French Artists

If you've ever wondered who is really to blame or thank for this monthly digression on matters of Holmes, then this month's column is for you. If you haven't wondered, and dunk that the columnist is simply coming up with an excuse for some self-indulgent reverie as usual, well, I hope you like self-indulgent reveries.

For you see, it's not the silly columnist, nor his inciting editor, that deserves the credit for filling these two pages every month. We are simply two more links in a long chain of happenstance.

"So all life is a great chain," Sherlock Holmes said, "the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it"

And where does this chain begin?

French artists.

So many things come back to French artists when you track them back to their lair, be they fashions or the genes for Sherlock Holmes's imagination. Such wild, passionate souls they were... it's no wonder their seeds can be found in the roots of such divergent matters. But the most obvious legacy of the French artists, is, of course, their art.

Before I knew of Vemet or Greuze, or the good or evil men that Sherlockians associate with them ... before I knew of Sherlockians ... I found myself on a bus to Chicago, bound for the Art Institute there, to see some French art.

Chicago is one of the most Sherlockian of American cities, and rightly so ... with its reputation for producing criminals, it only seems right that a few of them fell into Sherloek Holmes's purview. And so link number two in the chain becomes Chicago.

I was travelling with my college French class ... an interesting smattering of individuals, ranging from Klein the newspaper critic and his wife to the blonde twins whom I briefly served as liaison to during the business of the amorous atheist. Our professor, an Irish Frenchman who would have fit quite well in the Red-Headed League, thought that exposure to the bits of France that Chicago had to offer would inspire us in our studies. A few paintings, some coq an vin served by a waiter who was only befuddled by our attempts to speak to him in French, and we could return to Peoria, energized to resume our conjugations (instead of constantly dwelling upon what little phrases Britt Ekiund contributed to Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night," as we had previously).

At least that was the plan.

Somewhere between the museum and the food came a moment or two to shop, and, as was my habit, I drifted into the first bookstore I came across. I had been reading pastiches in those days, as there were plenty of them available. Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds, Hellbirds, and, of course. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Sherlock Holmes was a great character, and even in the most outlandish plots, a fun fellow to read about. And, as my eye roved the shelves of books, I happily spotted what I thought
was another pastiche.

A closer look revealed something slightly different: a book called Beyond Baker Street: A Sherlockian Anthology. Michael Harrison's collection of twenty-five essays on Holmes and his milieu was unlike anything I'd seen before. The ten dollar hardcover was a bit extravagant for an impoverished college student, but fearing I might never see its like again, I hesitated only briefly in making the purchase.

On the bus trip back to Peoria, I found myself seated next to a charming young lady who I would later wind up dating for a time, but that would come later ... at that moment I had a new book that demanded reading ...and another link in the Sherlockian chain that started with those darned French artists.

In retrospect, I don't know if the essays Harrison collected in Beyond Baker Street are the best bits of Sherlockian scholarship I've ever read. But at the time they were definitely at the top of their class — they were the only things in their class, as far as I knew. With a few interludes to chat with my seat-mate (unlike Holmes, I'm not a perfect reasoning machine), I still managed to read most of the work before we made it back to Peoria. It was amazing.

After years of learning game after game after game, from "Go Fish" all the way up to "Dungeons and Dragons," here at last was a game that really seemed to suit me. The Grand Game.

It was like finding a fabulous new type of food that you just knew you could cook up at home. My next paper for English class became a treatise on Holmes's methods. And once I finally discovered scion journals that published such stuff and were actually desperate for material ... it was like getting a blank check with Bill Gates's signature at the bottom. I've never hesitated in cashing that check, and it's given me much pleasure over the past couple of decades.

But in this modern world so fond of blame-targeting lawsuits and socio-economic excuses, I now have my own excuse ready for the occasional writing indiscretions that may have resulted from my fondness for the Game.

It's those darn French artists.

Art in the brain is liable to take the strangest forms, especially when that brain goes Sherlockian.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, April 1997)