The Two Paths  

The end comes all too soon.  

Be it the end of a vacation, a good book, a childhood, a fine meal, a love affair, a life, or even just a faint aroma caught on a passing breeze. Time claims each for its own, and we are left with ... what?  

Well, something else. There's always something else, you just have to find out what it is.  

So it is with one's initial exposure to the Canon of Sherlock Holmes. Four novels and fifty-six short stories. One thousand, one hundred and twenty-two pages, if one is reading the Doubleday Complete. At a decent pace, say a page a minute, that's eighteen hours and forty-two minutes.  

You get 657,000 hours to spend in your life, if you live to the ripe old age of seventy-five. The time one spends on their first read of the Sheriockian Canon is barely a tick of that. Condensing your whole life to a single day, less than four seconds of it was spent reading Sherlock Holmes as new.  

And then it's done.  

So you read it again. Four more seconds out of your day. And again. Four more seconds.  

Eventually you have to move on to something else. As we've already established, there's always something else.  

And in the case of the Sherlock Holmes stories, there are two big "something elses."  

Having finished reading Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, one can   read everything else Doyle wrote. While he was no Isaac Asimov, Conan Doyle did put out a decent amount of material, ranging from genre fiction to new age philosophy.  

Or, having finished reading the Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle, one can start reading Sherlock Holmes stories by other people. There are even more of them than there are books in that first category, owing to the fact that Doyle was just one man. Other writers are being born every day.  

You can read Doylean scholarship and you can read Sheriockian scholarship. You can read stories with Conan Doyle as a fictional character and you can read articles about Sherlock Holmes as a real person. You can read it all, and a good number of people try to.  

But like any religion, the Canon's devout also have their extremist factions. There are those who stick with the one true Holmes, the Doyle Holmes and disdain any imitators, toppling graven images at every turn. And there are those who could give a flying fig about anything else Doyle wrote, and continue to search the pastiches for the next true reincarnation of the Master.  

One road is a bit more high-brow, a bit more respectable in certain circles. The other road ... or should I say, the other side of the tracks ... has its unmen- tionable pleasures. A lot of those who walk the high road sneak out for a quickie from Michael Hardwick or Loren Estelman, and many on the other side of the tracks look a bit longingly at the ivory towers of The Oxford Sherlock Holmes.  

If you're like most people, you fall somewhere in between. (If you're a die-hard Jeremy Brett fan, I'm definitely not sure where you fall, so you might just want to stay in the tree.) It's hard to have found Doyle without a love of Holmes, and it's hard to love Holmes without some respect for his creator.  

With only sixty original stories, though, we're not just limited in our reading material. We also often find ourselves quite limited in having something to talk about. And if you're feeling in a particularly cranky mood, it's very easy to start crabbing about the people on the other path.  

"Pastiches are crap! There never has been one as good as Doyle's stories, and there never will be!" How many times have you heard that one in one form or another?  

"Doyle studies are as dull as dishwater! They should keep 'em the heck out of The Baker Street Journal!"  Okay, so that one's not as common. Most of the time it just shows up in this column in one form or another.  

But the two paths exist, and they will for as long as anyone gives a mongoose's hindquarters about Sherlock Holmes or Conan Doyle. Each has something to give and a lot of people want that something. And if you put us all together, there still aren't as many of us as those damn Trekkies. Do we care? Do we wish there were more like us, or are we content remaining the chosen few?  

Again, two paths. But life isn't black and white, yes or no, Doylean or Sherlockian, despite what ruses we Sherlockian columnists come up with to fill our two pages. Sherlock Holmes, you will remember, only had two paths before him at Reichenbach falls. One led down toward Meiringen, the other off a cliff and into the falls. Professor Moriarty had me latter forced upon him, but Holmes chose neither.  

As Holmes himself discovered, there's always something else. Always.  

Have fun.  

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, November 1996)