Sherlocking Your Way To Arkham Asylum

Ever wonder how you can tell when your hobby has taken too much control over your life?

Well, here's a symptom that I recently encountered, during a three-day marathon of Sherlockian writing and reading over the recent Labor Day weekend. I was taking a break to eat breakfast, and turned on the TV to find a Batman cartoon on. As I watched the Batman dealing with the Joker and the Penguin in his usual bat-fashion, I began to notice a sympathy creeping up in me for the villains. Suddenly they weren't criminals any more, but simply men pursuing their hobbies with a wild abandon very similar to my own.

Watching the Joker and his jokes, and Penguin with his birds, I suddenly felt myself transported to Gotham City. My name was now Shirl O'Kean, a mild-mannered bookworm of Irish descent who was tormented by the fact his parents gave him a girl's first name. Having been a fan of Sherlock Holmes from childhood, collecting everything with a pipe and deerstalker I could get my hands on, writing entire books on Holmes's habits and methods, reading Holmes stories every day and watching Holmes movies every night . . . eventually my mania would find it's climax during an auction at Gotheby's auction house.

The only copy of Watson's privately printed brochure A Study in Scarlet, that has ever been discovered since its mention in the second Holmes novel is on the auction block, and my puny resources are rapidly outbid by Lascar Warbucks, the billionaire Sherlockian from Metropolis. Warbucks chomps his cigar and grins as he collects his prize, and I am left to return to my Sherlock-filled apartment in despair, popping in the current Holmes tape I've been watching, an adaptation of "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton."

As the giant video screen lights up the darkened apartment, Holmes's face appears, saying, "You know, Watson, I don't mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. This is the chance of my lifetime in that direction."

"Damn you, Holmes!" I cry, throwing the nearest book at the screen, hitting the VCR instead, which causes it to start looping, as such machines in fiction often do.

". . . a highly efficient criminal. This is the chance of my lifetime in that direction. VREEEP!... a highly efficient criminal. This is the chance of my lifetime in that direction. VREEP! ... a highly efficient criminal.... "

And as that video repeats and repeats and repeats in the darkness of the apartment, a look a maniacal enlightenment steals across my face.

Our scene cuts to the hotel suite of Lascar Warbucks, where the billionaire is celebrating his acquisition of the Watson brochure with a bevy of supermodels. A figure in an Invernesse cape and deerstalker leaps over the balcony railing into the suite.

"Who the heck are you?" Lascar Warbucks demands.

"Elementary, my dear Warbucks," the caped figure laughs, his identity hidden behind an oversized beak of a fake nose, "I am the Sherlockian! Mind if I smoke?"

With that, the Sherlockian takes one puff on his great calabash pipe, which starts emitting clouds of knock-out gas (the big fake nose is a gas mask, of course). He scoops up the rare Watson brochure while Lascar Warbucks and his supermodels start coughing and quickly fall to the floor.

This is just the beginning of the Sherlockian's demented crime spree through Gotham City. A Bicasso drawing of Sherlock, Ouida Zathbone's diamond deerstalker broach, every one-of-a-kind Holmes item you can imagine becomes fair game for the Sherlockian's plunder.

Batman, naturally, will eventually out-Sherlock our villain, finding that one item that the Sherlockian has to go for, setting a trap, then punching him in the big fake nose. It's inevitable. Just as it's inevitable that the Sherlockian will wind up locked in Arkham Asylum with the Joker, Poison Ivy, the Ventriloquist, and all those other monomaniacs whose fixation with a single area of interest took on new meaning when life in Gotham City drove them over the edge.

Finishing my breakfast and returning to reality, I was very glad that I lived in Peoria and not Gotham City. Life in Peoria doesn't drive people over the edge quite so much as it does in Gotham, and you can be a crazed Sherlockian here without Batman punching you in your big, fake, gas-mask nose.

Not that anyone here is crazed . . . yet . . . hmmm, maybe it's time for a break.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, October 1998)