What level do we Sherlockian at?

 Way back in April, a goodly number of us attended a conference that emphasized the importance of the local Sherlockian society. The point was well made, and it was a fine conference, but there was a mistake one could easily made walking away from that conference in the joy of just being there.

While there were many an Indianapolis local there from the Illustrious Clients, for the most part we were all handing out flyers, etc., promoting our local societies to people who weren't local to the place we are from. We encouraged people to come visit us, log on to our Zooms, etc., and that's where I suspect one could miss the point. It isn't people coming from other cities served by other societies that make a local Sherlockian society strong and healthy. It's the people who live in your town. Any visitors are just the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

It seems like a very obvious point, but it's an issue that can suck the life out of a local Sherlockian society. If a group's best and brightest are keeping their Sherlockian gaze on distant horizons -- the birthday weekend, the conferences that draw from across the country, the larger journals, and the friends from distant places -- they are apt to overlook the needs of their local group.

Am I calling anyone specific out in that statement? You bet I am . . . myself!

Even if you don't go to New York every year, even if you've had that BSI shilling long enough to be bored with it, the siren song of the larger Sherlockian community outside of your town still beckons. Some members of a local scion will always share you interest, but the larger part of what often makes up a local Sherlock Holmes society are people who just like talking about Sherlock Holmes with their local Sherlockian friends. They have no thoughts of being invited to a Baker Street Irregulars dinner, or driving up to Minneapolis to see a rare tome. They just like the local hang. And that's fine.

In the early 2000s, I had a lot of non-local aspirations. Hosting a Sherlockian website, publishing a bi-monthly journal, just kicking things up a level, right at the time when our local scion needed leadership. My usual partner in crime, who was great at keeping local meetings running, had retired from the job, and I just wasn't giving the local scion the attention it deserved. Had I been born at some later time, I might have gotten some sort of attention deficit diagnosis because ritual and routine have never been my strong suits, and that's what keeps a Sherlock Holmes society chugging along. You can have creatives doing random, wild guitar solos of Sherlock work in your group, but the steady drumbeat of an ongoing meeting schedule and regular events are the beating heart that keeps a group alive.

As I've gotten older, I've come to really appreciate Sherlockiana at the local level. Our monthly library discussion group is the steady drumbeat that keeps Holmes alive here, and I'm appreciative of that.

"Okay, Boomlockian!"

One eternal question that circles Sherlockiana like an overhead vulture has long been "How do we get more younger people into our Sherlockian world?" As so many Sherlockians are grandparents, indoctrinating school kids always pops up as an answer. Grandparents have enough distance from their parenting days to think that you can get a kid to like something you like, I suspect, but what do I know?

Well, one thing I do know is that Sherlockiana can be expensive. Folks at the end of their careers have often built up more money than folks at the start of their careers. We see more older Sherlockians for the same reason you see more older folks on cruises -- they are more likely to afford such luxuries. But given the way the money game is more and more slanted against new players, I wonder if that will hold true forever.

The Boomlockians seem to be doing okay. (Yes, "Boomer Sherlockian." I'm not proud of that. But, being one, I can say that.) Most of us seem to be okay with country club level Sherlocking. And a few of us are apparently doing much more than okay.

Yet we're probably coming to a time when we need to think of cheaper on-ramps to full participation in Sherlockian culture, if we truly want to keep the old Sherlockian culture. Like being able to be recognized as a full-fledged contributing member of Sherlockian society with paying for a New York vacation just to attend a certain dinner. We've got Zoom now, we could literally recognize someone for their achievements with no cost to them or expectations that they come to New York two to three times to prove their dedication. And it isn't just New York. The old expectation that everything needs to have a banquet, something every traditional Sherlockian ever to wander into 221B Con seems to want to suggest, needs a good solid look.

A lot of things happen in Sherlockiana because someone has enough in their bank accounts not to fret when a big bill for an event comes due. Or are so caught up in the fever of the fandom that they just don't care about those bills coming due.

