T. S. Eliot and Sherlock Holmes

Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fantasy of his existence."
-- T.S. Eliot, in a review of The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, 1929

Perhaps there's a reason for that, T.S.

Many commentators have noted T.S. Eliot's devotion to Sherlock Holmes. For example, the great poet's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats contains a verse about "Macavity: The Mystery Cat," who is identified in the last line as "the Napoleon of Crime."

In his verse play, Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot has a long passage obviously drawn from the Musgrave Ritual. And the use of the word "Grimpen" in the poem "Little Gidding" seems to come from the Great Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

But I may have discovered a new connection between Eliot and Holmes.

In "The Adventure of the Priory School," Holmes notes that his bank is Capital and Counties on Oxford Street. Leslie S. Klinger's New Annotated Sherlock Holmes points out that Capital and Counties, also ACD's bank, was acquired by Lloyds Bank in 1918.

Young T.S. Eliot worked at Lloyds from 1917 to 1925. Presuming that Holmes continued his relationship with Capital and Counties into his retirement years, and stayed with the successor bank, T.S. Eliot could have been his banker.

Someone else may have already made this connection, but I am not aware of it.

Dear Mr. Eliot, Dear Mr. Starrett

Even a non-collector like me is likely to return from Baker Street Weekend in New York with a few literary gems. And I did!

My most unusual acquisition, perhaps, was a 20-page pamphlet called “Conferment by Needle,” Number 69 in a limited edition run of 230 copies printed by Ronart Press Ltd., St. Louis, MO, in 1980. It contains an exchange of letters, just one each, between Vincent Starrett and T.S. Eliot. Michael Murphy wrote the introduction.

Starrett is best known, of course, as a great Sherlockian and Eliot as a great poet (my favorite of the 20^th century). I’ve written about both many times on this blog, but not together.

On April 1, 1956, Easter Sunday, Starrett wrote to Eliot to ask him to accept honorary membership in the Hounds of the Baskerville (sic), a Chicago-based scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars. Starrett founded the Hounds in 1943 and gave himself the title of “Needle.”

Eliot wrote back on April 10, 1956: “I thank you for your letter of Easter Sunday, & beg to express my appreciation of the honour of being installed as an honorary Baskerville Hound. It is with great pleasure that I accept.” He then noted that he was already an honorary member of two other Holmes societies, “so I hope that amongst the various septs or divisions of the Baker Street Irregulars there is no regulation preventing pluralism.”

The poetry of T.S. Eliot is replete with Sherlockian influences, as I’ve noted before, but it’s a joy to hold in my hands the evidence that he was not only a Sherlockian (or perhaps Holmesian) but a member of the Sherlock Holmes community.   

One of my other weekend acquisitions was a copy of The Last Bookman, a handsome volume about Starrett edited by Peter Ruber. More about that in a future blog. Both the pamphlet and the book came from The BSI Trust, which has an enormous collection of Sherlockian tomes at great prices. To present your want list or see what’s available, email Denny Dobry at dendobry@ptd.net.

Quintessential Quote #18

"Every writer owes something to Holmes."
-- T.S. Eliot, in The Criterion, 1929

Thomas Stearns Eliot, the great Anglo-American poet, was born on this date in 1888, the year in which The Sign of Four and other Holmes-Watson adventures took place.

He wrote the above in a review of The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories in which his affection for the Canon was obvious. Also obvious is that his own writing was much influenced by the Master.

The best known link, perhaps, is Eliot's verse "Macavity: The Mystery Cat" in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, upon which the musical Cats was based. There's no doubt who Macavity is, because the verse ends with the phrase "the Napoleon of Crime."

In Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral, there's an enigmatic exchange between Beckett and The Second Tempter that closely resembles the Musgrave Ritual.

And in his poem Easter Coker, Eliot uses the word "grimpen," which apparently has its origin in the Great Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

For years I have kept a copy of Murder in the Cathedral in my Sherlock Holmes library. Perhaps I should move my copy of T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays there as well.

