A Couple Of Things That Need Saying

Sometime shortly after my last column, my good friend and editor gave me a flyer.

The publisher of The Universal Sherlock Holmes was coming out with an electronic version for the personal computer, the flyer said. Knowing how much use I get out of my Canon on CD, Bob thought the electronic bibliography of all things Sherlockian would be a natural for me, and I agreed. Information at your fingertips -- what a marvelous concept.

Then I read the flyer.

For the electronic version. The Universal Sherlock Holmes had been acronyminized into the name "Hyper T.U.S.H."  I didn't much like the looks of that, so I read on. The publisher was also selling an installation and user's guide for "Hyper T.U.S.H.'" called How To Use Your T.U.S.H.

And that's where they crossed the line. First, in all my time fiddling with computers, I've never bought a piece of software that didn't come with a manual or instruction book. And here I was being offered the chance to shell out more money to buy something that should have come with the original product (kind of like selling the index to a book separately from the book itself) . If the price of the
original product had been raised to include the manual, I might have happily paid the whole sum and never thought twice about it. Not now.

Because the more I looked at How To Use Your T.U.S.H., the more offended I got. (And after sitting through the movie "Natural Born Killers" without getting offended, this is saying something.)

The bibliographies of Ron DeWaal are something of an institution in the Sherlockian world. DeWaal built something that no one else dared attempt, and the earlier incarnations have been standard reference materials for Sherlockians for years. They were, and are, a part of the "class act" of the study of Sherlock Holmes. Sure, we're irreverent sometimes. And, sure, we're quite scatological at others. But this ...

I'm certain that Ron DeWaal's basic core for all this was undoubtedly as solid and classy as everything else he's done. It's the treatment of his work by his publisher, "The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box," a.k.a. George Vanderburgh, that is rather sad. All I can see coming out of a Hyper T.U.S.H. is C.R.A.P.

There's a place in the world for silliness. But personally, I'm not paying seventy-five bucks for it, with another twelve for the instruction manual.

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An old friend went to visit the Sherlockian greats last month. Those of you who knew Jim Duval have surely heard the news elsewhere, perhaps even elsewhere in this publication. But his passing could hardly go unmentioned in this column.

You don't hear the term "sparking plug" in Sherlockian circles as much these days, but it used to represent enthusiastic Sherlockians who caused things to happen around them. Every good Sherlockian society had a sparking plug at the core, as did every publication. Some lucky groups, like the Occupants of the Empty House, seemed to have a whole engine full of them; others got by with just one.

In the seventies, a whole generation of sparking plugs first found their sparks. They formed new clubs, started new journals, and grew well into the eighties when some of them became Baker Street Irregulars. They recharged the Sherlockian world and helped their predecessors carry it onward into the future.

Jim Duval was one of that group, and he worked as hard as any of them at it. His Quarter£y $tatement was a great place to get published, and he was kind enough to print everything a writing fool like myself could throw at him. His encouragement and advice were always there when problems arose, and my wild and woolly days as a young Sherlockian wouldn't have been the same without him.

I'm beginning to notice a new generation of sparking plugs coming into the Sherlockian world, and I really hate to think that Jim won't be around to benefit from their enthusiasm as others benefitted from his. And they, in turn, will miss one more resource of Sherlockian lore and friendship.

But as I said at the first, he's visiting the Sherlockian greats now. He should fit right in.