Welcome

Welcome! Like the book of the same name, this blog is an eclectic collection of Sherlockian scribblings based on more than a half-century of reading Sherlock Holmes. Please add your own thoughts. You can also follow me on Twitter @DanAndriacco and on my Facebook fan page at Dan Andriacco Mysteries. You might also be interested in my Amazon Author Page. My books are also available at Barnes & Noble and in all main electronic formats including Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iBooks for the iPad.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Tincture of Conan Doyle


Approximately half the people I know, from my physical therapist's receptionist to a journalist friend who canceled a luncheon meeting last week, have taken sick this cold and snowy winter. I wonder if they know about Christopher Morley's magic elixer?

The founder of the Baker Street Irregulars once wrote:

What opiate can best abate
     Anxiety and toil?
Not aspirins, nor treble gins,
     Nor love, nor mineral oil --
My only drug is a good long slug
     Of Tincture of Conan Doyle.

But the great adventure writer Robert Louis Stevenson, a fellow Scot, made the same discovery long before Morley. In 1893, he wrote Arthur Conan Doyle from Samoa to laud The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

"That is the class of literature I like when I have the tooth-ache. As a matter of fact, it was pleurisy I was enjoying when I took the volume up; and it will interest you as a medical man to know that the cure was for the moment effectual."

It couldn't hurt, folks!

No comments:

Post a Comment