Side note: I am now writing a sequel to No Police Like Holmes which takes place during this very week of September, 2011. In it we learn that today is also the birthday of my narrator/"Watson," Thomas Jefferson Cody. He just narrowly escaped having Stearns for a middle name!

If you have read No Police Like Holmes, please write a review on Amazon.com, no matter where you purchased it. Thanks!

More of T.S. Eliot on Sherlock Holmes

I've written a lot (too much?) on this blog about T.S. Eliot. He's also a character in The Amateur Executioner, my 1920s detective novel. I'm fascinated with him and with his wonderful poetry. So I was fascinated to read some quotes about Sherlock Holmes from Eliot via Christopher Morley.

In The Standard Doyle Company, edited by Steven Rothman, we find that on Christmas Day 1948 Morley was reading Eliot's lecture From Poe to Valery, privately printed as a Christmas present by Harcourt, Brace & Co. In his "Clinical Notes" column for The Baker Street Journal, Morley quoted a paragraph:

            Conan Doyle owes much to Poe, and not merely to Monsieur Dupin of The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Sherlock Holmes was deceiving Watson when he told him that he had bought his Stradivarius violin for a few shillings at a second-hand shop on Tottenham Court Road. There is a close similarity between the musical exercises of Holmes and those of Roderick Usher: those wild and irregular improvisations which, while on one occasion they sent Watson off to sleep, must have been excruciating to any ear trained for music. 

Morley added a brilliant commentary: "Of course Tom Eliot has long been a disciple of Holmes; which is one of the tests of a genuine High Brow: to distinguish the immortal elements in work apparently only popular."

Who is your favorite High Brow?

Holmes and Hercule

In a few weeks, Sept. 9, I will have the distinct honor of speaking to the Cincinnati Branch of the English Speaking Union on the subject of "Sherlock Holmes and the Development of Detective Fiction."

My thesis will be that all mystery writers and their sleuths are more indebted to Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes than most people realize.

T. S. Eliot, reviewing The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories for The Criterion in 1929, wrote, “Every writer owes something to Holmes.” And who am I to argue with T.S. Eliot?

With some writers this is quite obvious. In a previous blog post I have noted that the early Ellery Queen was hailed as "the logical successor to Sherlock Holmes." Consider now Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.

Christie tells in her autobiography how she went about creating a detective hero for her first novel, written during World War I: “There was Sherlock Holmes, the one and only – I should never be able to emulate him.” Is that why Poirot is so short – because Holmes is so tall?

When it came to creating a name for her detective, she recalled: “He would have a rather grand name – one of those names that Sherlock Holmes and his family had. Who was it his brother had been? Mycroft Holmes. How about calling my little man Hercules?”

In methods, too, there was a similarity. What is Poirot’s famous appeal to his “little gray cells” but logic, which is also Holmes’ stock-in-trade?

Early on Poirot even had his own "Watson" in the form of Captain Hastings, who is not nearly as astute the original Watson. In fact, at times he out-Bruces Nigel Bruce!

What does your favorite modern-day sleuth owe to the Master?

The Love Song of Sherlock Holmes

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Okay, I admit that those opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” include possibly the strangest simile in all of literature. Still, I’ve been madly in love with that poem since I first read it in 1969 or 1970. And I didn’t even know then that Eliot was a Sherlockian.

I’ve written often on this blog about Eliot’s passion for the great detective. Put “Eliot” into the search engine on the upper left of this page and you’ll get 17 blog post hits. But just recently I stumbled onto a connection between Holmes and the Prufrock poem that was new to me, although not new at all.   

Jill Vig wrote a delightful essay on “The Love Song of Sherlock Holmes” in the March 1975 issue of The Baker Street Journal. Seldom has anyone played The Game with such equal amounts of wit and scholarship (22 footnotes in four pages).

“I think it is time that we re-examine ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ . . . discarding the long-held notion of Prufrock as an impotent and senile old man and substituting instead the character of the ageing Sherlock Holmes,” Vig writes. She re-envisions the poem not as interior monologue but as a dialog between Holmes and Watson, referring at each point back to the Canon. And it works!

