#sherlockiana

[hopelesslyprosaic]

A Different Kind of Queen of Crime- five ways that Dorothy L Sayers changed the way we see Sherlock Holmes

For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!

I got into Dorothy L Sayers, in the long run, because I loved Sherlock Holmes from childhood and that later launched me into early and golden age mysteries- but it was discovering Sayers that brought me back full force into the world of Holmes. Just an awesome lady.

[paverage-blog]

On the Origin of (Phallic) Tree Worship

Picture is text from EMPT which reads: “As I did so I struck against an elderly, deformed man, who had been behind me, and I knocked down several books which he was carrying. I remember that as I picked them up, I observed the title of one of them, The Origin of Tree Worship, and it struck me that the fellow must be some poor bibliophile, who, either as a trade or as a hobby, was a collector of obscure volumes.”

Just casually looked up Victorian tree worship (as you do) and came across this…

“…A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship, published anonymously in 1890. The fourth entry in a ten-volume “Phallic Series” printed privately in limited number…”

Obscure volumes, indeed…

[inevitablies]

happy 221b day from me and my holmes stuffies! ft. the fabulous canon lamp shade my lovely and talented gf made me :)

[astudyinimagination]

Truly, the women of the Sherlock Holmes canon and the surrounding media are beautiful and excellent and messy and awful and human, human, human... and the fandom does not deserve them.

[o-uncle-newt]

A very fun absurdity

I just did a post on my Holmes blog about Rex Stout that mentioned what was clearly his magnum opus, "Watson was a Woman," which claims that Watson was a woman, Irene Adler in particular, who was married to Holmes- and that the two of them produced Lord Peter Wimsey.

Stout's allegation about Wimsey being born of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler/Norton/Watson (!?!?) is obviously garbage, as contrary to the scrupulously researched and deathly serious rest of the article /s, this statement is based on Stout vaguely assigning Wimsey a birthdate around the turn of the century, when The Second Stain was published- presumably because that connotes a clear point when Holmes and Watson were no longer actively solving cases, and presumably their removal to the Sussex Downs to raise bees was also intended to provide a place for them to raise their son away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Or something.

The problem here, of course, is that Wimsey was, per his author, born in 1890, when both Holmes and Watson were in the public eye solving cases. And, like, we know who Wimsey's parents are. So that's a wash.

...or is it?

There is another possibility. Wimsey's birthdate of 1890 is mentioned a number of times, one of which is in DLS's radio story written for the Holmes birthday centennial. In this story, she helpfully situates that Wimsey's birth came just before Holmes's apparent death, and that Wimsey's father was a "minor member of Cabinet" during the period of The Naval Treaty, and thus was involved in the affair at the time. It is implied that he may have met Holmes at this juncture.

The Naval Treaty is dated, in-story, as the July after Watson's marriage. Watson becomes engaged to Mary Morstan in 1888, and has married her by June 1889, per Twisted Lip. Ergo, Naval Treaty takes place in July 1889.

Apropos of nothing... let's consider Sherlock Holmes's hands. We're told over the course of the stories that he has "long, white, nervous fingers" and a "delicacy of touch," which he obscures by the fact that he always has punctures and chemical stains all over them. We'll of course get back to this.

So it's July 1889. Mortimer Wimsey, Duke of Denver (or Viscount St George, unclear), is a minor cabinet minister, a position he has most certainly fallen upward into. He is in a marriage of more or less friendly detente with his wife Honoria nee Delagardie, much cleverer than he is, on whom he is constantly cheating. She's already given birth to the heir, a clear chip off the old block. One day, Mortimer comes home and tells Honoria of the calamity of the disappearance of the treaty. A month or so later, he excitedly comes home to share that the great Sherlock Holmes has found the treaty, solved the case, and saved the empire. Honoria is, of course, pleased to hear this, and even more impressed by this Mr Holmes than she already had been from other tales of his exploits which had made their way to high places.

We know that Holmes did not shy away from connections with nobility and royalty, and that for all his protestations that he did not discriminate by class in his detective practice (clearly true), in his private life he did not object to being feted by the upper classes. It was probably not that difficult for Honoria to invite him for dinner, or get herself invited to a party celebrating Holmes's accomplishment. Or perhaps it was Mortimer, respecting intelligence greater than his own, who invited Holmes. It could have happened pretty much anytime over the next few months- and, somehow, and without my attempting to explain exactly HOW, because the mind recoils, Honoria's second child resulted without her husband's involvement.

