An Easter Egg So Big I Missed It

 

Frederic Door Steele illustration of Barker in "Retired Colourman"

“You see, Watson, it was perfectly obvious from the first,” Holmes says in “The Red-Headed League.” But Watson is not the only one who overlooks the obvious.

I recently wrote a blog post about all the Sherlockian Easter eggs in Will Thomas’s Barker & Llewelyn series in which I managed to miss the most obvious connection of all. And then Will called my attention to “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman.”

“It was undoubtedly the tall, dark man whom I had addressed in the street,” Watson tells Holmes in that story. “I saw him once more at London Bridge, and then I lost him in the crowd. But I am convinced that he was following me.”

“No doubt! No doubt!” Holmes replies.  “A tall, dark, heavily mustached man, you say, with gray-tinted sun-glasses?”

“Holmes, you are a wizard. I did not say so, but he had gray-tinted sun-glasses.”

“And a Masonic tie-pin?”

“Holmes!”

Tall? Check! Mustache? Check! Tinted glasses? Check! A Mason? Check! These are all characteristics of “private inquiry agent” Cyrus Baker.

And Holmes later says, “You had not met Barker, Watson. He is my hated rival upon the Surrey shore. When you said a tall dark man it was not difficult for me to complete the picture.”

Unfortunately, I am not Sherlock Holmes. But now that the picture has been completed for me, I will re-read the Barker & Llewelyn books with a new pleasure.   

A Series Packed with Sherlockian Easter Eggs

 

I just finished reading or re-reading all 15 of Will Thomas’s Barker & Llewelyn detective novels straight through in order. Man, what a ride!

The series is set in the late Victorian era and follows the adventures of two “private enquiry agents,” the Scottish Cyrus Barker and the Welsh Thomas Llewelyn. Barker’s eccentricities and Llewelyn’s brisk prose make comparison to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels and novellas inescapable. (One major difference is that, unlike Wolfe and Archie, Barker and Llewelyn age as the series progresses.)

 But I was struck by all Sherlockian Easter eggs. After the first few books, I started writing them down. Some of them are:

• Barker talking to Llewelyn echoes Holmes to Watson at least twice: “I never get your limits” in Anatomy of Evil and “You scintillate this morning” in Old Scores.
• In another familiar line, Barker says “It’s a bonny thing” in Heart of the Nile, just as Holmes does in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”
• Liam Grant frequents the Alpha Inn, “on the other side of Montague Street,” in Old Scores and Dance with Death just as Henry Baker did in the aforementioned “Carbuncle.” (In Heart of the Nile, however, the name is given as the Museum Tavern, which many scholars believe was the inspiration for the Alpha. I’ve been there, though only on the outside.)
• Dr. Anstruther in Hell Bay is either the doctor that Holmes said could take over Watson’s practice in “The Bascome Valley Mystery” or has the same name.
• Dr. Vandeleur is coroner throughout the series, sharing a name the killer in The Hound of the Baskervilles used as an alias.
• Barker's office is just past Cox and Co. Bank in Blood is Blood and many other stories, that being the bank where Watson’s battered tin dispatch box famously resides (“The Problem of Thor Bridge.”) 
• In n Death and Glory, the KKK sends watermelon seeds in an envelope, an action strongly reminiscent of “The Five Orange Pips.”  

There are other callbacks, but you get the idea. Is that a reason to read these books? Yes—it’s just not the only reason. The Barker and Llewelyn stories are highly entertaining and well worth the time, with interesting characters and compelling story lines.  

Sherlock Holmes A to Z

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the publication of a book that probably isn’t on your bookshelves but should be.

Matthew E. Bunson’s Encylopedia Sherlockiana : An A to Z Guide to the World of the Great Detective tends to be overshadowed by Jack Tracy’s better known though similarly named The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana. Even Bunson, in the introduction to his 1994 book, calls Tracy’s 1978 predecessor “brilliant.”

“Unlike that excellent tome, however,” he adds, “this encylcopedia is concerned not only with the Canon, but with the hundreds of related issues and topics that have been part of the evolution of Sherlockiana in the years following the cessation of Dr. Watson’s published accounts.”

One of the things I love about it is the charts. “The Disguises of Sherlock Holmes,” which I looked up recently when I was writing a talk, lists in chart form all said disguises and what stories they appeared it. (Tracy doesn’t have any entry on disguises.)

