Learning To Be a Sherlockian

I’ve had a fun week — my father and stepmother came into town and we had a few days of seeing the local sights, as well as going out to see plenty of music (from a free symphony performance to a musical to some live music in the park). Good times, and through it all… uh, yeah, I’m still going strong on all this Sherlock Holmes stuff.

I’m working my way through the “Canon” currently, and in a rather haphazard manner. A bit over a year ago, I bought Leslie Klinger’s new annotated Holmes, and read “A Study In Scarlet” (which, frankly, wasn’t a very good story) and “The Sign of Four” (which was). Traveling Europe last summer, I picked up a beat-up old paperback of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” at an OxFam charity shop in London, and read that in Rome. And, now, thanks to discovering the Notorious Canary-Trainers, I have been slowly working my way through the short stories, reading whichever one strikes my fancy (or whichever story my friends suggest I read next). So far, in the past week, that’s been:

“The Bruce-Partingon Plans”
“The Veiled Lodger”
“The Musgrave Ritual”
“The Blue Carbuncle”
“A Scandal in Bohemia”
“The Man With the Twisted Lip”

… with probably “Silver Blaze” or “Mazarin Stone” up next (two stories I can’t recall ever reading). Additionally, I’ve picked up hardbacks of each of Nick Meyer’s three Holmes novels (The Seven Per-Cent Solution, The West End Horror, and The Canary-Trainer), as well as a number of pastiches (The Bee Keeper’s Apprentice, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon), and some reference books ( The Sherlock Holmes Compendium and Encyclopedia Sherlockiana). On top of that, I found my old copy of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (the paper version, not the computer game), and plan to try to get my friends to play it with me soon.

Speaking of which… wow, this Holmes obsession is hard to explain to my friends.

Sure, they’re nerds like I am, but there’s something qualitatively different about gaming nerds and the kind of person who finds Victorian sleuthing fascinating. I’ve raised several eyebrows of friends by describing my current interest in Conan Doyle, and even though I’m currently in a graduate program trying to incorporate research on learning with new media and fandom, this is difficult to explain. Academically, I’m finding Holmes to be interesting because of how, as scholarly and fan communities, they have refined “fan theorizing” to an art — the kinds of attention to detail and erudition required to create new knowledge in these communities is simply staggering. But, as a fan, I am finding the content of Holmes’ world to be equally foreign to my current life as any game’s fantasy world, yet more appealing. The deduction and reasoning at the surface of the Holmes Canon is, to be honest, much more appealing at the moment than the hack and slash world of many videogames. That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t many complex intellectual practices going on in and around games — that’s one of the central things I’m interested in studying in my research — but just that, for now, I’m finding Victorian detective work to be immensely satisfying and interesting.

So, a few more short blurbs on things of Sherlockian/Holmesian interest that I’ve discovered in the past week:

First off, it looks like there’s going to be a new DVD set of the complete Granada Sherlock Holmes TV series from the 1980s and early 1990s, starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. As a teenager, I was completely enthralled with these shows, and still have a few of them on musty VHS cassettes I taped off of my local PBS station. They were all released earlier on crappier DVDs with no extras to speak of, but now have been remastered from the original negatives (!) and come in a single, beautiful box with a few extras:

Bonus Features Include:
Sherlock Series Promo
Three commentary tracks
Daytime Live
Elementary My Dear Watson: An Interview with Edward Hardwicke
An Interview with Adrian Conan Doyle
Sherlock Museum Short
Spanish/English subtitles

So, the extras are a bit underwhelming, but an improvement over the original releases. And the transfers appear scintillant from the few images that are up on the Amazon page:

The only problem — it lists for $300?! Ugh, I might have to “rent and rip,” though I’m dying to buy this.

In other news, I’ve subscribed to Scott Monty and Burt Wolder’s new Holmes podcast, “I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.” It’s not bad so far, though I only understand maybe a third of what they’re talking about. I’ve listened to the first two episodes so far, and it’s interesting to hear the history of Sherlockian vanity presses, as well as the history of the Baker Street Journal. I’ll keep listening, and am happy to hear someone’s doing this.

One thing I noticed, however — since there are a few Holmes-related blogs and now a Holmes-related podcast, why isn’t there an (English language) Holmes wiki anywhere? Perhaps there is, and I can’t find it, but I find this peculiar, especially when modern (and, frankly, much more complex) media have had wikis devoted to them. I’m thinking of Lostpedia, Memory-Alpha, etc. — community knowledge about a fictional world that is collaboratively negotiated, all in public. I’m interested in the ways that knowledge get formed online, and find it peculiar that the only Holmes-related wiki I can find is in French.

There are a couple of explanations for this — Holmes enthusiasts tend to be older than fans of newer fictional worlds, and thus are potentially less attuned with the latest, greatest Internet phenomena, but since wikis have been around for several years, this seems unlikely. Or, perhaps there’s an ethos of scholarly knowledge-construction going on here and thus people are more interested in seeing (and arguing over) what specific individuals have contributed to Holmes scholarship rather than the relative anonymity of a wiki. Or, maybe … it’s just that no one has bothered to do it yet?

A wiki could be a fascinating experiment — what if every Sherlockian had the opportunity to contribute their own annotations to the “Canon”? It would be a simple task technically to set up such a site, but a potential nightmare socially. Since I’m quite new to all of this, I can only suspect there might be clashes of egos and pet theories in play on a Holmes wiki. If anyone even used it! Anyhow, just an idea.

More later, as my Holmes obsession branches into different directions.