Every now and then I think of that one Sherlockian group that was so proud of themselves and their history that they never needed to adapt to the changing world, and that group nearly fell off the map completely. We like to think the things we like are impervious to change and will go on forever. We like to see ourselves as a part of that eternal thing, a touch of immortality.

But the times, as ever, are a'changing. A select number of country club Sherlockians will certainly be able to maintain a certain level of Sherlockian events and travel as long as there are old people with money and a few youngsters in their wake. But a new Sherlockiana, if the fandom does not fall with literacy rates, will surely evolve to fit the lives people can afford in the decades ahead. 

Might be time to start thinking about that.

My Comfort Sherlock Holmes

 It's easy not to expect much from a TV Sherlock Holmes. The medium has given us such random incarnations of the great detective -- actors like Roger Moore, Tom Baker, Matt Frewer, and James D'Arcy make the casting choices seem practically random. And once cast, who knows what direction the script and director will take them.

So when Watson on CBS announced Sherlock Holmes was returning from Reichenbach Falls yet again, to be played by Robert Carlyle, most famous in my mind for The Full Monty from the showrunner who gave us Elementary, well, let's just say I was not optimistic. (Apologies, Elementary fans, but I still just don't get it.)

Sherlock Holmes turned up in Watson's kitchen in the middle of the night, making a sandwich, just as casually as you please. No disguise as an old book dealer. No air-gun worries. Just "My dear Watson . . . I don't suppose you have any horse radish."

He offers Watson the chance to hit him for faking his death, but Morris Chestnut's Watson is no Martin Freeman Watson. This Watson goes in for the hug. And then lets Holmes finish making his sandwich.

"I was hoping we could start small," Holmes starts when asked about how he survived and what he was up to. There is a tenderness between the two. Not ship-worthy, but that of real friendship. Holmes admits to fearing he's hurt their friendship, and then does start small with that simplest of questions, "How was your day?"

And he had me.

Robert Carlyle's Sherlock Holmes was kind and gentle, with that sort of wisdom we expect from a aging sage. The episode that follows, then, is Watson telling Holmes about his day, and the latest medical mystery. The two talk all night, until the sun rises the next day, as one would expect of two close friends so long apart. It reminded me of the set-up for Lee Shackleford's play, Holmes and Watson, where the two friends spend their first night together post-Reichenbach talking it out. But that was more dramatic, not this quiet, not this comfortable.

I was surprised at how much I loved this new Sherlock Holmes. No diagnosable personality disorders, no over-dramatic quirks. Just that sage old friend you'd love to have in your life. Like those Holmeses from a day when genius detectives didn't have to have some personal defects to counterbalance their superior brains for the more mundane minds. From a day when we trusted our experts, and desperate influencers weren't trying to puff up their own opinions by tearing down the learned.

In a time when things are as messy as they've ever been, Robert Carlyle brought us a "comfort Sherlock." The kind of Sherlock Holmes that I'd love to find in my kitchen making a sandwich some evening after having a pleasant evening with a date who was still asleep back in the bedroom. (Okay, so that date part is just the icing on the Watson cake.)  I was really thinking this Watson might leave his current love interest and start chasing cases with Sherlock Holmes, but no! This Holmes lets Watson get on with his life . . . even if Holmes does suggest that Mary Morstan and John Watson might really be the couple that should be togther.

I happy with this new Sherlock Holmes. And his secret mission to deal with that very real problem we have with the uber-rich right now. I'm looking forward to his eventual return.

Just Watson's Grandparents?

 In all my years as a Sherlockian, and lately a Watsonian podcaster, I have heard many a conversation and read many a thought on John H. Watson's sad brother and his late father. The watch scene in The Sign of the Four has etched that one into Sherlockian minds like the pawnbroker's scratched ticket number mentioned in that same scene. But in all that time, I've never heard anyone speak of Watson's grandparents.