Other charts, just to cite a few examples, cover “Inspector Lestrade on Film and Television,” “Sherlock Holmes and Science Fiction,” “Major Plays Featuring Sherlock Holmes,” “Watson on Film and Television,” and the 8-page “Sherlock Homes in Film,” which spans the silent Sherlock Holmes Baffled to Without a Clue.

In his introduction, John Bennett Shaw called Encylopedia Sherlockiana “a well-planned and much needed book.” I quite agree. And at this point, 30 years on, an update would be a wonderful thing.

A Surprisingly Good Ripper

 

Just because a movie flopped, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. Case in point: A Study in Terror, the original Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper film. Although it failed to fill theaters when released in 1965, it holds up well all these decades later.

Thirty members and potential members of the Tankerville Club of Cincinnati (which has active participants from five states) viewed the film along with three shorter presentations at our Sherlockian Film Festival last Saturday. The historic Parkland Theatre, which the club rented for the occasion, was built as a vaudeville theater in 1881, the year Holmes and Watson met. Importantly, it also has a pub attached for pre-screening socializing.

Reaction to the film was highly positive, and vocally expressed through cheers and laughter (and not of derision). A Study in Terror has a good plot that is reasonably true to the characters, with many lines of dialogue drawn directly from the Canon.

John Neville and Donald Houston were fine as Holmes and Watson, and seeing a young Judi Dench was a treat. But Robert Morley was the greatest Mycroft ever! Physically, he looked the part but he also oozed the superiority one would expect of the elder Holmes. He was also the first to play Mycroft on the big screen.

Mike McSwiggin, Second Most Dangerous Member of the Tankerville Club, organized the film festival and procured an incredibly pristine version of A Study in Terror (don’t ask me how) that added to the joy. 

Your mileage may vary, of course, and this film may not be to your taste, but it seemed to be the hit of the day. 

The other features each had their attractions -- Christopher Plummer in "Silver Blaze," Douglas Wilmer in "The Beryl Coronet," and most notably Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as Dorlock Homes and Dr. Watson in the classic cartoon “Deduce You Say!”

Plotting My Mysteries with Sherlock Holmes

Recently I had the honor of being asked to give a Zoom talk on mystery plotting to Capital Crime Writers, based in Toronto. Art Pittman invited me specifically because of my association with the world of Sherlock Holmes as well as the more than 20 mystery novels I’ve written.

And that set me to thinking about how my mystery writing about an amateur sleuth has been influenced by the greatest detective of all. T.S. Eliot wrote that “Every writer owes something to Holmes.” I owe him a lot.

I don’t recall what won my heart when I borrowed The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes (an anthology) from the Cincinnati Public Library at the age of 9 or 10. But as an adult I can recognize that the Holmes stories excel in character, writing, plot, and setting.

It’s the unique character of Sherlock Holmes that has made his name and his markers—the deerstalker, the pipe, and the magnifying glass—instantly recognizable throughout the world 137 years after his debut in A Study in Scarlet.  But the sturdy and reliable Dr. Watson is an equally memorable character, and my narrator Jeff Cody probably wouldn’t exist without him. In addition, Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, was fiction’s first master criminal.

But Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing in the Holmes stories is also first-rate, whether it’s descriptions of weather, immortal maxims such (“You see, but you do not observe”) or great dialogue (“That was the curious incident.”) Conan Doyle is also a writer of great beginnings and great endings; see “His Last Bow” for peerless examples of both.

I’m sure that my four Holmes pastiches (two novels and two short stories) and my three other novels that feature Holmes fall far short of that standard. “We can but try—the motto of the firm,” as Holmes said in “The Creeping Man.”

But most of my fictional efforts have been concentrated on the Sebastian McCabe & Jeff Cody series, with my 15^th book about them—The Magician’s Trunk— coming soon. All of their adventures are baskets full of Sherlockian Easter eggs. That’s most obvious in the titles and plots of No Police Like Holmes, Holmes Sweet Holmes, The 1895 Murder, The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore, and No Ghosts Need Apply, but is true of the other books as well.

Right now, with the 2025 book already written (Ding Done! The Witch is Dead), I’m plotting Mac and Jeff’s 2026 outing. And I’m inspired by a line in “The Red Circle.” When Holmes meets Mr. Leverton, of Pinkerton’s American Detective Agency, he greets him by asking, “The hero of the Long Island cave mystery?” Well, this is a mystery indeed—because Long Island has no caves. How did that inspire a McCabe & Cody mystery set in the small town of Erin, Ohio?

Stay tuned and find out in the book that will be called Too Many Suspects.

