The Coal Scuttle’s Tale

People are always accusing me of being someone else.

“Oh, you mean so-and-so is a real person?” they ask. “I thought it was just you writing under an alias.” At least half of the writers that hang out at the Dangling Prussian have been thought mythic at one time or another, and I suppose it is my fault. Using the occasional pseudonym as I do (even in The Baker Street Journal, no less!) and having impersonated one of my friends (only once, in a very evil moment), it’s only my just desserts.

And being a naive sort, however, I don’t look for literary disguises. But when a manuscript crossed my desk purporting to be written by the Baker Street coal scuttle, I was more than a little suspicious. Firstly, because coal scuttles don’t have hands. And secondly, because there was a pawprint-shaped marmalade stain on the back of one of the pages. It didn’t take the world’s greatest consulting detective to know that the bearskin rug had struck again.

Pseudonym or no, I was delighted to see the Baker Street insider dishing out the dirt once more. I was even going to print his article this time. And then the move hit . . .4009 N. Chelsea Place, Peoria, IL 61614 . . . is the new editorial/subscription address for The Holmes & Watson Report. (Which, if you haven’t heard it already, is only a hundred yards from the editorial/subscription address for Plugs & Dottles). Relocating, of course, requires packing and moving things (which is why I’m now sitting at a computer in a bare room, trying to get this issue out before the computer, too, gets moved). In the process of moving, however, the “coal scuttle’s” article, along with a bit of this issue’s editing, and Pj Doyle’s column heading vanished. So if you’ll just “bear” with us, we will hopefully be back up to speed next issue.

— The Editor (who won’t be using pseudonyms in The H&W Report)