The Birthday Issue

Welcome to the party.

I feel a bit silly saying that, because we’ve all been at these festivities a long time before any of us picked up this issue. The world of Sherlockiana is one big ongoing party, if you look at it with a smile, much like the city of Savannah has been depicted in the movie “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” The occasional pedant may try to tell us that Holmes and Watson were not put on this earth for our entertainment, but our hearts know better. Buy the scholars a drink, hand the bearskin rug his fiddle, and off we’ll go, to the next symposium or wildly improbable pastiche.

And just because Sherlock Holmes didn’t eat his breakfast one January morning, we’ll give this month a little more reason to celebrate than the rest. Sherlockians have celebrated with less motivation.

In honor of the master detective’s birthday, I’d like to say we’re doing something special this issue. I’d like to say it, but I can’t, really. We’re not doing too much that’s very different from every other issue. It’s just that, like those stores with “everyday sale prices,” we do try to have a good time every issue. There is a different feature or two this time (and I’ll let you discover them for yourself), but they’d be here anyway.

But if you’d care for a factoid to spice things up as you read this, a large chunk of this issue is attending the BSI dinner and the Baskerville Bash in New York on Friday, January 9th. The etheric filaments that magically connect every single copy of a given issue of The Holmes & Watson Report should be fairly lively that evening, as every one of over four hundred copies attaches itself to one of your fellow Sherlockians. So pick this up that evening if you have nothing else to do, and get set for a real charge.

View-aloha and best reagents,

Brad Keefauver,

Editor-in-chief