Front Page News

Mentioning Peoria, Illinois, in Sherlockian circles has never evoked much historical comment, and probably won't for some time to come. Prior to 1977 when the Hansoms of John Clayton was formed, Peoria just didn't have much Sherlockian history. The Baker Street Irregulars formed in New York City, Vincent Starrett did a lot of Sheilockian groundbreaking out of Chicago, and in London -- well, practically anyplace in England has Sherlockian significance just because it's where Holmes was to begin with. Peoria just never seemed to get its Sherlockian bearings until the trio of Farmer, Scheetz, and Burr got together in the 1970s. That doesn't mean, however, that this old river city didn't always have some potential.

Interest in Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, has been high in Peoria a lot longer than one might think. As evidence to this fact, we would offer the front page of The Peoria Evening Star for Saturday, April 7, 1923. The lead headline that day read "HERRIN INDICTMENTS QUASHED" -- just the type of headline one would expect to lead off a newspaper -- namely, a major development in a major Illinois murder trial. But what was the lead photo being featured on that day's front page? "Doyle Returns to America." Right in the center at the top of the page is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and clan, with the caption "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his family as they arrived in New York on the Olympic. Sir Arthur is here on another tour to exploit his belief in spiritualism." Below that was a small story that read as follows:

GHOSTS OF SOLDIERS SHOWN BY DOYLE

New York, April 7. A photograph, showing many grim, set faces hovering over a crowd assembled at the Centotaph in London during two minutes of prayer for England's war dead, was exhibited here by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle during a lecture last night.

Sir Arthur today offered to let skeptics examine the photograph just as closely as they liked. He declared it was taken by an English spiritualist who exposed the plate for the two full minutes of lisilence" last Armistice day.

When the picture was thrown up on the screen in Carnegie Hall, a murmur went through the audience. Several women sobbed. The great crowd, held back from the monument by soldiers of the Guard's regiment in their tall shakos, was blurred in the photograph, owing to the long time of the exposure. But just over the bowed heads of the people was a cloud of faces. Some of them had stern expressions, like men going into battle. Some were mere smears, others quite distinct.

It's not much of a story, but we think it's significant that such a piece found its way to the top of the front page. The people who put together the Star in those days knew what Peorians were interested in. Apparently, they were interested in Conan Doyle; and unless the city was home to some strange midwest pocket of White Company fans, we would assume that that meant Peorians also had a strong interest in Sherlock Holmes. In the year 1923, between the publication of His Last Bow in 1917 and Casebook in 1927, Sherlock Holmes was still among the current popular fiction. Some of that popularity, it's nice to find, was certainly in Peoria.

In closing, a quick look at the current status of Holmes in Peoria -- books on authors and literary criticism are shelved according to author, alphabetically, in the Peoria Public Library. Books on Holmes, therefore, are shelved under "D" for Doyle. Why, then, is Michael Hardwick's The Private Life of Dr. Watson shelved under "W" for Watson? Could it be that Holmes was fictional, but Watson did exist? As the main repository for all knowledge in Peoria, the Peoria Public Library obviously knows something. As to what that something is, perhaps the spies that the Hansoms of John Clayton have been planting in the PPL all these years can tell us.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, June 1987)