"Sherlock and Elvis"

Reality isn't what it used to be.

Recently, a nonSherlockian friend told me of an interesting conversation she had had with her daughter. The daughter had been engrossed in the gory details of a recent John Lennon biography, and was telling the whole business to her mother just as the movie, "The Return of Sherlock Holmes," was being reshown. The mother, being well-versed in Sherlockian lore for a layperson, told her daughter that Holmes, too, was subject to the sort of accusations that were going John Lennon's way. She then proceeded to explain how some people suspected Holmes of being gay, of having a serious drug addiction-basically the same sorts of things being said about Lennon. Yet the daughter would believe no such thing of Holmes.

Perhaps it's that we're so short of heroes these days that anyone we know is real must have faults. The human race's self-image is so tarnished that we expect weaknesses, even in our most cherished idols. The tabloids thrive on that expectation. Yet as a fictional character, Sherlock Holmes can be without faults (even though we Sherlockians know he had them). Since he's not real, he doesn't have to have the same quirks and bad qualities of the rest of us.

But to many people, Sherlock Holmes is real. Sherlockians have made great fusses over that fact for years. Somewhere along the line, in becoming one of the world's greatest fictional characters, Holmes crossed over the line; people who didn't know him well thought he was a detective from history, not fiction. And as Sherlock Holmes became real, a funny thing happened . . .

Scandals started coming out about him. Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution told the world that he was a drug addict. Less widely read works made him out to be gay. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story even made him a psychopathic killer. And many of those people who thought Holmes was real, now thought he was a drug addict, or gay.

Holmes had made it to the realm of the John Lennons and the Elvises.

But as I've watched the world around me lately, from a Sherlockian perspective, I've noticed an interesting phenomenon. The book, Is Elvis Alive?, with its wild conjecture and theorizing-before-the facts style of investigation reminded me of nothing so much as bad Sherlockian scholarship. And a month later, when I watched the PBS series, "In Search of the Trojan War," the theorizing and retheorizing of archeologists in reconstructing historical events reminded me of nothing so much as good Sherlockian scholarship. People take Elvis and archeology a good deal more seriously than most of us take Holmes, but the methodologies used are virtually identical to those of Sherlockian scholarship.

Real people, once they're dead and a part of history with no way to defend themselves, suddenly become fictional. Sure, there e are eyewitnesses and written accounts — all colored with the opinions of the source — but the further they get from the original live human being they're about, the further they get from reality. Any objective survey of the literature on Elvis Presley that clutters the bookstore shelves would almost have to conclude that the man wasn't real, if it weren't known otherwise.

Suddenly, Elvis is fictional and Sherlock is real.

Or is Holmes, not having shown his face in a while, on the verge of becoming fictional again? A dogged Sherlockian could chase his tail for hours on that one.

Confused? If you are, thanks. It means you were paying attention, and I'm glad to have such a perceptive reader. Thanks to the media explosion of the last thirty years, reality isn't what ong it used to be. It almost seems that you can't be sure of anything anymore, but what you yourself perceive (and even that can be suspect).

And myself . . . I have this overwhelming feeling that somewhere on this planet, Sherlock and Elvis are playing ping-pong and having a dickens of a time holding the paddles as they fade in and out of reality.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, October1988.)