I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere

The Art of the (Sherlockian) Murder

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"It is murder, Watson -- refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder" [HOUN]</h4>
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Murder, like a forbidden back-alley bar, is a preoccupation. But it's a curiosity we can forgive. Because outside of the gory, sordid details, the promise of <a href="http://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2014/06/basil-rathbone-reluctant-sherlock-holmes.html" target="_blank">a hero</a> -- a doctor, a soldier, <i>a detective</i> -- makes the whole unseemly business somehow more understandable. In her recent book <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1xrssMy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Art of the English Murder</a></i>, <a href="http://www.lucyworsley.com/" target="_blank">Dr. Lucy Worsley</a> explains the by-night fascination with unhinged minds and forensics in the context of some of Britain's most famous crimes, criminals, and fictional characters. <br />
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Including our namesake. The Sherlockian story begins in Victorian Wiltshire:<br />
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<i>1860. Road Hill House, a Georgian estate belonging to Samuel Kent and his second wife, Mary. Nighttime. As the Kents sleep on, their three-year-old son Saville disappears from his cot. His body is found early the next morning, crammed down the backyard privy. Nearly beheaded.</i></blockquote>
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This case played out with morbid fascination even in London newspapers. Among Scotland Yard’s best, Detective Inspector Jack Whicher was tasked not only to unravel little Saville's tragic demise but to deal with the many write-in deductions of England's new class of armchair sleuths: A mixed class of clerks, shopkeepers, and accountants with <a href="http://www.victorianperiodicals.com/Contents/Overview.asp" target="_blank">increased access to and interest in</a> shocking news from the too-tidy countryside. <br />
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"Despite its lack of artistic merit," writes Worsley, "the literature of murder tells us not what people thought they ought to read. It tells us what they really read." <br />
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Such a notion of quiet hypocrisy directly compels the popular image of Victorian domestic life -- of sexual, violent desires stifled by corsets and crinolines. Indeed, many supposed from the well-publicized testimonies that Mr. Kent had been having an adulterous relationship with one of his housemaids. <br />
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More bewitching still was the newly discovered science of forensics. Over the course of the 19th century, Worsley explains, professional detectives and their amateur (<i>ahem - unofficial consulting</i>) counterparts were interpreting medical evidence collected at crime scenes and from the dubiously maimed bodies themselves. Whicher concentrated the early part of his investigation, for instance, on a bloodstained nightgown that had been lodged in the chimney.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi0w531tlM3RcbAA65ECGvRvJyAh5dGl6S0wvANRp4Fn0vOQ5aCp-YKvAN7wTxNJBqpN2AMXH8h_F6ueADkom75Lm_rcLfxRxZxgkQh0aBt4NePr5U3G4ZN884qBwfonZWy-Zo244024GE/s1600/Morgue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi0w531tlM3RcbAA65ECGvRvJyAh5dGl6S0wvANRp4Fn0vOQ5aCp-YKvAN7wTxNJBqpN2AMXH8h_F6ueADkom75Lm_rcLfxRxZxgkQh0aBt4NePr5U3G4ZN884qBwfonZWy-Zo244024GE/s1600/Morgue.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 107%;">A Victorian-era morgue. Doctors examined cadavers with their bare hands.</span></td></tr>
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Such a discovery was scandalous. Exciting. What <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensation_novel" target="_blank">sensationalist</a> author Wilkie Collins later described as symptomatic of a sort of sickness:<br />
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Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach? And a nasty thumping at the top of your head? I call it the 'detective fever.'</blockquote>
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Armed with a Stradivarius, a laboratory of gruesome poisons and chemicals, a magnifying glass, and a riding crop, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's indomitable Sherlock Holmes nourished the fever pitch. He pursued criminals over pages that read to this day like <a href="http://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2011/05/great-teacher-cree_30.html" target="_blank">Dr. Joseph Bell's</a> autopsy reports. He applied reason to <a href="http://www.universityherald.com/articles/10694/20140731/nasa-unveils-rover-that-will-explore-mars-in-2020-is-its-name-an-ode-to-sir-arthur-conan-doyle.htm" target="_blank">the unknowable</a>. To the equally terrifying and titillating. <br />
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And there is comfort in that. When <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/10/18/jack_the_rippers_long_shadow_from_sherlock_holmes_to_jekyll_hyde/" target="_blank">monstrous murderers prowl the night</a>, when the world seems to have completely lost its way, we take refuge in the constants -- damning facts and a damn good story. No one does <i>it</i>, the <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2852/2852-h/2852-h.htm" target="_blank">dogged</a> hunt for exact knowledge, better than our Holmes. <br />
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Worsley cites <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Detective_Fiction" target="_blank">Golden Age</a> author Dorothy L. Sayers for conclusive perspective. <br />
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"Death," she says, "seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other subject." <br />
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<i>Click to read more about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Kent" target="_blank">the murder at Road Hill House</a>. </i><br />
<i><br />Image credit: Wikipedia </i><br />
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The Art of the (Sherlockian) Murder