We know that Mortimer had no idea, as he seemed uncomplicatedly joyful when, as DLS noted, he came home to Honoria to tell her the news of Holmes's return. We wonder if Holmes knew- Wimsey's narration makes clear that he's not sure why Holmes let him into the 221b rooms as a young child looking for his lost cat, but what else would he do for his secret son? And, of course, the Wimsey hands, the only positive trace of Wimseyness that wasn't quite overcome by Delagarditude, were in fact Holmes hands, also delicate and sensitive. (But Gherkins had the same ha- shut up.)

And no, in case you're wondering, I have absolutely no shame. After all, as DLS herself said, the Game "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." And two can play that Game.

[annoyingcat413]

“Watson was a woman?” By Rex Stout I will always love you

[holmesoldfellow]

Sherlockian Relics Vol. 1, including "The Musgrave Ritual, Blue Carbuncle, Devil’s Foot poison, Red Headed League contract and dissolve notice, Sign of Four card, and Falls of Reichenbach poster"

[dynamicsofapodcast]

NEW EPISODE! It’s number one of season FOUR, and we’ve got a great episode to celebrate! Monica Schmidt is here to help us recap this year’s BSI Birthday Weekend in New York City, and talk about what it’s like to participate in what amounts to the world’s biggest Sherlockian family reunion.

We had a terrific time talking about... our terrific time. 😁 Plus, our show notes cover a host of links for things that were recorded during the Weekend and other recaps that preceded ours! Enjoy!

[three--rings]

If you want a historical note on this, these terms reference Sherlock Holmes for very good reason. For over a century Sherlockians have engaged in fandom discussion, writing articles, books, etc from a Watsonian perspective. It's called "Playing The Game" and it's assumed all discussions are Watsonian if not otherwise stated. It goes further than most fandoms, in that Sherlockians traditionally pretend Sherlock Holmes was real, and Watson really wrote all the stories and ACD was just The Editor. (That's what he's called.) In fact, it's considered a bit of a faux pas to break the kayfabe and admit it's all fiction. At the very least, you probably should disclaim before you do, like "okay just for a second let's talk Doylist."

Like scholarly articles in Sherlockian publications are usually written from a Watsonian perspective, unless otherwise stated. It's really pervasive. (Probably less so now than when I was active, which was over 20 years ago, when it was more isolated from larger media fandom.)

As an example I remember a huge discussion on a forum I was on back in the day about a detail in one of the stories where the currency doesn't add up write. Like okay a guinea is this much and a shilling and added together it's not this many crowns...why is Victorian English currency so confusing. But anyway it's a mistake. Obviously from a Doylist perspective he got his math wrong or just wrote the wrong thing or whatever. But Sherlockians spend their time coming up with a bunch of reasons why it might be the case. Like maybe Watson skimmed some money off to fund his gambling habit (which is a canonical Thing I could get into the evidence for but I won't.) That's Playing The Game.

Sherlock Holmes was the first modern fandom and originated a lot of concepts (like using the term canon and canonical, which were usually used in religious contexts before that).

But it's definitely good to be clear when you are using which POV and when you are switching between them.

I feel like we need a refresher on Watsonian vs Doylist perspectives in media analysis. When you have a question about a piece of media - about a potential plot hole or error, about a dubious costuming decision, about a character suddenly acting out of character -

A Watsonian answer is one that positions itself within the fictional world.

A Doylist answer is one that positions itself within the real world.

Meaning: if Watson says something that isn't true, one explanation is that Watson made a mistake. Another explanation is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a mistake.

Watsonian explanations are implicitly charitable. You are implicitly buying into the notion that there is a good in-world reason for what you're seeing on screen or on the page. ("The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie all the time because they're from a desert culture!")

Doylist explanations are pragmatic. You are acknowledging that the fiction is shaped by real-world forces, like the creators' personal taste, their biases, the pressures they might be under from managers or editors, or the limits of their expertise. ("The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie because somebody thought they'd sell more units that way.")

Watsonian explanations tend to be imaginative but naive. Seeking a Watsonian explanation for a problem within a narrative is inherently pleasure-seeking: you don't want your suspension of disbelief to be broken, and you're willing to put in the leg work to prevent it. Looking for a Watsonian answer can make for a fun game! But it can quickly stray into making excuses for lazy or biased storytelling, or cynical and greedy executives.