She ends with:

“A love song? In a way, for although Holmes does not know the passion of love, he despises crime, which hurts mankind, and he is willing to give his live to end evil. We should realize that this is love in the fullest sense of the word.”

I ran into this marvelous monograph while searching for something else in the eBSJv2, which contains all issues of the journal from 1946 through 2011 in PDF on DVD. If you don’t have a copy, you should. It’s an invaluable research tool. You can order one from the BSJ at: https://bakerstreetirregulars.com/2013/01/06/ebsj-v2/

P.D. James on Sherlock Holmes

The late British mystery writer P.D. James made some interesting comments about Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in her memoir Time to be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography.

The book, which I picked up recently at a library sale, is a diary of her 77^th year, interspersed with commentary and looks backward. On Wednesday, Aug. 13, 1997, she had dinner with Valerie Eliot, widow of T.S., at the Grill Room of the Café Royal. “Valerie talked about T.S. Eliot and there life together and I listened, ate and felt relaxed and cool. Valerie dropped me home at about eleven.”

That’s the end of the entry. That afternoon, she records, Baroness James had finished and sent to The Independent newspaper a review of Martin Booth’s The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle. After a brief outline of ACD’s complex character, she notes:

But neither virtue nor eccentricity would have justified this or his previous biographies if he hadn’t created Sherlock Holmes, the best known of all fictional detectives. The world appeal of the stories is extraordinary. I remember some years ago being in Tokyo to open an exhibition of crime writing. I was visited in my hotel room by members of the Tokyo chapter of the Sherlock Holmes Society. They came in beaming, all wearing deerstalker hats and shooting jackets and smoking meerschaum pipes. What, I wondered, could they possibly have in common with this fictional Victorian archetypal hero. Martin Booth points out that the plots of the stories may be ingenious, but they are hardly credible. Conan Doyle didn’t care very much about details. The dog that didn’t bark in the night is less mysterious than Dr. Watson’s dog, which disappeared completely. The chronology is sometimes confused, parts of London are inaccurately described and the writing is occasionally slapdash. None of this worried either Conan Doyle or his readers. A modern crime writer could wish that readers today were as accommodating. As the author himself wrote, “Accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matters is that I hold my readers.” He certainly did hold them, and he does so still.

Some years before, in 1984, P.D. James had been the Guest of Honour at the Sherlock Holmes Society of London’s annual dinner. In her talk that night, as related by Roger Johnson in a contemporary account, she was more effusive in her praise of the Great Detective. She proclaimed herself an enthusiast and great admirer of Holmes. To quote Roger, “She was here to pay homage, for there is no writer of detective stories, in England at least, who does not owe a great debt to Sherlock Holmes and to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whether or not that debt is acknowledged. It’s all there: the scientific method, the omniscient detective, the slight mistrust of

officialdom, the character of the narrator to point the difference between normality and genius, the evocation of horror and above all the wonderful sense of place – the real street and the real apartment, the real people. We accept the fantastic in these stories because it is rooted in reality.”

She certainly did not go too far in acknowledging the debt that detective story writers owe to Holmes and his creator. Valier Eliot’s husband went even further years earlier. “Every writer owes something to Holmes,” the great poet wrote in 1929.

Back to 1895

“It’s no mystery why we still love Sherlock,” said the headline in the USA Today insert of my morning newspaper yesterday.

But that’s nonsense. The popularity of Sherlock Holmes has always been a mystery, and there’s no single satisfactory solution to it.

I’ve always felt that a big part of his attraction is the way Holmes transports us to what Vincent Starrett called “a romantic chamber of the heart . . . a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895.”

“Sherlock Holmes reminds us always of the pleasant externals of nineteenth-century London,” T.S. Eliot said in his review of The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories in 1929. “I believe he may continue to do so even for those who cannot remember the nineteenth century . . .”

As usual, Eliot was right.

William Bolitho summed it up in an epigram when he said of Holmes, “He is the spirit of a town and a time.”