"It is murder, Watson -- refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder" [HOUN] Murder, like a forbidden back-alley bar, is a pr...

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by Jessica Levine

Review: The City of the Saved: Tales of the Great Detectives

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"I shall commence with the City" [FIVE]</h4>
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's interest in the afterlife has finally found a suitable partner/ ghost writer in the team assembled by British sci-fi giant Phillip Purser-Hallard. <br />
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The eclectic creator has edited a third book in his series <i>The City of the Saved</i>, stories set in a megalopolis of the afterlife (Heaven?) in which exist every human and fictional construct ever created. This third entry in the <i>CotS</i> series muses upon the possibilities of all incarnations of the Great Detective and his humble sidekick as well as his eternal nemesis, his bumbling police contacts, his landlady.<br />
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In other words, it's heaven (or Victorian England) and everybody is there, and the city goes on forever, and it's London but it's not London, and there is an entire detective agency populated by different versions of the one and only. Purser-Hallard and his team of writers all leap off the ideas fermented in his previous <i>CotS</i> works. Once the reader grasps the basic idea (and it is a stretch) the volume <i><a href="http://obversebooks.co.uk/product/detective_tales/" target="_blank">Tales of the Great Detectives</a> </i>makes for great fun seasoned with a refreshing sprinkle of eschatological philosophy.</div>
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Not unlike collections such as <i>A Study in Sherlock</i> in which multiple versions of Holmes and Watson stalk and detect across multiple venues and eras, <i>Tales of the Great Detectives </i>benefits from the multiple authors creating their own deerstalker-clad hero, giving us their own spin on a character who after a century and more is still as elusive as the vapors of The Thames but as immediate as Benedict Cumberbatch's voice.<br />
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The collection consists of seven tales, pro-and epilogued by brief sketches setting the scenes.  The opening tale gives us the landscape and breadth of the seemingly infinite City of the Saved and connects in a deft descriptive analogy to Holmes' aviary passion also linked to in the brief ending tale (a stream of conscious look at the death of an aged Holmes among his bees in the gardens of Sussex).<br />
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From the brief opening the book becomes immediately engaging, and the reader is not far into the first tale when she realizes that the scenario being played outs connects seamlessly with the last scenes of the 1986 film Chris Columbus film <i>Young Sherlock Holmes</i>. One tale gives us Conan Doyle himself as the murder suspect, out to silence his consulting detective forever as he failed to do at the end of "The Final Problem."<br />
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Perhaps most engaging is the various handling of Watson, who in this volume ranges from a philandering roue to a video game character.  Briefly told, the stories engage incredible Holmes/Watson scenarios set on the other side of existence in a city that never ends.  Fans of science fiction will be engrossed, followers of religious debate on the End Time will be engaged, and the average fan of Sherlock Holmes will feel an odd familiarity in all the unique renderings of Holmes and his detection of crime in an afterlife that knows no death, no murder, no crime.<br />
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<a href="http://obversebooks.co.uk/product/detective_tales/" target="_blank"><i>The City of the Saved: Tales of the Great Detectives</i></a> is available from <a href="http://obversebooks.co.uk/" target="_blank">Obverse Books</a>.<br />
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Review: The City of the Saved: Tales of the Great Detectives

"I shall commence with the City" [FIVE] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's interest in the afterlife has finally found a suitable...