Sherlockians on the Turf in Chicago

Sherlockians "on track" after the 65th running of the Silver Blaze racea

Saturday saw the 65^th running of the Chicago “Silver Blaze” race, now jointly sponsored by the Torists International and the Watsonians, two scion societies of the Baker Street Irregulars. It’s the longest running such race in the country. And no trainers were killed in the process.

Race day details at Hawthorne Race Court were flawlessly presided over by Phil Cunningham of the Watsonians, ably assisted by his wife Loraine. The crowd included a healthy contingent of Illustrious Clients from Indianapolis, who designated the event as their annual field trip. The Silver Blaze race was the third of the day. Whichever horse won, neither Ann nor I bet on him.

Weekend festivities for Sherlockians gathered in Chicagoland began the night before with an informal cocktail hour gathering at a Marriott hotel, followed by a dinner meeting of the Torists International at Palermo’s of 63^rd, where the food and hospitality were top-notch. Co-Chief Stewards of the Torists, Linda Crohn and Jon Shimberg, had everything incredibly well organized.

Dinner speaker Monica Schmidt put John Straker on the metaphorical couch with her talk on “A Horse of a Different Color: The Double Life of John Straker.” I was honored to be one of three Sherlockians offering toasts, along with Louise Haskett (to Mrs. Straker) and Dino Argyropoulos (to Silver Blaze).

My toast was to “The Dog in the Night-Time,” and here it is:

What did the dog in “Silver Blaze” do to warrant fame? Absolutely nothing! And yet allusions to this inactive canine are to be found in legal writings, crime fiction, and popular culture.

That master researcher Ira Matetsky reports well over a hundred U.S. court decisions mentioning “Silver Blaze” or a metaphorical non-barking dog—a number that continues to grow each year.

And as early as 1928, in his “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” S.S. Van Dine listed among the clichés to be avoided, “The dog that doesn’t bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.”

Fast forward 66 years to a cartoon published on January 28, 1994. Charlie Brown is reading aloud to Snoopy from “Silver Blaze.” After he hears, “the dog did nothing in the night-time,” Snoopy thinks to himself, “My favorite part.”

Five generations of Sherlockians have agreed—it’s our favorite part, too. So let us raise our glasses to that idle, unnamed, and yet renowned dog who did nothing in the night-time.

The Torists meeting concluded with Ann Lewis singing “221B” to a tune of her own composition. It was beautiful, and incredibly moving—one of many highlights of a five-star weekend.

The Pleasure of Re-Reading

However, you define great literature, one its hallmarks is re-readability.

I recently re-read the first (1927) and the last (1958) of the Freddy the Pig books, a series about which I’ve written on this blog before. Those tales of the Bean Farm’s talking animals may not be literature as snobs define it, but they are wonderful. It was interesting to see how consistent the books are—and how much I still enjoy them.

Rex Stout once said about a third of his reading was re-reading. I can’t say that, but I do enjoy re-reading favorite books. And yet, that can change.

I still enjoy Stout’s Nero Wolfe books. Ditto Ellery Queen (even when I see their flaws) and Agatha Christie. I blush to admit that I re-read two of my own mystery novels recently and read favorite passages out loud to my long-suffering wife. On the other hand, I find that I have lost my taste for John Dickson Carr.

In the field of detective fiction—if you consider it fiction—surely the most re-readable body of works is the four novels and 56 short stories of the Sherlock Holmes Canon. I’ve been reading them for 60 years, and each time is a delight. For me, that’s the one fixed point in a changing age.    

More on Freddy the Pig:

https://bakerstreetbeat.blogspot.com/2013/12/fredddy-gateway-drug.html

https://bakerstreetbeat.blogspot.com/2013/04/holmess-greatest-disciple.html

https://bakerstreetbeat.blogspot.com/2012/04/sherlockian-adventures-of-freddy-pig.html

https://bakerstreetbeat.blogspot.com/2019/04/freddy-and-me-and-baker-street-journal.html

Holmes, Doyle, & Fun in Dayton

Fun and Affordable -- that the annual Holmes, Doyle, & Friends Conference in Dayton, which was held last Saturday, March 23. I'm still basking in the afterglow.

The "Dayton Symposium," as it is often called, has been held under various names, in various places, and under various sponsorships since 1981, making it the granddaddy of all Sherlockian conferences that is still going strong. The Agra Treasurers of Dayton have been the sponsors since it became Holmes, Doyle, & Friends a decade ago. 

Full disclosure: I'm the Programme Chairman, which means that I get to round up the eight speakers. It's a fun job. The speakers are the heart of the conference, although the vendors are almost just as important. Each speaker gets 20 minutes to speak and 10 to answer questions. The day really moves along.

