Valuable Institutions

“The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it,” Sheriock Holmes advised in “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.” The thing of it is, Mr. Holmes knew how to use just about everything.

The Press. Wax dummies. Train schedules. Handwriting analysis. Street urchins. Microscopes. Public-houses.  Half-sovereigns. Just about everything.

And he knew how to use just about everything in the way that best suited his purposes. From medical knowledge to manuscript dating, Sheriock Holmes seemed to be able to take any subject you could name and turn it into a tool of detection.

What, I have to wonder, would Sheriock Holmes do with electronic mail-ing lists?

Part of the reason I’m wondering will be obvious to anyone who has spent time on the Sheriockian Internet of late.  The Hounds of the Internet, the e-mail list that has served computer literate Sherlockians for many years now, has suddenly developed a couple of electronic splinter groups following a bit of a dust-up. After years of dealing with a single group that basically tried to be everything to everyone. Internet Sherlockians are now faced with a few basic questions they may not have stopped to consider before, like “What are we doing here?”

As a follower of Holmes, the natural impulse is to look to the master detective’s example and see what he would do with an electronic mailing list like the Hounds or the new Baker Street and ACD lists.

Sheriock Holmes loved information sources, and e-mail lists are marvelous information sources. News specific to your area of interest comes to you faster than through any other medium, and unlike most news sources, an e-mail list is interactive. If Holmes needed the name of a left-handed forger who kept pet parrots, he could simply put out an inquiry to the criminologists list and see if anyone else had encountered such a fellow.

It would be a great medium for other criminologists like Francois Ie Villard, on an entirely different continent, to consult Holmes, Bertillion, and a few others simultaneously.

Of course, no system is perfect. In asking for the help of Holmes and Bertillion, Ie Villard would have to page through postings by Gregson, Lestrade, Jones, and anyone else who had two cents to put in on his case. And that’s not the worst of it. You know Dr. Watson would be on the list, and he would always somehow wind up writing about the Afghan War or incidences of whooping cough among women or something else that had nothing to do with criminology. And Barker, the detective who nobody previously knew had Afghani forebears, would take umbrage with Watson’s anti-Aghanistan remarks and start the war all over again, this time on the Internet.

At which point, you have to ask yourself: would Sherlock Holmes put up with all mis crap just for a speck of info on parrot-keeping forgers now and then?

The answer? Of course he would.

For a perfect illustration of Sherlock Holmes handling an e-mail list, turn in your Canon to “The Adventure of the Red Circle” and find the part where he pulls down the book in which he keeps his collected agony columns.

He calls them “irrelevant” or even “unmitigated bleat” as he goes through the pages, and refers to the whole as “a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings.”
But he also finds exactly what he needs to solve the case amid the mess.

Admittedly, any specific e-mail list is going to be less chaotic than the agony columns of all the London papers which Holmes so dutifully collected, day after day, and that is my point. Sherlock Holmes dealt with something much worse than any e-mail list you’d care to imagine, working with it on a daily basis to turn it into a valuable source of reference. It didn’t matter what every other person who used those personal ads used them for. Holmes knew what he wanted and kept to his own purposes, as well as the regimen that kept the agony columns useful to his purposes.

Holmes, of all people, had no fun reading things like “Surely Jimmy will not break his mother’s heart. . .” And, in a like manner, there are times when Internet e-mail lists are without any charm whatsoever. But they are not without their uses. And you have to be the one that decides what uses they have for you.

Holmes could do it. You can too.

I know, that was Sherlock Holmes.  Holmes was also skinny and eventually rather wealthy, as well. But think about it ... if Holmes could master an information source like the Internet and you can do likewise, then maybe the next thing you know, you’ll be rich and slim, too.

And they say reading this column doesn’t have benefits. Like e-mail lists, it’s a very valuable institution ... if you know how to use it.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, April 1998)