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by N. Thomas Padilla

Ebook Review - 221b: The Curious Case of the Drugged Dog and the Jammed Window

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"You come to a London house-agent!" [SOLI]</h4>
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A young woman working as a temp at a housing agency may not sound like a candidate for a Sherlock Holmes stand-in, but in Brendon Connelly's novella <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1sBYoZ3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">221b: The Curious Case of the Drugged Dog and the Jammed Window</a></i>, that’s exactly the case.<br />
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Emily and her fellow temp Jenny work at Homes Brothers Estate Agents, a real estate company located at 219-223 Baker Street. The company, of course, receives mail addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and they use it for a bit of good-natured publicity. Emily and Jenny are tasked with answering Mr. Holmes's mail and stumble upon a genuine mystery when Emily takes it upon herself to look into the details of a particularly odd letter. <br />
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This novella is the first of a series; according to the author, each novella is a self-contained case, with an overarching plot connecting all six. The author describes the first as the "pilot episode" of his series and, much like pilot episodes of television shows, the series’ potential still has a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA-EYaxWJkbCqShNFivYtNXIZDqBUFlyjRSsPTYi4mQmCGv1bC5rypp8JKDthmWvmqHb3ryD4PNLRTmCxlqi_prXpkrPedOog82LmeclBCz4-MTUVdDRC6NhQNz832eUEUdR7Za7fglCmO/s1600/221B+Curious.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The first in a series of six Sherlock Holmes novellas by Brendan Connelly" border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA-EYaxWJkbCqShNFivYtNXIZDqBUFlyjRSsPTYi4mQmCGv1bC5rypp8JKDthmWvmqHb3ryD4PNLRTmCxlqi_prXpkrPedOog82LmeclBCz4-MTUVdDRC6NhQNz832eUEUdR7Za7fglCmO/s640/221B+Curious.jpg" title="221b: The Curious Case of the Drugged Dog and the Jammed Window" width="452" /></a></div>
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The transitions between scenes are often clumsily sudden, like a quick cut in a film but without the visual cues to ground the viewer. Emily, the story's Holmes equivalent, is so puzzled by people's skepticism of her deductive prowess that it comes across as naive. Believing a Holmes enthusiast could work out a case on her own is one thing - asking the reader to believe such a person would honestly expect the police to listen to her pushes her credibility.<br />
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The case itself is a unique twist on "The Empty House," but the end is too easy. Connelly presents a classic 'drawing room explanation,' where all the details are spelled out, the deductive leaps are illuminated and loose ends are tied up, but without the case having any of the suspense or tension that makes such a scene enjoyable. Too much of the case has been kept in the dark, not only from other characters, but from the reader as well. The clues are mentioned, but Emily lacks Holmes's flair for the dramatic to keep the reader's attention. The reader isn't even sure what crime it is exactly that the ladies have been investigating until the last few pages. What was likely intended as a major reveal at the end instead falls flat and feels a little like cheating.<br />
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While the end is dissatisfying, getting there is enjoyable. The story is light, fun, and loaded with references to Sherlockiana. The character Jenny, the Watson to Emily’s Holmes, is very believable as the excitable friend who gets pulled along and discovers she’s actually enjoying herself. She’s got a head on her shoulders, and the two of them hit it off well. Emily is well meaning if a bit awkward, and very singlemindedly driven to find the solution to the puzzle out of the sheer fun of it. Connelly is very good at describing locations, and his enthusiasm for his characters and the story is engaging and keeps the momentum moving. <br />
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It needs work, but it’s a fun read with enough potential to warrant taking a look at the rest of the series once it’s released. <i>221b: The Curious Case of the Drugged Dog and the Jammed Window</i> is available on Amazon as an e-book.<br />
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Ebook Review - 221b: The Curious Case of the Drugged Dog and the Jammed Window

"You come to a London house-agent!" [SOLI] A young woman working as a temp at a housing agency may not sound like a candid...

