The Maniac Collector's Inbox More Sherlockian Potpourri Plano is a suburb north of Dallas. It was a bit infamous in the 80's and 90's because of so many heroin related deaths. Recently it was the scene of brutal murder. Sherlock Holmes, Jr. was found in his house, brutally beaten to death. Ironically, the murder took place within blocks of the Plano Police Station. A long time acquaintance of Holmes has been arrested. There was even more irony in the Friday, February 7, 2009 obituaries in the Dallas Morning News. Not only was the listing for Sherlock Holmes but also one for a Mrs. M. Watson. There was no mention of anyone named Moriarty in paper. I thought about attending the funeral dressed as an old bookseller. There is even a Church Street in Plano but sensibility won out over weird Sherlocking this time. Holmes was 68 years old and as far as I know never attended a single meeting of any of the Dallas Sherlockian societies. In other local news, I had an email from the ICT MainStage in Irving, Texas. This town is famous for several reasons. My wife Joyce graduated from High School there and until this past December, the Dallas Cowboys played there. They will be moving into their new facilities in Arlington, Texas fro the 2009 - 2010 season. Joyce will not be relocating. She seems happy living here in Flower Mound. The email from ICT MainStage was to inform me that I could have one of the large posters from "Sherlock's Last Case." The poster can be seen in last week's article, Sherlock's Last Case: A Review. Of course I took them up on their kind offer. I will dry-mount it and get it framed. It will look quit nicely on the wall heading upstairs to my library. The nice people of the theater told me since I was the local 'expert' on Sherlock Holmes; they thought I would enjoy the poster. I did not ruin their allusion so I accepted the poster graciously. And speaking of being an 'expert' on Sherlock Holmes, I was actually accused of being such twice this past week. The second occurrence happened in response to yet another email. I had sent an email inquiry to IndiaNet, who is a book distributor in India, asking about Indian language translations of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They responded by informing me their 'book experts' said there have never been any translations of Sherlock Holmes into any Indian languages. I responded by telling them they needed a new set of 'book experts' because I have Sherlock Holmes translations in Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, and Urdu. I also told them there were known translations in Assamese, Telugu, Oriya, and Sindhi. As we played a game of email-tennis, they next asked me for the information I had on the Hindi and Urdu. I returned their service with the requested information in turn, asking if they could help me locate the Assamese translation I had recently learned about. They cc'd me an email they sent to a colleague is the India state of Assam. I am referred to in that email as an 'expert' on Sherlock Holmes in translation. Now I have to wait patiently for the reply from Assam. I have been accused of many things but this is the first time I have been accused an expert twice in the same week. Go figure. Happy Collecting!!
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Past 2009 Columns January 4, 2009 January 11, 2009 January 18, 2009 January 25, 2009 |