There's a bit of a family feeling as well because some of the participants have been coming from far-flung parts of the United States for years. As a surprise this time, we celebrated Chicago Sherlockian  Bob Sharfman's 88th birthday with a cake during the afternoon break.

If you've never been to a Sherlockian conference, HD&F is a great place to start. And if you're already on the circuit, Dayton should be one of your stops. The 2025 conference will be held sometime next March. Stay tuned! 

Bob Sharfman and Ann Lewis with Bob's cake

A Screwball Mystery with a Sherlockian Angle

The Hounds of the Hollywood Baskervilles, by Elizabeth Crowns, is a mystery novel set during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Struggling young private detectives Babs Norman and Guy Brandt are trying to keep their business alive by unmasking the force behind the dognapping of Asta from the Thin Man movies and Basil Rathbone’s cocker spaniel, among other canines.

Hijinks ensue, not the least of which is the embarrassment that follows “Sherlock Holmes” losing his dog. For good reason the book has been compared to Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s. We put the author under the magnifying glass to learn more. 

Q. This book is much different from your Time Traver Professor trilogy. What prompted you to go in that direction?

Boy, oh boy is it different! That’s saying it mildly. Obviously, while having Arthur Conan Doyle as one of the featured characters in the Time Travel Professor series and, by the way, there will be one more book before that adventure is complete, I read not only about him and what he wrote in the Sherlockian Canon, but many of his other books like The Lost World, obvious from the most recent book in that series, A War in Too Many Worlds. So much of it is a mashup between that and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. Those books, however, are in the “alternate history” genre which is a subgenre of science fiction and fantasy.

I’ve been veering away from that direction and into good old-fashioned traditional historical mysteries and started with contemporaries or inspirations for Doyle, like Poe and Agatha Christie, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to divorce myself from the humor. My agent and I got into a debate when it came time to pitch this project to publishers. She wanted to label my novel as a cozy, and I disagreed. Usually when I describe a cozy mystery to someone unfamiliar with the term, I say, “Think of Murder She Wrote.” Cozies might have dead bodies or other crimes, but there never is a lot of blood or violence and no graphic sex. It’s always implied or behind closed doors.

When I think of a cozy, it has an amateur sleuth. It takes place in a quaint small town. It’s a Hallmark mystery with someone who owns a bakery or works as a librarian. It’s usually a female who is dating the town’s sheriff, and she has a “talking” cat or dog. Yes, I know I’m exaggerating about the talking pet, but there are quite a few cozies where someone might have a magical or psychic cat—but not in my books. As Sherlock Holmes would say in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, “…no ghosts need apply,” but there are authors who do that, and some do the paranormal element well. I have a hero dog in my book, but he’s more like a self-taught search and rescue dog and smarter than the actual K-9 on the police force.

Hounds of the Hollywood Baskervilles falls into the subgenre of soft-boiled crime, versus hardboiled noir, because it involves two professional private eyes in the large city of Los Angeles. They might be young and inexperienced and sometimes make blunders, but they have legit licenses and this is the way they make their living. In noir, everyone seems bad-to-the-bone with a bleak ending. Hounds has a feel-good ending, and many of the characters will prove themselves worthy of redemption.

Q. Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, William Powell, and Myrna Loy are among the major characters in this book, with Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart in minor roles. Dashiel Hammett and Lillian Hellman also appear. How long did you spend researching the people and the era of this book before you began writing?

I laugh when I’m asked to do an author interview and one of the questions is: “Do you have a hobby, or what do you do in your spare time?” Who has spare time? Writing historical fiction, which I can’t seem to tear myself away from, takes an enormous amount of research. The name I go by in my ASH investiture is A Collector of Obscure Volumes from The Adventure of the Empty House. As you can imagine, I own a crazy library collection beyond Doyle. Besides a lot of nonfiction and biographies, I try to read a lot of fiction written in the time period that my novel is in and, of course, I watch a lot of Turner Classic Movies. A little less than two years ago, I won a trivia contest at a prominent mystery convention. Apparently, I was the only one in the entire room who had read the book version of The Thin Man and knew a specific thing different in the book than from the movie. I’d tell you, but if you read my book you’ll find out.

Q. Which came first—the plot or the research? In other words, how much of the storyline emerged from immersing yourself in that time and place?