Tonight's library group discussion of "The Adventure of the Empty House" brought a particular line from that story to the fore: 

"The face was turned half-round, and the effect was that of one of those black silhouettes which our grandparents loved to frame."

Tracing a person's profile on to black paper and then cutting it out was an nice, low-cost way to do something like a portrait before photography was a thing. The middle and lower classes could afford to hang such a shadow portrait of a loved one on their wall in the Victorian era, and apparently Watson's grandparents were fond of the form. The idea that a young John H. Watson's silhouette was once hung upon their wall is intriguing.

Silhouettes of Sherlock Holmes, inspired by that window shade in "Empty House" or not, have long been a part of Sherlockian culture going back a long ways. How far back? Well, let me propose a first silhouette of Sherlock Holmes that goes back long before anyone ever read of him. Because what did Watson write?

"... one of those black silhouettes which OUR grandparents loved to frame."

And who was he with when that "our" came up?

Sherlock Holmes.

Sounds a little bit like Holmes and Watson had the same grandparents, doesn't it?

Holmes and Watson as first cousins? Which would mean Watson only pretended he didn't know about Mycroft (like he doesn't seem to know about Moriarty when we know he did). And that Stamford bringing them together was a little different than we imagined: "Hey, I heard your cousin was looking for someone to share rooms with."

Well, it's a thought. Always something fun coming up at library discussion group night.

Explaining Sherlock Holmes

 Yesterday, someone asked me if I could explain Sherlock Holmes to them. It took me a bit to get back to that question, and I thought, "why not share what I come up with to answer that." So here we are.

Sherlock Holmes.

Originally a detective character in four novels and sixty short stories published between 1887 and 1927, Sherlock Holmes became the model for generations of fictional detectives to come. Working with the police, but not one of them, Holmes used his special talents for seeing details, working out theories, and presenting solutions in a dramatic fashion to solve mysteries in a very entertaining fashion. 

Most of his stories are narrated by his friend Dr. Watson, whom fans of Sherlock Holmes sometimes like to pretend actually wrote the stories instead of the true author, Arthur Conan Doyle. The level of actual historical detail that Doyle layered into the stories gives fans a window into the Victorian era in which Holmes worked, so that if Sherlock Holmes goes to a restaurant called "Simpson's" you can often look it up and learn all about it from historical sources. This makes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson almost seem like historical characters who actually existed, delighting their fans all the more and confusing a few folks along the way.

As time has gone by, versions of Sherlock Holmes in books, TV, and movies, have moved beyond the Victorian era and been used for drama, comedy, and nearly every other sort of entertainment you can name, including commercials and pornography. It was once said that there was more written about Sherlock Holmes than anyone besides Jesus and Napoleon, but at this point, I think he might be beating Napoleon. The images of a fore-and-aft cap and a magnifying glass, used by early actors to play Holmes on stage and screen, now symbolize detective-work when applied to anyone in cartoons or live action. Sherlock Holmes has, in the nearly one hundred and forty years since his creation, become a part of our culture across most of the world.

Okay, that's my answer. Most folks might have used an AI to come up with that at this point, but I needed the mental exercise and was very curious what the answer was myself. Having studied Sherlock Holmes for over forty years, it was fun to see what came out of my brain on the topic.

My kind of Sherlockiana

Sherlockiana is such a far-ranging hobby that one constantly has opportunities to look into the distance and go, "Why aren't I doing that thing?" Sometimes the answer is obvious, like watching a certain Will Ferrell movie or spending a year working out a detailed system for putting dates to Watson's cases is to people who aren't me. But then there's the opposite, when you do a thing and go "YES! This is why I am in this hobby!!!"

I had one of those times Monday night, recording the latest episode of Sherlock Holmes Is Real, when Talon King, Dr. Janet Peters, Mrs. Horace Thimbleburger, and Shecky Spielberg went on for an hour about "The Case of the Night Train Riddle" which they seem to believe is actual documentary footage of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solving a case. (It's the premise of the podcast later episodes, if you haven't bumped into it yet.) It'll be coming out later this week.

