Every few years, I find myself, thanks to circumstances too dull to recount here, revisiting the Canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and stories. Four novels, fifty-six stories. They’re fun, they’re sometimes boring, they’re often inconsistent, and they afford reading and rereading like no other popular literature I know.

The other day, while reorganizing my bookshelves, I came across Isaac Asimov’s “The Ultimate Crime” — I can’t find a full text copy of the story online right now, but here’s a link to a review of it. Basically, in the story, Asimov recounts a dinner meeting among a number of friends, one of whom is trying to address a vague part of the Holmes “Canon,” what the true topic of Moriarty’s The Dynamics of an Asteroid is about, as a justification for joining The Baker Street Irregulars, the worldwide group of Holmes fans and scholars.

It struck me that this is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been interested in studying in new media: The ways that fans of texts come together and reinterpret and “fill in the gaps,” sometimes via fanfic, but very often in terms of theories that have evidence marshalled toward them, are assailed upon by counter-evidence and reinterpretations, and are shaped via the use of argument. This is something I’m studying in World of Warcraft and The Legend of Zelda fandom right now, but also something I’ve found interesting in Lost and Heroes fans as well.

Anyway, I wondered if there are still active Baker Street Irregulars groups, and what they talked about. A quick Google search later, and I discovered that not only did Madison have a “scion” (an officially recognized group by the BSI, though none of the Canary-Trainers are BSI members) but that they were meeting this Sunday! They’re called the “Notorious Canary-Trainers,” from a reference in the Holmes story “The Adventure of Black Peter.” It appears that the group is open to the public, and that their topic for this Sunday’s (today’s!) meeting is a discussion of the story “The Bruce-Partington Plans.”

Now, I’m not much for superstition or fate or anything, but I do think it’s a weird coincidence that they happened to be talking about this particular (and not all that significant) story today. The plot of it features Holmes trying to track down a set of missing submarine plans that were stolen from Her Majesty’s Navy. Holmes’s brother Mycroft makes a rare appearance, and the mystery itself is pretty decent. However, it’s purely personal nostalgia that makes this story significant for me.

When I was a kid, I used to sit in the backseat of my parents’ car with a tape recording, listening over and over again to old time radio shows on cassette that my parents had bought me. The Shadow and Sherlock Holmes were always my favorites, and an adaptation of “The Bruce-Partington Plans” was the one I listened to the most. Surprisingly, I discovered just the other day that I had a copy of this specific radio show, starring Sir Ralph Richardson as Watson and Sir John Gielgud as Holmes. Click here if you’d like to listen!

Anyway, I decided to go to this Canary-Trainers meeting today, at 3pm. To prepare, I listened to that radio show once again, found another (older) radio adaptation starring Rathbone and Bruce and listened to it, a radio version from the 1960s, as well as watched the Jeremy Brett Granada television production from “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” in the mid-’80s. And, of course, read the story once again:

I have copies of both annotated versions (Baring-Gould’s original on top, and Leslie Klinger’s new annotated Holmes at bottom). Reading the story this morning, I skimmed both sets of annotations as I went along — it was a fascinating little exercise, and I don’t think I’ve ever really read a text like this before. Sort of amusing that I’ll do this with a Sherlock Holmes story rather than, say, Plato, but I’m not fretting about that too much.

So, I’ve listened to three different audio versions, watched a television production, and read the story with two sets of annotations. I’m probably prepared, I hope! I’m going to hop on a bus soon and head out to the meeting — their website says that guests are welcomed, so I hope it’s okay that I show up unannounced. I don’t hold any illusions that this meeting will be anything like Asimov’s great little short story, but I’m curious to see what it actually is like. Plus, I’ve always wanted to join a reading group for fun, and what could be more fun than the classic stories of the Master Detective?