Doyle, Doyle, Doyle, Doyle, Doyle . . .

Life was simpler once, even for Sherlockians.

"Things made so much more sense back then," a Sherlockian father might tell his Sherlockian child. "When I was a boy, Holmes was Holmes, Watson wrote the stories, and Doyle was just his literary agent."

"But Doyle really wrote the stories, pater," the young, oh-so-modern scion would reply, "based on Joe Bell, paying homage to Oliver Wendell Holmes, not to mention some cricketeer named Sherlock."

The elder Sherlockian could only shake his head in despair at what his youngster had become.

Life was simpler then. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were the prime targets for Sherlockian affections, for, after all, they were real people. No obituary for them ever appeared in the London Times, so they were real living people as well. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's name did come up on occasion. Since he was Watson's literary agent, that was only to be expected. But Doyle biographies and copies of Rodney Stone and other Doyle fictions were relegated to some obscure, but fondly noted, corner of one's Sherlockian bookshelf. Holmes and Watson, their lives and times, were still the main focus.

"Sherlock Holmes? Of course he was real," a Sherlockian would tell anyone who asked. After all, that was the grand game.

The 1980s have made that question a bit harder to answer. How can a Sherlockian, even whimsically, answer that Holmes was real, knowing full well his Sherlockian bookshelf contains Redmond's Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources, Hardwick's A Study in Surmise, and a myriad of compilations with Richard Lancelyn Green's name attached to them? Doylean scholarship has found a home in all the major Sherlockian journals, even coming to dominate a few of them. What was Doyle thinking of when he wrote this? Where did Doyle stop when he toured Puerto Rico? Which anonymous letter to the June 26, 1911 issue of the Portmouth Daily News was written by Doyle's sister, and what effect did it have on Kitty Winter's character in "The Illustrious Client"? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has finally come into his deserved due, yet the average Sherlockian is left with an identity crisis, caught between the good-natured fun of the old grand game and the serious scholarly works of the new criticism.

Was Sherlock Holmes real? Even when Nicholas Meyer caused the avalanche of psuedo Holmeses in the seventies, even when the pastichery ran from good to bad to bizarre, Holmes's reality never suffered as it's suffering today.

Sherlock Holmes, who once seemed to tower over Doyle in the public eye, is now being dwarfed in the Sherlockian sector by the massive amounts of Doyleana being unearthed. Doyle's medical career has been scrutinized, as has the life of his teacher, Dr. Bell. Every word Conan Doyle ever put to paper that was fit to print has now seen print in one place or another. The author's travels in America and Canada have been tracked, and there seems to be still more to come. Most Sherlockians are familiar with the fact that Doyle would rather have been remembered for his historical novels than the Holmes stories, but at the rate minutiae on the author surface these days, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may wind up being remembered for what brand of tooth powder he used.

Conan Doyle was a great guy, sure, but this is getting ridiculous. It's becoming difficult for a Sherlockian to deal with unreality. "Holmes was fiction, right?" people will ask Sherlockians of the future. "Yeah," those Sherlockians will reply sadly. No one is going to write articles in the newspaper about that kind of answer, to be sure.

But perhaps all is not yet lost. Doyleana has infiltrated the Sherlockian world, but the outside world remains untouched. Books on Doyle have yet to make the best-seller list, and there are still a lot of secondhand copies of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution floating around from the seventies. A lot of old-school Sherlockians may have hated those pastiches, but they at least kept the name of Holmes where it should be -- getting top billing.

The seventies brought pastiches, the eighties Doyleana. These two columnists can't wait to see what the nineties bring to the cult of Holmes.

Holmes as Holmes, Watson writing the stories, and Doyle ... why he's the literary agent, of course.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, May 1987)