HE TRADES has a review of Mack and Citrin’s new Sherlockian juvenile book entitled Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars: The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas:

In the spirit of the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series comes this new addition to the Sherlock Holmes legend from husband and wife team Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin. Told with a focus on the rag-tag gang of boys that got short shrift in the Doyle stories, the Baker Street Irregulars, the story is still a Holmes adventure, as seen from behind the scenes.

HERE’S A SHORT ARTICLE in the online Westmount Examiner concerning the 26-year-old Sherlockian society based in Montreal: Bimetallic Question keeps Sherlock alive:

More than a century after the fictional detective first captured the imagination of Victorian Londoners, there are still many loyal Sherlockians all over the world—with a division of followers here in Montreal, and they meet regularly at the Westmount Public Library.

It’s a typical piece about the 5 W’s, including location, fees, typical activities, and so forth, but of course the greatest benefit of articles like this is the local publicity that draws in new members.

Hmmm. Are there any other Sherlockians (or Doyleans) here in Yellowknife, the Northwest Territories, I wonder?

HE BRITISH GOVERNMENT’S Inside Justice website currently has a poll entitled Who is your all-time favourite British justice character?. Of course, the Great Detective is in the list, but he’s currently tied at second place with Inspector Morse, while “Danger Mouse” is number one. I can’t say I’m familiar with the aforementioned rodent, but I suspect I’d rather count on Sherlock Holmes if my neck was on the line. Keep the memory of the Master green — head on over and vote.

Update: Apparently, you can vote once per day.

LOVE CANDID INTERVIEWS with writers, and especially with those who expose both personality and writing process without shielding themselves by a thin veneer of propriety or pomp. The Sacramento Bee has a fascinating interview with Sherlockian author and bad boy Michael Kurland, the author of the recent Moriarty series and the editor of a series of pastiche anthologies.

From Elementary, My Dear Kurland:

“I didn’t want to write a pastiche,” Kurland says. “I don’t like doing what somebody else has done. If I write a Holmes story and let Dr. Watson tell it, I can’t win. I’m going to be compared to Doyle and I’ll lose. Why would I do that? A lot of people do just that because the books sell. But if you write a Watson story and add anything to it, 10,000 Sherlockians are going to hate you.” […]

“Holmes is a bit of a prig,” Kurland points out. “He’ll occasionally break the law, but he won’t break the social bond, no matter how stupid it is. In Doyle’s day, Holmes was the perfect Victorian. Not as we think of Victorians today, as lacy and uptight. But the way Victorians thought of themselves, as modern, scientific and logical.

“Moriarty thinks all that is bull. Basically, Moriarty is a late-20th-century man living in the late 19th century.”

(From what I can tell, the Sacramento Bee website allows you to read this article without registration the first time, but if you revisit the site, you have to undergo a free registration to see it again.)

F, LIKE ME, you watched Sesame Street in the seventies, you should be quite familiar with a character whose propensity for trifles is even greater than that of Sherlock Holmes, and who too has a faithful sidekick called Watson. See the Muppet Wiki entry for Sherlock Hemlock:

Sherlock Hemlock, a Muppet spoof of Sherlock Holmes, first appeared on Sesame Street in Season 2 (1970), and was last seen in Season 23 (1991).

Sherlock is the self-appointed “World’s Greatest Detective.” He solves mysteries by concentrating on the little clues and overlooking the big ones. When he finds a clue, he shouts, “E-GAD!”

I’ve recently been watching some Sesame Street with my two-year-old, and wondering about this Muppet’s mysterious disappearance. Perhaps there was a Moriarty Muppet too?

Oh well… I guess a “Tickle Me Sherlock” toy wouldn’t have been a very hot Christmas toy.

T ISN’T UNUSUAL to find our favourite detective used to illuminate some modern mystery, and especially those political ones mused by pundit journalists. A case in point — the Palm Beach Post of July 31st has a dialogue between Holmes and Watson in which they discuss Valerie Plame: Watson, the Plame game is afoot.

“You know, Holmes,” I said, “there is still something about the Valerie Plame matter that mystifies me.”

