmes?

Well, I unconsciously did a little of that elimination right there in framing that question. Poor Watson just got stripped away, with the lone name "Sherlock Holmes." Yes, the relationship between the doctor and the detective is important, but it is not unique. Other characters bond just as hard as our friends, and even Watson intended to shine the spotlight on Sherlock as the rare and special thing.

So what does Sherlock Holmes give us as a core belief for some hypothetical religious institution?

I'd have to say the thing he fights for, works for, and produces in every story, even when he's wrong.

It's not justice, though he does get it many a time.

It's not stopping crime, as crime does not appear in every story.

It has to be a little thing called objective reality, doesn't it?

In every case, Sherlock Holmes enters a world of subjective reality. Scotland Yard thinks a dancer murdered a noble's bride. The citizens of Dartmoor think a dog from Hell is killing members of a certain family. A husband thinks his wife might be a vampire. Sometimes the subjective reality is something as simple as "there's no possible reason for this thing to have happened." Having not seen what actually happened, somebody gets a headcanon going.

And while headcanon might be great fun for questions we'll never get answers to, like where John Watson got shot in Afghanistan, it's not always real useful in reality. And that's where Sherlock Holmes comes in.

Sherlock Holmes looks hard at reality. Bits of hair or fiber. Impressions in the soil. Types of paper. The measurements of a house. Looking at all of the little realities, Sherlock Holmes begins to assemble an objective reality that, in most cases, is finally proven out to be the one true reality.

If you ever looked into police work prior to forensic science, it was basically asking the neighbors what happened, depending upon finding a witness. And if no witness came forth, the investigator was just gathering opinions, like the classic "He was a nice, quiet man who couldn't hurt a fly." Subjective views that are, as in case of that particular trope, often as wrong as can be. Headcanon from the neighbors is not always the best source of truth.

Here in 2020 we've seen a massive rise of folks loving their subjective truths in spite of solid evidence, so a hero of objective truth like Sherlock Holmes still fulfills a need in our culture. Will that carry him forward a thousand years, whether spawning a cult or not (like he hasn't already)? 

Let's hope he makes it in one form or another reminding us that objective reality is a valuable thing. And hopefully he teaches us that lesson a little better than Robin Hood, the legend that still reminds us that there can be the too rich at the expense of the poor when Jeff Bezos doesn't seem to be holding any archery tournaments.

Let's talk again in a thousand years.