"Did Holmes Come To Peoria . . . Ever?"

How does it feel to be living in a canonical nonentity?

Peoria, as many a Hansom is painfully aware, does not appear in the sixty recorded cases of Sherlock Holmes.

New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia are mentioned. People from these places are probably used to finding their cities in their reading, and doubtless take it in stride. Residents of lesser urban lights like Savannah, Georgia, and Lebanon, Pennsylvania surely aren't as blase about knowing that they, too, are referred to in the Canon. But if there's a Sherlockian in Moorville, Kansas, a town so small it's not even on the map, he or she must be pretty darn proud; Moorville is in the Canon.

Sherlockians of other cities bypassed by the Holmes tales have tried to correct the situation. Milton F. Perry put Kansas City, Missouri on the Sherlockian map by proving that Holmes was in that city as part of an English company of actors in early 1880. (See Baker Street Miscellanea, No. 6, June 1976, pp. 1-5). Not only was the detective in Kansas City, but, as Perry also discovered, Holmes advised the police there on an unusual murder. How delighted Kansas City Sherlockians must be.

Did Holmes also stop in Peoria during his early years? Searching through copies of The Peoria Transcript for 1879 and 1880 does not provide much hope. The company Sherlock Holmes was with in Kansas City apparently never came through town. Holmes's entire acting career has never been fully accounted for, however, so something may yet come from this line of inquiry.

His youth was not the only time during which the Master may have passed this way. After his retirement, Sherlock Holmes came to America again in the guise of Altamont, the bitter Irish-American. In 1912 he began his undercover work in Chicago, worked his way to Buffalo, and on back to the British Isles. Although Peoria doesn't fall in a direct line between Chicago and Buffalo, it did have a local branch of the Clan-na-gael, an Irish secret society thought to be responsible for the London bombings of the 1880's. The Clan-na-gael were just the sort of people Holmes was dealing with in 1912. But did he deal with the Peoria group?

A lot of unanswered questions of this sort spring up after a Holmesian scouting venture into Peoria's past. There are definitely points in the city's history that hint of Holmes's touch, but to find the right thread in a much-tangled skein may be a matter of time and luck.

Before letting the subject of Holmes in Peoria go for now, we must make mention of one man's effort to cut past all this speculation and searching. In the first issue of Wheelwrightings (May, 1978), Phil Farmer invited Holmes to come to Peoria with all expenses paid. The great detective wrote back, but unfortunately declined the generous offer. DARN!!

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, June 1983)