Even Conan Doyle seemed to agree. He wrote five out of his nine volumes of Holmes stories and novels in the twentieth century, but set all but a handful back in the late Victorian era where Sherlock Holmes belongs.

Yes, 12 of the 14 Basil Rathbone – Nigel Bruce films were mid-century modern, set in the years in which they were produced. But that never weakened my belief that Holmes was a period piece.

Then along came the cult hit Sherlock from the BBC, followed by CBS’s Elementary. Both TV shows brought Holmes into the twenty-first century, more popular than ever. I began to question my certainty that time and space had so much to do with enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes.

But wait! Now the BBC series is apparently going back to 1895 (or thereabouts) in a Christmas special. Maybe I had it right after all.

One thing I’m sure of: Ian McKellen’s statement (if accurately quoted by a reporter) that Holmes is popular “not because of the books, but because of the spinoffs and the very fine actors who have played him.” On the contrary, it’s only because of the original books that Sherlock Holmes has survived some truly dreadful pastiches and lame actors.

What do you think?

 

Gnomes Sweet Gnomes for the Collector

My Sherlock Gnomes

My wife Ann and I just had the great pleasure of spending a long Sherlockian weekend, bracketed my talk to the Red Circle of Washington, D.C., on Friday and attending a delightful meeting of Watson’s Tin Box of Ellicott City, MD, on Monday. It was great to see the faces of so many friends, and so many friendly faces.  

The Red Circle is presided over by Peter Blau, a wise and witty force of (benign) nature who has been a member of the Baker Street Irregulars since 1959. He explained that he doesn’t hold an office in the scion, however, so that he can’t be impeached! Although "DC" is part of its name, the group actually meets in Bethesda, MD, where Peter also lives. 

Peter’s collection of Sherlockiana is beyond description – at least, it’s beyond my description. Every shelf of his large and beautiful library contains gems I never even imagined. I’m not a collector, but I love to look at the collections of others.  

Perhaps my favorite item from our tour of the Blau shelves was the volume of Holmes stories containing the signature of its original owner – T.S. Eliot. Peter believes that when Eliot wrote the famous scene in Murder in the Cathedral based on the Musgrave Ritual, it was to this very book that the great poet went to refresh his memory of the ritual’s wording.

In addition to thousands of books, Peter also has memorabilia – lots and lots of memorabilia, from the tacky to the sublime. When Ann mentioned that she had bought me a Sherlock Gnomes statue for Father’s Day, and where to get it online, a new edition to the Blau collection was in the mail as soon as Peter could get to his computer.

As one of the worst villains in the entire Canon remarked to Dr. Watson, “If a man has a hobby he follows it up, whatever his other pursuits may be.”

My Favorite Sherlockians

When I was a lad, I used to ride the bus downtown on Saturdays to the main Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. It's four times bigger today, but even then it was a great library. At some point I was overjoyed to learn there that Sherlock Holmes was more than just nine volumes. The library also had books about the great detective written by people with names like Starrett and Baring-Gould. 

Those other books weren't primary sources, but they did help to make me a Sherlockian. Friend and fellow blogger Matt Laffey and I have been musing to each other about our favorite Sherlockians of the past. We decided to each post a list of our top five -- mine here, and Mr. Laffey over at his always1895.net blog. We agreed to two rules for our choices: they have to be real people, and they have to be no longer among the living.

In my case, the first four were mandatory. It was only the fifth that required some internal debate. In each case their accomplishments are many and my descriptions limited:

1. Monsignor Ronald A. Knox. His famous satirical essay, "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes," virtually launched the Higher Criticism of the Canon, otherwise known as The Game.

2. Christopher Morley. In addition to founding the Baker Street Irregulars in his Saturday Review of Literature column and nominating January 6 as the Master's birthday, he wrote (among dozens of Holmes pieces) "In Memorium: Sherlock Holmes," the peerless introduction to Doubleday's The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

3. Vincent Starrett. An original BSI member, this American man of letters wrote the landmark book, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, as well as perhaps the greatest of all pastiches, "The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet."