Doylist explanations are very often accurate, but they're not much fun. They should supersede efforts to provide a Watsonian explanation where actual harm is being done: "This character is being depicted in a racist way because the creators have a racist bias.'" Or: "The lore changed because management fired all of the writers from last season because they didn't want to pay then residuals."

Doylism also runs the risk of becoming trite, when applied to lower stakes discrepancies. Yes, it's possible that this character acted strangely in this episode because this episode had a different writer, but that isn't interesting, and it terminates conversation.

I think a lot of conversations about media would go a lot more smoothly, and everyone would have a lot more fun, if people were just clearer about whether they are looking to engage in Watsonian or Doylist analysis. How many arguments could be prevented by just saying, "No, Doylist you're probably right, but it's more fun to imagine there's a Watsonian reason for this, so that's what I'm doing." Or, "From a Watsonian POV that explanation makes sense, but I'm going with the Doylist view here because the creator's intentions leave a bad taste in my mouth that I can't ignore."

Idk, just keep those terms in your pocket? And if you start to get mad at somebody for their analysis, take a second to see if what they're saying makes more sense from the other side of the Watsonian/Doylist divide.

[hopelesslyprosaic]

I said I was going to start a Holmes sideblog- here's the closest thing to it!

Too antsy to truly commit to a blog about just one series/writer, but I definitely anticipate a nice chunk of Holmes stuff. Canon, Sherlockiana, some adaptational stuff. Will probably also talk a bit about my journey into the Golden Age. Let's see what happens.

To kick it off- a tiermaker I did of canon stories. All on instinct, did not spend more than two seconds considering each one. I haven't looked at it since I finished it and yet I stand behind it completely.

[paverage-blog]

Who wants to see pictures of my Sherlock Holmes themed study? (I made a wonky cross stitch sign for it because my partner kept calling it the “Stranger Things room”.)

[inevitablies]

In case you were still thinking about Sadie Shaw:

A fan nominated Sadie's Sherlock Holmes story, A Master of Magic, for a Featured Article at Fanlore. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Featured_Article_Nominations#A_Master_of_Magic

I added some context to the page yesterday about the prompt she had been working from and some brief descriptions about some other short stories she wrote.

Then I did some sleuthing about Sadie herself. https://fanlore.org/wiki/User:Mrs._Potato_Head#Sadie_Shaw

Your post about Sadie's story last July is what spurned it!

Oh my goodness that's incredible!! I love the thorough research you did on Sadie as well. It's so sweet that we know she got to travel to England and move there. Thanks for putting this information out there and letting me know!

Highly recommend everyone checks out the Fanlore article plus the research into Sadie!

(The original post for context)

[motion-blur-crowley]

"what on earth are you doing here?" "looking for you."

SHERLOCK HOLMES (1984 - 1994) ↳ 5x04 | Boscombe Valley

[petrvyhlidka]

Sherlockiana: Josef Friedrich

The first Czech illustrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories was born in 1875 in Prague, where he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1896. In Bohemia, he was known mainly from Humoristické listy, of which he was the core and until 1907 practically the only illustrator, but his work also appeared elsewhere, whether in the rival magazine Švanda Dudák or on the covers and pages of books by various publishers, such as Pavel Körber...

[thegildedbeeloves]

a gildedbee side blog: mainly fic recs, but also a bit of ancillary criss-crossing :-)

~ thegildedbeeloves~ is a side blog for me, {thegildedbee}. It's mainly to corral my fic rec lists (bbc sherlock), but it's also eventually going to serve as a place for me to collect three related kinds of posts: bbcs meta, sherlockiana (from the Strand until today) that I've come across in my main blogstream, as well as my own posts on fandom in general (when they start appearing :-)

I may do something with all of this at a later point, but for now what's gathered together is simply for sharing, pondering, revisiting, and speculating.

You're more than welcome to rummage about here -- and do some sharing, pondering, revisiting, and speculating of your own! -- or to pop on over to the main blog, which, while full of stuff I love, is admittedly a vast realm of self-inflicted chaos due to my failure to recognize the importance of #tagging :-) Feel free to say hey either here or there, or to mosey on over to the "ask away" box :-)

[holmesoldfellow]

Hello! Today is exactly six months since I started posting on this blog. I've had a great time deep diving into the various corners of the world of Sherlock Holmes and sharing it with y'all. Thanks for your support and here's to many more, from me and my ever growing Sherlockiana collection