The Game

THE CANON

Dramatic Kettle Drum Intro:

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The Sherlockian Canon.

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For well over half a century, academics, men of literature, and crazed eccentrics have poured over these sixty chronicles in search of mystery and truth. Fortunes have been spent on the trail of sacred relics in the field. Men have died, still wondering over of the secrets of the legendary figure at the center of it all.

Serious stuff, huh? You bet it is. The Sherlockian Canon is, to borrow a concept from William Gibson, our common "concensual hallucination." Created by Conan Doyle, these 1122 pages (Doubleday) have become a dimension unto themselves, a world where a large number of people spend a goodly amount of leisure time. To some, the Canon is an archeological dig, where the aged artifacts of Holmes's life can be brushed off and studied. To others, it is a misty, magic land to seek shelter in, the ways of Victorian England seeming so much gentler than Modern America. To some others, the Canon is pretty much Pee Wee's Playhouse.

Why is this so?

Because there is a certain "room to move" in the Canon of Sherlock Holmes. Last month's column discussed the number of questions that can be raised from a single line of a Sherlock Holmes story -- something Christopher Redmond called the Canon's "extraordinary density." Dense these stories are, too. Dense in character, in Victorian detail, in the little matters of day-to-day life. Other written works have been as dense, but do not have the fascination of Sherlock Holmes to make us care about the depth of detail. We want to know more about Sherlock Holmes, and Doyle/Watson gave us the workspace to find out. That workspace, that other dimension that is Holmes's England, is what makes these stories so much more than ordinary fiction.

True, you can lose yourself in the flow of the narrative, as with all good fiction. But, as Sherlockians have discovered, you don't have to follow the stories through their natural linear course. If you want to stop and poke around Holmes's Baker Street rooms while he goes on with the case, you can.

The first time you read the stories, you have to follow the plotline to its end. They're mystery stories, after all, and one wants to see what was behind the peculiar league of red-headed fellows or the ghostly hound. But on successive readings other attractions begin to surface. One Sherlockian friend became fascinated with the food and drink encountered in the stories, taking the Canon as one long, adventure-laced buffet table. I myself was always enthralled by the nuts and bolts of how Holmes pulled off his detective prestidigitation. While your first and second read might have to be quick, later reads can be more leisurely, more thoughtful.

Tina Rhea once wrote that she skimmed through the Canon very quickly to get her Sherlockian inspirations. As she tends to favor the pastiche, that made sense-quick reads give you an overall feel of the stories, the sort of thing any good pasticheur needs. But by slowing your pace to a one-line-at-a-time crawl, you can fully immerse yourself in the Canon. Taking each line as if it were a separate entity unto itself, just like the little exercise of last month's column, you can draw the full inference out of every word.

And while you're inside the Canon, don't forget to take notes on what you see. Notes turn into articles or letters, and these articles and letters can bring other Sherlockians in to see what you've discovered. True, we've all seen every bit of the Canon before, but there are myriad roses in there that none of us have ever stopped to smell. And even the ones we have stopped to srwll always seem refreshingly new when seen from the angle pointed out by a different Canonical explorer.

The more you explore, the more you realize what there is in there. With that realization comes something even more exciting -- you begin to realize that the real world works much the same way. The more you explore, the more you realize what is out there.

Have fun.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, July 1990 )