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by Katie Magnusson

Remembering Donald A. Redmond, BSI, 2s.

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[<b><i>Editor's note</i></b>: The following is a guest post by Chris Redmond, BSI ("Billy")]<br />
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My father, Don Redmond, BSI, 2s. ("Good Old Index"), first read the Sherlock Holmes stories in his boyhood, and his father’s copy of the grey-green three-volume Conan Doyle’s Best Books sits on my bookshelf today. Indeed, he was interested enough in Sherlockian matters to buy a copy of T. S. Blakeney’s 1932 book <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1B2fx7r" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction?</a></i> somewhere along the way. But the enthusiasm that would land him knee-deep in Sherlockian scholarship and bring him to membership in the Baker Street Irregulars lay largely dormant until the 1960s. That was when I as a young teenager read the stories and became fascinated by all things Sherlockian, quickly getting involved to the point that my father had to come along just to keep an eye on me.<br />
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His death on October 22 in Kingston, Ontario, at the age of 92, thus ends some fifty years of Sherlockian activity that earned him both that Irregular investiture (as “Good Old Index” in 1969) and a Two Shilling Award, not to mention memberships and friendships in Sherlockian societies far and wide.<br />
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His writing includes dozens of articles — I hope to prepare an anthology some day — and two substantial books, <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1zhqH3A" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources</a></i> and then <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1xferTf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates: Copyright and Conan Doyle in America 1890-1930</a></i>. The latter book completes the circle by including a bibliographic discussion of the Best Books volume with which my father had begun his reading decades before.<br />
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In the 1960s, I of course began writing Sherlockian juvenilia, and DAR, who was already an established scholar in the field of library administration, soon was not only advising me on my work but producing his own. Sometimes he gave his articles titles that he could straight-facedly include in his academic curriculum vitae, such as “Some Notes on the Ceylon Problem”, an early article in the <i><a href="http://sherlock-holmes.org.uk/journal.php" target="_blank">Sherlock Holmes Journal</a></i>. His study “Some Chemical Problems in the Canon” (<i><a href="http://bakerstreetjournal.com/" target="_blank">Baker Street Journal</a></i>, 1964) remains a definitive explanation of Holmes’s chemical work.<br />
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With me he joined the nearest Sherlockian society, the newly organized Great Alkali Plainsmen of Greater Kansas City, perhaps largely because I was too young to travel into the big city without an adult. Famously he organized a meeting of the Plainsmen on the campus of the University of Kansas, where he was then working, and John Bennett Shaw was appalled, after travelling all the way from Oklahoma to attend, to discover that alcoholic beverages were not allowed to be served on state property.<br />
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Later, living in Ontario, he played a key role in the creation of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the (then) Metropolitan Toronto Library. I recently had the opportunity to tell that story as part of a small volume, <i>The Four Pillars</i>, published in honor of the collection. The 1971 symposium held by the Library to launch that collection led to the creation of the <a href="http://www.torontobootmakers.com/" target="_blank">Bootmakers of Toronto</a>, and DAR was (as was I, though still young and busy with other parts of my life) an early member. When the Master Bootmaker award was created some years later, he was among the four initial recipients.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 19.3199996948242px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">This beautiful antique card catalog is home to the index of Sherlockiana created by Donald Redmond. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 19.3199996948242px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Photo courtesy of Peggy Perdue (Facebook)</span></span></td></tr>