4. William S. Baring-Gould. His Sherlock Holmes of  Baker Street, which I first read as a youth, could be legitimately criticized as being too inventive and straying too far from source material. But Baring-Gould's scholarship in creating the original Annotated Sherlock Holmes is beyond quibble.

5. Edgar W. Smith. In a close choice, I round out my five with the first editor of The Baker Street Journal and Profile by Gaslight over one of his successors, Dr. Julian Wolff.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Five is such a small number that I have to add host of honorable mentions in alphabetical order. Perhaps I will detail their achievements another day.

T.S. Blakeney
Anthony Boucher
Gavin Brend
John Dickson Carr
August Derleth
T.S. Eliot
Howard Haycraft
James Holroyd
Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay)
S.C. Roberts
Dorothy L. Sayers
Rex Stout
Jack Tracy
Julian Wolff
 
More importantly, who are your Fab Five?

Collecting Sherlock Holmes: "It's the Stories"

Glen Miranker, left, in conversation with Otto Penzler

Otto Penzler, not a mystery writer but nevertheless one of the most significant figures in mystery fiction over the past half-century, amassed a collection of some 60,000 books in the genre.

Then he sold them all. He seemed sad about that as he and fellow collector Glen Miranker discussed “Reflections on Collectors and Collecting” at the “Building an Archive” symposium last weekend in Bloomington, IN.

The conference celebrated the move of the Baker Street Irregulars archives from Harvard University to the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. Many of the panels involved the disease known as bibliomania. Nicholas Basbanes, one of the panelists, wrote a book about the subject called A Gentle Madness.

This ailment, for which there is no known cure, causes otherwise sane people to acquire lots of books, and sometimes artefacts associated with the subject of those books.  

“Whatever it is, I’ve got some,” Peter Blau, one of the great collectors of Sherlockiana, said in an early panel. He acknowledged following in the footsteps of the late John Bennett Shaw, who famously admitted to collecting with all the selectivity of a vacuum cleaner.

(Having stayed at Peter’s house once, I know this is true. His library includes some of the same inexpensive items as mine – cheap trinkets, even! – along with, for example, a Holmes volume once owned by T.S. Eliot.)

But collecting is not just about things. “It’s the stories,” Peter said. And he’s a tremendous storyteller. He mentioned that he once had two copies of a particular multi-volume edition of the Canon. One was in better condition, and with dust jackets. But he sold that set and kept the one in poorer condition – because it had belonged to Dame Jean Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur’s daughter.

Otto Penzler is also a fascinating teller of tales. His discussion with Glen Miranker came after dinner, at the end of a jam-packed day that included a display of 221 Sherlockian objects at the Lilly Library. But I’m sure that no one nodded. For me, it was the piece de resistance of a memorable conference. 

Publisher, bookseller, editor – that’s Otto Penzler. He described how he backed into bookselling about 40 years ago: He began as a publisher. Eventually, he needed an office that wasn’t just a space in his apartment. Buying a building in Manhattan was cheaper than renting, so he bought a building. He had so much extra space in that building, he decided to fill it with a bookstore. 

He now owns five publishing companies. They subsidize the Mysterious Bookshop, which has never made a profit.

It’s the stories.  

This was on display at the Lilly Library 

The New Adventure of the Two Collaborators

Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote the libretto for a comic opera with his friend James M. Barrie. The result was a disaster. Audiences stayed away in droves. Barrie satirized the situation in a Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Two Collaborators," which Conan Doyle considered the best of all the Holmes parodies.

Undaunted by this discouraging precedent in Doylean history, Kieran McMullen and I joined forces to produce our new Sherlockian novel, The Amateur Executioner. Here's how it came about:

In plotting novels, I first write a chapter by chapter outline. This gives me a road map and assures me that I have enough material for a novel, even though I adjust it as I go along. Sometime in the past few years, probably before my first Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody novel was published, I wrote the outline for The Amateur Executioner. I think I started with that intriguing title and made up a story to fit it.

