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American Sherlockian London This week, we explore one of those strange little concepts upon which a fractured Sherlockian mind can fixate. You might find it absurd, you might find it utterly pointless, and then again, you might find it a lightning bolt of inspiration to base the next phase of your Sherlockian career upon. So here we go . . . It's a metaphoric point of view, based upon the fact that we Sherlockians carry the London of Sherlock Holmes with us wherever we are, even here in America. If we can indeed get a "Sherlockian London" feeling here in the U.S.A. then what if we looked at Sherlockian America with an overlay of Sherlockian London? What if we actually superimposed the horizontal rectangle of the U.S. over the horizontal rectangle of London? Where would that put the various American Sherlockians in this giant London we call our own? While the Thames and the Mississippi run in two different directions over all, the key to lining up our two maps would have to be the dip in the Thames surrounding the Isle of Dogs. This equates prettty well to the river-wrapped Southern end of Illinois. Given this starting point, the Eastern seaboard winds up being Essex above Washington, D.C. and Woolwich below. Denver would be our Parliament and Salt Lake City would be found somewhere in Hyde Park. My own Peoria, Illinois winds up being somewhere in the middle of the West India Docks. Of course, this mental change of scaling the entire U.S. down to the size of a very large city cannot be without its side effects. Reducing an expanse of a couple thousand miles down to around sixteen could make you do some wacky things . . . like deciding to drive two hundred miles for a game of croquet. If Peoria is in the West India Docks of Sherlockian America-as-London, then Indianapolis is somewhere in the Greenwich Marshes. No great distance -- Sherlock Holmes even took the long way around in The Sign of the Four and made it in a single sentence. So, upon waking up this fine Saturday morning, with the sun shining and the temperatures in the low seventies, I decided to pop down to the annual picnic of the Illustrious Clients. Sure, it's a three-and-a-half-hour drive, but like objects in the rearview mirror, events in the mindset of Sherlockian America-as-London may be closer than they appear. The Sherlockian picnics that I've been to have never scholarly events. We tend to put our papers and programs aside for this one time of the year, do a little outdoor dining, and just socialize with the friends that we see under slightly more formal circumstances the rest of the year. The Illustrious Clients' picnic was no exception, being a pleasant combination of burgers, hot dogs, salads, desserts, and croquet, horseshoes, Victorian potato racing, and "vitriol" tossing. That last one, the Clients' annual "Kitty Winter Vitriol Toss," involves teams of two playing catch with extremely fragile water balloons over a volleyball net. It was similar enough to the Peoria society's annual egg toss that I found the same skill set worked for the water balloons, yet I have to give the Clients points for adding that volleyball net obstacle -- it makes the catching a challenge from the first toss. It was as perfect a day for a picnic as my personal taste in weather could ask for, the drive down was all easy interstate with a relaxing book-on-tape playing in the background, and I did a little shopping in Champaign-Urbana on my way back . . . all in all a lovely way to spend a Saturday, and I'm very glad I went. The side effects of thinking of Sherlockian America as Sherlock's London do not seem to be all that bad. Of course, there is still the matter of the American location of 221B Baker Street, the home of Holmes, on our metaphoric map. With Peoria at the West India Docks and Parliament at Denver, the sitting room of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson must be somewhere in the vicinity of . . . Montpelier, Idaho? What does this mean? Well, if I were Robert Langdon, popular symbologist hero of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, this arcane connection between Holmes, Idaho, and potatoes would surely have to mean something very important, leading me on some further adventures that would reveal Sherlockian secrets hidden for centuries. Hmmm, Robert Langdon would think. Sherlock Holmes was in Montpellier during his missing years. Watson also goes to Montpellier in following the missing Lady Frances Carfax. There is one "L" missing in the Montpelier in Idaho, which corresponds to 221B Baker Street on a metaphoric overlay of London on the U.S. map. Why only one "L"? It's a warning: "Stay the 'L' out of Idaho!" In the next chapter, Langdon would continue: Idaho is famous for potatoes. In the one Sherlock Holmes story that somehow takes place during Holmes's missing years, "Wisteria Lodge," the mysteriously not-missing Holmes says, "With a spud, a tin box, and an elementary book on botany, there are instructive days to be spent." And Steve Doyle, whose mysterious connection to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has yet to be fully exposed, had us race with potatoes, also called spuds, at the Illustrious Clients' picnic. The racing is an act symbolic for fleeing, fleeing with potatoes. And Holmes posed as an Irish-America during his second "missing" period, someone who may have fled the potato famine in Ireland as a youth. Was Steve trying to tell us something about Sherlock Holmes averting a near-disastrous potato blight in Idaho during his missing years? And why did the Clients have no potato chips, only potato salad, until chips were brought in from Illinois? Deep waters, my Watsons, deep waters . . . The great thing about characters in novels is that they can come up with all kinds of wacky theories like this and their writers can simply arrange the universe at the novel's end so that the wacky theories turn out to be true. For the rest of us, a weekend adventure can be a simple drive down to Fort Harrison State Park for some burgers, croquet, and water balloons. It's a lot more relaxing, to be sure. But that's life in American Sherlockian London. Your humble correspondent, |
