The Awful Truth

In his leisure time, Sherlock Holmes dismembered small kittens with a dull knife.

We have no evidence to back up that statement. We don't need any. After all, what is the Great Detective going to do . . . sue us? As long as we don't publish it in book form and try to make a profit from it, the Agent's daughter, current holder of the copyright, probably won't chastise us in the least. We have just committed libel and gotten away scot-free.

Therein lies the fun of it all. In that bit of lawlessness can be seen the raison d'etre of all Sherlockian scholarship, from the most high-minded tome on chronology of the cases to some brief article on how Holmes met the Wolfman. Have you taken it into your head that Mrs. Hudson was Watson's illegitimate daughter? All you need to do is explain your reasoning, be it a fluffy daydream or hard-driving paranoia, and you have entered the Twilight Zone of Sherlockian scholarship.

Dr. Watson gave us sixty stories. He didn't date them or assemble them neatly into a biography of Holmes; in fact, he was a bit sloppy about the whole thing. As he and Holmes went into retirement, taking as much evidence of their existence with them as they could, the stories remained. They had appeared in the public print and could not be recalled. From those chronicles come any information we are to have on the detective and the doctor. So it is that with a Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes in hand, any Sherlockian anywhere can deduce, extrapolate, or theorize whatever he or she will. And chances are that a scion journal somewhere will print his or her work.

Other Sherlockians can protest, write their own articles against that person's theory, or throw him or her into a snowbank (as has happened on one renowned occasion), but not a person among them can prove the theorizer wrong. Only Holmes or Watson could say for certain, and they're not talking. The only constraint put upon the Sherlockian writer is that the reasoning be sound and the wording convincing; and at that, only enough so for the editor of the journal for which the article is written. A bit of flair can make up for a missing piece of hard evidence, and a lot of moonshine can brace up the wildest theory. Being a lazy scholar may not get you a doctorate degree, but it can make you a readable Sherlockian writer.

The current trend in the Sherlockian world has been toward more serious scholarship-serious scholars taking their scholarship seriously. So serious does their work become, that the sixty stories are no longer enough for them. They branch off onto apocryphal figures who were not as clever in covering their tracks as Holmes and Watson ... people like the Agent, the Actor(s), and the Illustrator(s). Such work is all well and good, but at what point does the writer cease to be a Sherlockian and turn into a Doyleian, a Gilletteian, or a Pagetian? Such scholarship is always breaking new ground when the old landscape has yet to be fully developed. Just how many wives did Watson have? Did Moriarty really die at Reichenbach? Not one final and commonly accepted answer has ever been inscribed on marble tablets. Many great works on such subjects have been produced, but most were written decades ago. New thought is very possible and necessary for the grand game to go on.

No one is getting paid to be a Sherlockian. We do it for fun, just like a kid working in a coloring book. No matter how skillfully the young one gives his work tone and texture, he is still just coloring. The pages of his coloring book will never hang in the Louvre, but he enjoyed doing it and his grandmother enjoyed looking at the finished product. Sherlockianism is much the same. No matter how well thought out an article is, no matter how well footnoted or cleverly written, it is still mere supposition about a man who won't sue you if you're wrong.

So let's have some fun.

In the meantime, if any of you were worried about those kittens, Sherlock Holmes didn't touch so much as a precious whisker. Dr Watson, however . . . .

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, May 1984)