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He kept up a lively correspondence, and visited Sherlockians whenever professional travel allowed, and among his effects I have found a Speckled Band of Boston necktie, not to mention sheaves of newsletters from groups I have never so much as heard of. Sherlockian printed matter that he from all quarters received is marked “indexed” in his neat handwriting, to indicate that it had found a place in the Toronto library’s “Bigelow” card index, which he maintained on a volunteer basis for decades.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6K5l_E5KIeVXWNuf0EToY0UHGgQqgnt7dOvN-nOKTyK4hq7A5wxlA7Pa1fL4HZFYnruxR3-uVJzLWulp9Skcch66spiz_iGK7-g1Yvk39QVuboKTRTAP51ISwbdTGt3xq8BY97pKrHRBf/s1600/Don+and+Ruth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6K5l_E5KIeVXWNuf0EToY0UHGgQqgnt7dOvN-nOKTyK4hq7A5wxlA7Pa1fL4HZFYnruxR3-uVJzLWulp9Skcch66spiz_iGK7-g1Yvk39QVuboKTRTAP51ISwbdTGt3xq8BY97pKrHRBf/s1600/Don+and+Ruth.jpg" /></a></div>
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Together with my mother, Ruth, he got to know Britain’s Holmesians well during a research leave in 1977-78 from which he brought home massive notes for what became <i>Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources</i>. </div>
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As for his reputation as “Good Old Index”, his first major Sherlockian index, covering the <i>BSJ</i> from 1946 to 1969, appeared in 1970, and he continued to index the <i>BSJ</i>, with cumulations, until 2012. Other indexes followed, knocked out on a series of manual and then electric typewriters — he never had the slightest desire to touch a computer. Bibliographies of the <a href="http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/books-video-music/specialized-collections/literature-genre-doyle.jsp" target="_blank">Arthur Conan Doyle Collection</a> at the Toronto library were joined by Bigelow on Holmes, a cumulation of that massive card index created by S. Tupper Bigelow.<br />
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A chemistry graduate of Mount Allison University, Don Redmond went on to study library science at McGill University and the University of Illinois, and worked in library administration in Nova Scotia, Ceylon, Turkey and Kansas (where we both caught the Sherlockian bug) before becoming chief librarian of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, 1966-77. Railways, Meccano, and church administration and history were among his enthusiasms in addition to Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle.<br />
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His Sherlockian involvement continued after retirement, with a particular highlight being the summer “workshops” he led at Queen’s University in 1980 and 1981, which brought costumed Sherlockians to Kingston to mingle with fascinated Queen’s alumni. It would be safe to say that (although he took bibliographical and historical studies very seriously) it provided a field in which he could relax his customary dignity a little, enjoying himself and bringing enjoyment to others.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFPfgaPhaGYv21oL0SSMjYsh9PQk-mQ1JJF7nFG8HZEzKxpbHqn0LC_zg-49NvFglkLUs49JIbEbXj4DFMSx_roINt1qxv2GXYS2wzn0lugstgjybeMN8KVtyqGrH9N4v7WwgabGWVdZWV/s1600/Donredmond.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="494" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFPfgaPhaGYv21oL0SSMjYsh9PQk-mQ1JJF7nFG8HZEzKxpbHqn0LC_zg-49NvFglkLUs49JIbEbXj4DFMSx_roINt1qxv2GXYS2wzn0lugstgjybeMN8KVtyqGrH9N4v7WwgabGWVdZWV/s640/Donredmond.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Don Redmond, center, enjoying a Queen's University workshop. Just behind him is his wife Ruth, and on the far right is his son Chris.</td></tr>
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His long Sherlockian life produced a house full of books, papers, and memorabilia, some of which have come to me, while others have been deposited in the Toronto and University of Minnesota libraries or been distributed to a new generation across the Sherlockian world. A few key items, including his Irregular Shilling, will go to the <a href="http://www.bsitrust.org/archive" target="_blank">Baker Street Irregulars Archives</a> at Harvard University.</div>
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<i>Chris Redmond, BSI ("Billy") has been a Sherlockian nearly his whole life. He is the administrator of the comprehensive and informative <a href="http://sherlockian.net/">Sherlockian.net</a> and he lives in Canada.</i></div>
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