I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair.
And with those thirty-four words, I was hooked.
I was in fifth grade the first time I read a Sherlock Holmes story. Although I was familiar with the name (who isn’t?), I was under the mistaken impression that Holmes was a stuffy old man who smoked an incredibly ugly pipe and wandered around wearing a stupid-looking cap and cloak. (Curse you, pop-culture, for reducing poor Holmes to nothing more than a bland stereotype!) Nevertheless, I was still interested in reading the stories for their description of nineteenth-century London; even then I was a nerd for Victorian England.
Our teacher passed out a copy of The Adventures, but told us we were only going to study one: “The Red-Headed League.” We dutifully turned to the appropriate page and began to read.
I was engrossed from the very first sentence.
I loved everything about REDH: the culture of Victorian London, the patient but clueless figure of Dr. Watson, the inscrutable mystery of the stout red-headed pawnbroker - and above all, the enigmatic, energetic, oddly charming character of Holmes himself, so different from the Sherlock Holmes of popular culture.
Instead of forcing us to write a book report on the story, or something equally drab, our teacher had us stop half-way through and predict how Holmes would solve the mystery. I spent a long while scouting the text for clues. I remember lying on the floor with the book and combing the story over line-by-line. I wish I could find what I wrote; it would be incredibly amusing to read now. I do know that my guesses were partially accurate, because the teacher praised me for paying such close attention and getting so much of it right, but unfortunately I ultimately fell into the error of thinking that Spaulding had artificial kneecaps, and that was why Ross left the address that he did, and why Holmes glanced at Spaulding’s knees when asking for directions to the Strand. Sigh. But I fell in love, anyway. Before the week was out, I was at the public library hauling home the 1200-page Complete Sherlock Holmes.
I started from the beginning and plowed all the way through. A couple of weeks after that, I knew I had to get my own copy. So I brought my mother to the book-store and she bought me one. I still have it. The last hundred pages are bent in a rather funky way (I dropped it once and the pages splayed) and the cover is stained with ketchup (I ate some fast-food once and accidentally squirted the book instead of the fries), but it is still in commission. The book was such a behemoth that I felt it deserved a name; I ended up naming it Sherlock and referring to it as a “he.” (Yes, I do occasionally sex my books.) I used to bring him to the lunch-room with me and prop him up next to my friends. I used to carry him on top of my head walking from class to class. And whenever I had those beastly standardized tests, I hauled Holmes along with me. No other book could provide better entertainment for the anxious moments stolen in between exams. The book let everybody know that I was a literature geek and proud of it, thanks much! (It could also, in a pinch, be used as a weapon.)
About a year ago I hauled Holmes out again during a period of illness. I hadn’t conducted a systematic study of the stories before; I had just read them for what they were and enjoyed them for what they were…in short, I did what Doyle intended his readers to do. But then I read about The Game, and I thought, oh, that might be fun… Indeed, it is much more than fun: it is addictive. The Sherlockian universe has become one of my (many) enjoyable little obsessions.
So many minutiae to consider and discover! There are the little questions (how do you determine how far parsley sinks into butter? what is the giant rat of Sumatra, and why is the world not prepared for it? why did Wisteria Lodge occur in 1892 when Holmes was supposedly dead? how did he get a key for the empty house? and why didn’t he ask about a key in A Study in Scarlet?) and the big questions (when was Holmes born? what did he do during his retirement? what were his parents like? what really happened during the Great Hiatus? did he ever fall in love, and if so, with whom?).
I make no claim to be an expert Sherlockian. I have no desire whatever to add a BSI to the end of my name. There are times when I am scandalously irreverent toward the Canon. I even (horror of horrors!) enjoy writing fan fiction about Holmes and Watson and their world. But I do have a deep abiding love for these stories and the culture that gave birth to them, and doesn’t that count for something? I think it should.
In this blog, I intend to include little scholarly “monographs” about famous Sherlockian conundrums, reviews of some Holmes-oriented books and movies, links to some of my favorite Sherlockian websites, questions gleaned while reading through the stories, and maybe even an essay or two about the culture of Victorian Britain. In short, a little bit of everything. I hope that someone somewhere will find something remotely interesting in this collection of assorted Holmesian ramblings.
In closing, I resort to the most clichéd of Sherlockian send-offs: “The game is afoot!”
Believe me to be,
Very sincerely yours,
M.
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