As I went forward with the McCabe - Cody series, I kept revisiting my outline for a very different kind of book -- one including the older Sherlock Holmes as a character but not the main character. I kept thinking two things: that it was a good plot,and that I didn't want to do all the research. Then I thought of Kieran.

From Holmes Sweet Holmes onward, Kieran has been my go-to guy for any questions involving guns and police procedure. As a retired army officer, law enforcement official, and fire fighter, his breadth of knowledge on these subjects is encyclopedic. Once when I asked him a ballistics question he tested out the answer on the firing range in his basement!

Kieren also loves history and research, which is quite obvious in his own three novels that have now been collected in a single volume as Holmes and Watson: The War Years. So I sent him my outline and asked if he'd like to collaborate. He responded with a laconic "Let's give it a shot."

We did. It worked wonderfully. Whenever I asked a question that would help make the story more authentic ("What brand of cigarettes did T.S. Eliot smoke?"), Kieran usually came up with the answer in less than a day. He also did great work filling me in on the biographies of historical characters in the books, as well as the locations. He even helped me dress the female characters.

Kieran and I have met only once so far. We did all of our collaboration by e-mail and Facebook. I did about 95 percent of the plotting and about 95 percent of the writing, while he did about 95 percent of the research. He also supplied the wonderful photos that begin each chapter. 

The resulting book is very different from the ones that each of us has written before, and a book that neither of us could have written alone. And unlike the Conan Doyle - Barrie disaster, I think it was a successful venture that will be repeated.

A Book That's Hard to Believe

Well, I can’t say they didn’t warn me.

In their introduction to their 1992 paperback novel Believe. (the period is part of the title), authors William Shatner and Michael Tobias announce, “This novel is strictly a work of fiction. Most details that might have harbored even a shred of truth have been freely altered, embellished, imagined, or otherwise invented.”

I’ll say! This novel about Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini (one of many by a host of writers) frustrated me by the degree to which it changed such known facts as the circumstances of the wound that killed Houdini or the occasion on which the two men first met. And for no discernable plot reason!

Worst of all was this gem: “Though he once announced religion in favor of theosophy, the mature Doyle was a Roman Catholic to the core.” Huh? Even the most cursory reading of a thin biography of ACD would leave one with no doubt that the creator of Sherlock Holmes renounced the church of his family in his 20s and never looked back.

The book is, understandably, not well known. I only bought it at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York during Baker Street Irregulars Weekend because I’d seen it sitting on the same shelf every year for four years. So why am I beating this dead horse?

Because I love historical novels, including mysteries that feature historical personages. Writing partner Kieran McMullen and I wrote three Enoch Hale mystery novels populated with such characters as T.S. Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers, Winston Churchill, Ronald R. Knox, Agatha Christie, and P.G. Wodehouse as well as Mr. Sherlock Holmes. 

And it seems to me that such books should stick to the truth as much as possible, or at least not contradict well-known biography unless the reader is told up front that this is alternative history. Not to do so creates confusion among the innocent, and frustration for those who know better.

In any case, something like the “Notes for Curious” that the great mystery writer John Dickson Carr appended to his historical mysteries – detailing where fact and fancy diverge in the novel –  are always appreciated. Otherwise, the reader is left to wonder.

Writing historical fiction is special task (of which the traditional Sherlockian pastiche is a subset). Carr did it well.  William Shatner (yes, that William Shatner) and Michael Tobias did not.

More on London

The September issue of National Geographic Traveler features a story on "The Urban Reader," a guide to cities with literary connections. Of all the possibile literary connections to London (T.S. Eliot called it "Unreal City;" William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson were known to hang out there is well), National G chose to go Sherlockian.

In a short sidebar called "Sherlock in London," writer Shannon McKenna Schmidt only has room to highlight the Sherlock Holmes Museum, the "In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes" tour by London Walks, Simpson's-the-Strand, and the Museum Tavern. The concept was nice but the content rather minimal. When we go to London next year, I expect to have as our ready companion Alistair Duncan's Close to Holmes. And if I have an e-book reader by then, I may also take See the London of Sherlock Holmes, which sounds like an incredible electronic resource.