“No doubt,” the great man replied. There may have been a note of condescension in his response, but it was a relief from his infernal violin scraping. It was partially to stop the violin that I had spoken up. As we talked, however, I realized our thoughts were headed for the case book. Call it the Singular Case of the Missing Victims.

For those of you not in North America, or who don’t care enough to follow American political scandals (they do tend to bore me), Plame was a CIA agent “outed” by a high profile politician in the Bush entourage after her husband wrote an article criticising the U.S. invasion of Iraq. More details can be found in the Wikipedia entry for Valerie Plame.

HERE have been so many depictions of Sherlock Holmes over the years that, to many people, they all become an amorphous blob of characteristics, such as a long gaunt face, a well-endowed proboscis, and (of course) some smoking implement, usually of a wooden nature — an adjective which seems to apply equally well to many of the lesser-known actors falling flat in their ulsters.

Bob Bryne, in his essay The Definitive Holmes, writes:

The name Sherlock Holmes is uttered, and we all form an image in our minds. It might be a drawing by Sidney Paget or Frederic Dorr Steele, or maybe Basil Rathbone or Peter Cushing. Over a century with the great detective has given us very clear images of how we think he looks.

Since Charles Brookfield did a short skit entitled “Under the Clock” in 1893, Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on stage, screen and radio far beyond anyone’s ability to count. Each medium (publishing, stage, movies and television) has seriously affected the way Holmes is viewed by current and succeeding generations.

This excellent piece has many graphics included (be sure to click on the links to see them), and serves as a tight little survey of the most popular depictions — to include them all would be next to impossible.

Byrne also has a series of other great Sherlockian content on this site of his, Sherlock Holmes on Oxford Lane (a.k.a., HolmesOnScreen.com), including pieces on various key actors, quizzes, original fiction, an essay on how the Canon’s themes reflect Joseph Campbell’s journey of the hero, and much more. Well worth a visit.

HEN I READ A NOVEL like Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, a vivid setting is often constructed in my head, an environment that not only facilitates the story and offers milieu to the characters, but that also lives and breathes on its own. As I have the habit of reading in bed, I usually drift off to sleep clinging to fleeting fragments that I want –oh so much– to make real.

And then, someone lets me know that they are real.

From The Seoul Times: An Unearthly Plateau in Venezuela, which presents a unique travelogue with ACD’s The Lost World as an ever-present point of reference:

Seven years later, Everard Im Thurn and Harry Perkins made a successful ascent of Roraima, an ancient 9,219-foot sandstone mesa towering above the tropical rain forest and savanna. Im Thurn’s colorful account is believed to have partly inspired Conan Doyle’s 1912 sci-fi novel “The Lost World,” about a Jurassic Park-like plateau roiling with prehistoric beasts.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT, masquerading as a flea market tip, from the U.K.’s Sunday Mirror: What to look out for -

OLD MAGAZINES: Beeton’s Christmas Annual from 1887 is considered the most priceless mag in the world, as it features the first-ever appearance of master detective Sherlock Holmes. There are 28 known copies - and they sell for £100,000 each!

So, if you do happen accross a copy of Beeton’s in a pile of discarded People magazines, going for just a few pennies, do pick it up. Just so you know….

S ONE MIGHT GLEAN from its title, Skeptical Inquirer is a magazine devoted to “separating fact from myth in the flood of occultism and pseudoscience on the scene today.” I’ve read a few issues myself, and it truly is a fascinating publication. Exposés of Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, cold fusion, lost continents, cryptozoological oddities, and so on are perfect fodder for research and dissection (or, if you would, ripping apart). If they had been around at the time of Conan Doyle’s conversion to the quasi-religion known as Spiritualism, unfortunately rife with charlatans lightening the wallets of gullible grieving people everywhere, there’s no doubt that poor ACD would have yet another periodical tearing at his beliefs.

It’s no surprise, therefore, to see that a review of Massimo Polidoro’s book Final Seance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle appeared in its pages (in March 2002), and is now online for our reading pleasure. As one may discern from William Harwood’s opening paragraph, there seems to be a certain bias at work.

