Giant Summer Fun Issue!

Every now and then as we spin through this Sherlockian whirl, you may hear someone saying, “Things just aren’t fun in the Sherlockian world like they used to be!”

The pastiches are lame, all the Sherlockian greats are dead, and what’s up with the BSI, anyway? Why can’t things be fun like they were back in the good old days, when The Strand was showing up on the news-stands every month, William Gillette was up there on the stage playing Holmes like nobody had ever played Holmes before, and Father Ronald Knox was writing ground-breaking Sherlockian scholarship?

Well, let’s think about this for a moment. Did the Sherlockian world really change all that much? Did the pastiches really get worse? Was the Sherlockian scholarship of the fifties really so much better than that of the nineties? (Why do you think those journals are so hard to find? Somebody’s hiding them!) And what was up with the BSI back then, anyway?

Things change, sure. But people change, too. We get tired. We get jaded. We think we’ve seen it all and we give up the hope of good things ahead. And that’s when the fun stops. Or does it?

Nah, fun is like the Force in Star Wars. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the Sherlockian universe together. And if you aren’t feeling it, you just aren’t trying hard enough. Most of you probably aren’t to that burn-out point yet, because if you were, you wouldn’t even be bothering to read this. But suppose it happens to you someday? What do you do then?

Well, while I’ve still got your ear, let me give you a couple of pointers from a Sherlockian who’s burnt out more times than he likes to think about and lived to tell about it.

Tip Number One: Find something that impresses the heck out of you. Because even though you may think you’ve seen it all at some point, trust me, you haven’t. Just this past weekend I was lucky enough to get to visit the techno-lair of Sherlockian video columnist Jennie Paton. Now, I’m no neophyte to Sherlockian collections. I’ve sat in awe in the center of John Bennett Shaw’s Santa Fe library, and I’ve run my forefinger along the shelves of the great public collections in Toronto and Minneapolis. But as I looked at the walls of video in the Paton library (shelved sideways, not face-up like the ones in a video store), I was impressed. There wasn’t just five or six things I’d never seen . . . there were dozens and dozens of things I’d never even heard of. You would be amazed. An entire series of books and tapes using Holmes to teach English to Japanese speakers. A babe-city Czech adaptation of “The Creeping Man.” A squirrel puppet named Sherlock that hangs out with folk singers . . . okay, maybe that one wasn’t so impressive. But the point of this bit is that there’s stuff out there if you just keep looking . . .

Tip Number Two: If you’ve made it to the place in the Sherlockian food chain where nobody is doing anything that pleases you, then maybe it’s time to make your own fun. If you’re intelligient enough to be bored by every pastiche on the market, then you’re smart enough to write one of your own and do better than the stuff that’s out there. If every article you read on Holmes isn’t nearly as clever as you are just sitting around your house, well, maybe it’s time you wrote an article on Holmes. Quit waiting for people to bring the fun to you and start taking the fun to the people (or at least yourself, if you’re selfishly inclined).

Tip Number Three: If the preachy editor just keeps rambling on about eating your asparagus, brushing your teeth, and what you should do with your collection when you’re dead, ditch the editorial and head for the guts of the issue. Editorials can be so non-fun, can’t they? Ah, well, that’s enough of my rant for this issue. Welcome to the Giant Summer Fun Issue. Summer’s here, let’s party.

— The publisher, editor-in-chief, and king of the cranky diatribe