What are your favorite Sherlockian spots in London?

Toasting Watson's Bull Pup

Ed Lear, long-time member of the Tankerville Club of Cincinnati, should be its poet laureate – and not just because he shares the name of the famous limerickwriter and author of The Owl and the Pussycat.

At the quarterly Tankerville Club meeting last Friday (June 15), Ed produced a toast to Watson’s bull pup that confronted the question of just what the heck that pup was.

You will recall that upon first meeting Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, Watson lists one of his shortcomings as “I keep a bull pup.” That’s the last we hear of it. Or is it the terrier that is poisoned in chapter 7? Actually, it may not be a dog at all. A “bull pup” is both a kind of gun and an old British expression for having a quick temper.     

Ultimately, Ed isn’t sure what Watson meant. Here’s the toast: 

It started out as, “yes, I know this one,”But there was more by the time I was done.If truth be toldWe were all probably fooledBy what really is meant by this son-of-a-gun. It was in the story you just readAnd for his part winds up dead,Killed by strychnine pill,But some say he was illAnd in the end his name was never said. Or it could have been what Watson usedTo keep them from being battered and bruised.Easy to carry, easy to hide –
Just the thing when by Sherlock’s side,Or maybe what Sherlock used to keep himself amused. Or it could be his quick temper to some of you,And to others it may mean something I never knew.But now that you’ve read the story,You be the judge and jury –
’Cause it may be something else totally out of the blue! But regardless, Ladies and Gentlemen, let us raise our glasses to Watson’s bull pup!

It’s not exactly T.S. Eliot, or even Edward Lear, but it was terrific toast!

Baker Street Comes to Bloomington

Ann and Dan Andriacco and Glen Miranker

For almost a hundred years, the American Midwest has been a hotbed of Sherlockian activity. Vincent Starrett, Jay Finley Christ, Elmer Davis, Dr. Gray Chandler Briggs, and T.S. Eliot were all Midwesterners. So was Michael Whalen, long-time Wiggins of the Baker Street Irregulars.

The Midwest is also home to a number of legendary BSI scion societies and, since 2019, the BSI archives at the Lilly Library on the campus of Indiana University at Bloomington. It is only fitting, then, that the Lilly is now hosting the amazing “Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects” exhibit through Dec. 16.

Even more appropriately, a special Midwest scion day was held this past Saturday at the Lilly, highlighted by a talk by Glen Miranker, who is so generously sharing with the world a small part of his Sherlockian collection through this carefully curated exhibit. Facebook exploded with posts about the event in real time last weekend, so you may have seen many photos and know a lot about it. But this is my personal take:

Ann and I saw the exhibit in New York in January. That was great, but this was better—more intimate, and more time allowed to gawk closer up.

Although I am indisputably a book person, the first editions and the many handwritten manuscripts, letters, and diaries of Arthur Conan Doyle were not what moved me most. I was more blown away to see the iconic Sidney Paget and Frederic Dorr Steele illustrations. Think of Paget’s Holmes and Watson on the train, or every illustration that Steele drew for “Wisteria Lodge”—the originals, and many more, were there in Bloomington.

But even that was overshadowed by Glen’s wonderful presentation, in which he told the stories behind several books in the exhibit—how he acquired his copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, the detective work involved in tracing a non-existent library from which a pirated edition came, and his attempts to communicate with the former owner of the only known first edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in a dust jacket (complicated because that individual is in prison for murder.)

And what is Glen’s Holy Grail as a collector? The first manuscript page of The Hound of the Baskerville. He already owns the second and third pages.

After the Lilly closed for the day, the Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis and the Tankerville Club of Cincinnati hosted a dinner for 40 Sherlockians at the nearby Irish Lion. A whopping 14 scions from six states were represented at the event, highlighted by Sherlockian Show & Tell. And Jayantika Ganguly joined us from India. (Maria Fleishhack was at the exhibit from Germany.)

The entire day scintillated!  

The Lilly Library on the Indiana University campus