I have long been aware that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ended his friendship with Harry Houdini on account of Doyle’s blind, gullible belief in the very scam Houdini had disproven over and over. But not until I read Final Séance did I become convinced that incurable adherence to a security belief in the face of irrefutable evidence can only be described as a form of insanity. And I am far from the first person to reach that conclusion.

I don’t have the book yet, but the review seems to be overly critical of ACD’s devotion to his late-life cause, and to his insistence that Houdini was indeed tapping into the realm of the spirits. For example, there’s no evidence given in the review of the many other factors that led to his conversion to Spiritualism, its historical context, and why he thought it was such a worthwhile channel for his energies. It seems that the reviewer is dwelling less on the actual quality of the book, and more on the skeptical material it presents.

I’m curious if anyone here has read the book. Is it a good read? Is it balanced? Please feel free to leave a comment below.

HE IRONY is not lost on me. My return to this blog, after my not-so-great hiatus, is marked by my vigil in an empty house. Unlike Holmes and Watson awaiting the notorious Colonel Sebastian Moran and Von Herder’s airgun, however, my situation is actually quite mundane. After some 8000 km of travel from Newfoundland to Yellowknife (in the Northwest Territories of Canada) to take up a new life with a new home and a new job, I sit most evenings in a house devoid of furniture, books, computer gear, or family. Thanks to a kindly neighbour, I now have a little computer desk propping up my work laptop, which is running on an intermittant network. The furniture and library are still several weeks off (and upon their arrival, I can send plane tickets for my wife and boys). In the meantime I’m going rather stir-crazy, occupying my spare time mostly with cycling and cleaning.

But I am not completely Holmes-less. (Ugh.) While I was packing up the old place, I used some spare cycles on my computer to convert a number of Jeremy Brett shows to iPod video format. And so, in addition to reading my two books –a beat-up “Wings” Strand facsimile edition of the uncopyrighted stories, along with Christopher Redmond’s amazing Sherlock Holmes Handbook– I’m happily lying on my air mattress each night watching Grenada episodes on a screen roughly the size of a large postage stamp, or listening to Rathbone/Bruce episodes of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

While I await my books and gear, I’m going to take advantage of this downtime and start posting to this blog once more. A quick perusal of my Net queries, mailing lists, inbox, and other correspondences show that there has been much ado in the Sherlockian world, and so I’ll endeavour to cover as much of it as I can. Without my library, you’ll have to forgive me if the visuals are rare for the next little while, and my references aren’t quite as exact as I like. If you spot a mistake, please don’t hestitate to let me know, and if you’ve heard of something that you think is worth mentioning, please fill me in on the details. (My contact form is in the menu above.) A goodly number of postings here come from readers like you, and I appreciate every email I receive.

Oh, it’s nice to be home.

or those readers wondering why things suddenly became so erratic here, I ought to come forth with an apology, and some personal news. It’s been quite a month or two at the homestead, involving plenty of job-hunting, shuffling across the continent, taking care of young’uns, and –last week– the birth of our new son Daniel, simultaneous with a job offer requiring the packing up of our old life to begin another up north.

As Jenny is not yet fit to do much packing or moving, my spare time is being divided between taking care of our two-year-old Conor, packing up our worldly possessions, and trying to organise the transition. I’ll soon be heading up to Yellowknife to set up our new place (and life), and sending Jenny and the kids a plane ticket when everything is ready.

Needless to say, that doesn’t leave very much time for the blogs for the next few weeks. In fact, all my books except a beat-up Holmes collection and Chris Redmond’s handbook is already packed away and ready to go.

So, I’m terribly sorry for the lack of posts recently –and in the near future– but once I have a connection in Yellowknife, my online life will be getting back to normal. I assure you, I’m very much looking forward to daily Sherlockian postings once more. There’s still a tonne of stuff in queue that needs editing and nice graphics, and I can’t wait to get this site au courant again. In the meantime, if you come across a link or some Holmes-related information you wish to share, please don’t hesitate to use my contact form (see the menu above); I’ll be checking mail often, and these are the sort of things I can post even while on the road.