Moving Into Your Summer Holmes

As you stand at the threshold of another season of long days and leisure, pause for a moment. Look out over the days ahead like they are a vast valley of virgin landscape, just waiting for you to explore and exploit them. Forget being ecologically correct for a moment. Forget that endangered bitterns are out there on the moor (did I mention this valley has a moor?). We're only speaking figuratively here.

Me, I look at that untouched landscape and want to build Baskerville Hall. The Sherlockian urge arises, even in the most non-Sherlockian of circumstances. And so it is with summer coming on. The months ahead are ripe with Sherlockian opportunities, and here, because I couldn't think of a single theme for this month's column, is a list of them:

-- Mowing your yard? Try etching some dancing men into it by setting the wheels higher or lower accordingly. Send secret messages to your pilot friends.

-- Need something new to collect? Try finding action figures of people who have played Sherlock Holmes. Since Playmates, the makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation figures, have yet to make good on their promise to do figures of Data as Holmes and Geordi LaForge as Watson, toy-shopping Sherlockians may just have to make do with this approach: think of whatever character the actor was playing when the toy was made as Holmes in disguise. Currently in the stores you can find Christopher Plummer (as General Chang from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) and Leonard Nimoy (as versions of Spock from several of the Trek incarnations). If anybody figures out an action figure of someone who played Watson, however, I will be very interested to hear about it.

-- Going to a sporting event? You know those people that hold up signs with Bible reference numbers on them? Try getting on TV holding up a sign with Doubleday page and line numbers on it (and maybe a Jay Finley Christ abbreviation thrown in). Without Jeremy Brett making new episodes for Mystery! we're going to have to recruit new Sherlockians somehow.

-- Buy a mystery novel, cross out the main character's name as you read it, and write in the name of a Canonical character. You'll probably wind up with something just as good as some of the non-Holmes Holmes novels we've seen lately.

-- Read the Canon again. Yeah, I know that's a stock suggestion, but here's a new reason to do it. At summer's end, the Hansoms of John Clayton are holding a sort of Sherlockian Olympics in conjunction with our annual banquet, on September 28th.  

It's called the Downstate Illinois Sherlockian Invitational, and we're inviting every scion society within shouting distance to join us for a day of fun and competition. There'll be a College Bowl-style knowledge competition, pitting scion teams against each other in a challenge we haven't seen since the Pshaw! Bowl in Kansas  City. A pastiche/parody contest will be on the agenda as well, giving writ- ers from the competing scions a chance to show their stuff. And lastly, but not leastly, we'll be having a Sherlockian presentation pageant, at which we'll give each scion ten minutes to present a speech or paper having something to do with the name of their scion.  

Invitations have already gone out, so if somehow we missed you and you think you and/or your scion would like to get in on it, just write the editor of this publication for further details.

-- Write for a Sherlockian publication you've never seen before. If you have a computer, try one of the on-line Sherlockian groups, like the Hounds of the Internet or the Wigmore Street Post Office. Make up a groaner for Plugs & Dottles (worried about having it rejected by the editor? Think about some of the puns he's inflicted on the rest of us!). Whatever your whim, there are plenty of avenues for a Sherlockian to vent, pursue, or just kick back and relax with. Have fun, be careful, and if you can't be careful, name it Sherlock.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, June 1996)