But if you type "Sherlock Holmes is real" into Google, the AI will immediately tell you, "No, Sherlock Holmes is not a real person, he is a fictional character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle." Because the AI does not know how to have fun, and is also kind of a jerk. It makes up its own pretend facts when it wants to, but doesn't seem to want to let others to play games or have a podcast whose name it disagrees with.

But, not being an AI myself, I do like to play silly games. Life is work. Sherlockiana is a nice escape from the chores of life and whether it's getting together with other Sherlockians or fiddling around with my own brand of Sherlockian scholarship, the most silly, the most absurd Sherlockian tangents have long been my favorite. It's what makes a Holmesian like Paul Thomas Miller such a treasure. 

We've come so far since Rex Stout simply gender-bending John Watson was the height of Sherlockian hilarity. So far! These days we have things like Mike McSwiggin finding the funny in Sherlockian chronology, of all things. The list of Sherlockians who have made me laugh is tempting to get into here, but we all have different folks who catch us with the right silliness at the right moment. It's been woven into our culture from the earliest days.

Ronald Knox, Christopher Morley . . . they were not taking this thing seriously at all. It took time and academia to push those borders. I get it -- some of my first Sherlockian writings were term papers where I had to be serious to get a grade. But that's not where the best stuff is for this little black duck. So here's to the fun bits! Hope yours are many and just the best.

We Come To This Place . . .

 I see Nicole Kidman a lot. Sometimes once a week. Sometimes more.

I'm referring, of course, to her monologue before every movie shown at the local AMC theater. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a link to it. Her monologue is like part of a church ritual that brings the faithful together for what is about to take place. Is she turning AMC audiences into a cult? Could very well be. But being in a certain other fandom cult, I know cults aren't always about sexual slavery and drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.

"We come to this place . . ." Nicole begins, eventually closing with ". . . stories feel perfect and powerful. Because here [dramatic pause] they are."

A lot of that speech applies to Sherlock Holmes as well as AMC Theaters. Not all stories, like all movies, are actually perfect or powerful. A whole lot of them suck. But even the bad catch some of the radiance of the good, elevating them at least to a level where they get noticed.

But lately, with Sherlock Holmes and this hobby we call Sherlockian, I've begun to ponder why we do come to this place. It's a large and diverse city-in-miscrocosm of a hobby, with neighborhoods that each have their own personality, posh venues, long-standing institutions, and back alleys that can make our Sherlockopolis look a bit different for each of its citizens. It may look like one single entity from a distance, but, oh, it is not even close to the simplicity of what any one view can take in.

And we all come to this place, this Sherlockopolis, for our own reasons. Community, connections, creative outlets, and, primarily, the chance to go somewhere outside our normal lives. And since it's a place of imagination, it can be whatever we need it to be . . . for us, for our own escape from the day-to-day. But there are other minds, with other imaginings here too. John Watson's everyman quality, spread across a world of people, makes him a secret legion of perceived John Watsons.

One of the best terms to come to any fandom in recent decades . . . and the Sherlockopolis is a fandom city, make no mistake about that . . . is "headcanon." Headcanon is the simple acknowledgement that we all have our own interpretation of the characters and stories that we share with the world. There are, of course, those who are sure their headcanon is actual Canon, whether due to innocence or narcissism, and they do like to interrupt a conversation to speak their truth on occasion. But its their truth, not always ours, and not what we came to this place for.

We come to this place for the things we share. The things we enjoy together. The things we want to learn together. Some of us may be like farmers, who enjoy living outside the city and growing ideas, writings, art, or presentations, but every now and then we have to come to town to share our produce, talk to the other farmers, and catch up on the news. Or take a little vacation there.

But our Sherlockopolis has no Nicole Kidman, framing our coming experience with a little monologue that just will not go away before every outing. We have to decide why we come to this place on our own.

And sometimes that bears thinking about.