The answer to that question will surprise you. Obviously, in writing my alternate history series with Doyle, I had to read the Canon over and over. Besides A Study in Scarlet, where Holmes meets Watson for the first time, the other stand-out story for me has always been The Hounds of the Baskervilles. It was also the first of the fourteen Rathbone-Bruce films. What’s ironic is that both Rathbone and Doyle had something in common—they hated being typecast. Doyle wanted to kill off Holmes and write other things. Rathbone wanted to return to theater and Shakespeare.

But getting back to your question, my background is in film production and film history. One of my best friends, who sadly is no longer with us, used to be an actress in Hollywood during the forties. She gave me the legal rights to her life story, but the challenge of putting those adventures into print was she wasn’t famous. However, she was the type of person who always read mysteries and watched everything from Murder She Wrote on television to TCM to NCIS and Law & Order. If she wasn’t watching a mystery on television, she watched Animal Planet or Nat Geo Wild, because she was a major animal lover. One day, the lightbulb went off in my head. I told her, “I figured out how to write your story. We’ll turn you into an actress-turned-PI and you will solve mysteries. How does that sound?” She loved that idea and gave me her blessing. She was my inspiration for Babs Norman who would solve celebrity cases. Who would be her first big client? That’s where my Holmes background came in. During the forties, Basil Rathbone was synonymous with Sherlock Holmes in Hollywood.

Q. From the title onward, there are a lot of Sherlockian references and Easter eggs in this book—such as characters named Jefferson Hope and Wiggins—as well as Canonical quotes. Is it fair to say this book owes a lot to our Baker Street hero?

Dan, you know the answer to that. But of course! Also to Basil Rathbone. As a kid, I grew up in Cincinnati just like you. Having only three network channels on an analog television set, my only exposure to Holmes was through the old Basil Rathbone films on Saturday afternoons or late at night. William Gillette? Who was he? I didn’t luck into Granada Television or Jeremy Brett until much later, and I had a lot of catching up to do.

Q. What’s next for the B. Norman Agency?

In the last chapter of Hounds, the reader discovers that one of the missing dogs belonged to Humphrey Bogart. He and one of my hero private detectives exchange banter and business cards. So now, I’ll let you play Sherlock Holmes. If Hounds takes place and solves the crime towards the end of 1940, in what famous movie does Humphrey Bogart star which is filmed and released in 1941? That’ll clue you in to what the next major crime novel is about. Now, I’ll keep my mouth shut and let you do the sleuthing.

Q. What question haven’t I asked that you want to answer?

You might run out of space. Just kidding. If you want updates, sign up for my free monthly newsletter at elizabethcrowens.com. Don’t worry, I won’t spam you. Who has time if you’re writing historical mysteries? Newsletter subscribers also get inspirational insights and free eBooks of Best of the Caption Contests based on a popular post I have on Facebook at facebook.com/thereel.elizabeth.crowens. If you send me a FB request, send me a private message to say you heard about me through Dan’s blog so I know you’re not a robot. You can also find me on Instagram.com/ElizabethCrowens and x.com/ECrowens.

A Children Mystery Series Worth Revisiting

Encountering Christian Monggaard, a Danish Sherlockian, at Baker Street Irregulars Weekend in New York last month led me to renew my acquaintance with some old friends—the Three Investigators.

Christian’s essay on “Sherlock Holmes and the Three Investigators” in the Autumn 2021 issue of the Baker Street Journal explores the connection between this children’s mystery series and Sherlock Holmes. Suffice it to say that those connections were significant over the 43-year run of the original series, from 1964 to 1987.

I just happen to own the entire series, a gift of our daughter who picked them up at a flea market, and I read many of them when I was young. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up #11, The Mystery of the Talking Skull, the last book written by the series creator, Robert Arthur, Jr., and was soon back in the small town of Rocky Beach, California, with Jupiter Jones, his friends Bob and Pete, and the introducer of their early adventures—Alfred Hitchcock!

It was a delightful book, most of all for me because it involves a magician’s trunk. And the title of my next McCabe & Cody mystery novel is The Magician’s Trunk! Aside from that, the tale is full of twists and turns on its way to a surprising and satisfying solution.

Then I read series finale #43, The Mystery of Cranky Collector by M.V. Carey. I found it entertaining, but somehow lacking the spirit of the Robert Arthur book. The former was a better mystery with more interesting elements—a magician, a talking skull, the surprise ending. There were more ingredients in the soup, even though the number of words was slightly less.

 “The Robert Arthur books are the best,” Christian agreed. “He deliberately set out to make a series for kids that had a certain literary quality—at least compared with Stratemeyer’s Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.”

If you’ve never read the early Three Investigators mysteries, they are well worth a couple of hours of your time.