KNOWING IS EASIER THAN EXPLAINING

Holmes pulled out his watch.

 

"It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it."—Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet" 

This past Saturday I attended my first in-person Sherlockian event since March 2020. Initial awkwardness aside, it was a grand afternoon--a pot-luck picnic in a lovely park with a small beach on Puget Sound and twenty-five members of The Sound of the Baskervilles, my local scion for the past 15 years. I love these people. However, I encountered a small difficulty when attempting to answer the question "So, what are you doing with yourself?" 

How to explain my falling off into an Arthur Conan Doyle rabbit hole of epic proportions is a tough task; I am quite sure I blathered. The kind SOBs were too polite to pull out their watches (really, their phones) to signal to me that I needn't go on.

I tried to explain that I'm committed to producing two books and, as part of that process, I'm spending an inordinate amount of time reading, rereading and studying Doyle's short stories. I went on about the stories collected in the Oxford World's Classics Arthur Conan Doyle Gothic Tales.

I tried to explain how I want to understand how Doyle wrote short stories, and specifically short stories that do not include Sherlock Holmes.  While I love a good Holmes yarn, I want to understand more about Doyle's short story writing beyond Holmes, and not just plot or characters: I want to get down in the weeds of syntax and common word usage. I can talk about it all day. I'm fascinated with Doyle's syntax. I worry, a lot, about my own sentence structure. 

I didn't have a good answer when a patient listener once said "Why do you worry so much? It is not like you are going to hurt Doyle's feelings." That is true but I still feel an obligation to him.

Many authors write quality short stories inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's work in half the time as I do and they do so without excessively obsessing over sentence structure. I know the eventual readers won't spend a great deal of time wondering if my sentences move in companionship with Doyle's common usage. The reader just wants a good story.

My aim is not to "sound just like Doyle" but if I'm appropriating his characters and form (as in pastiches), or am inspired by his imagination and style in other works, I feel a need to be respectful of the source. I also have a duty to write original stories. It is a balancing act.

There is also the matter of something I think of as familial memory. There is a thing in families wherein a family story is told over and over until a family member that had no involvement in the actual origin event can not only tell the story, but has a feeling of being part of the event—a memory of sorts. It is an elusive feeling to capture. I want to write unique stories that engage the Sherlockian and Doylean reader while still leaving them with a feeling of remembering an old family story.

Lofty goal. Probably unreachable. I think it is worth trying for.

At least for the next year, I think my relationship with Doyle will be very much like Violet de Merville's relationship with Baron Gruner ("The Adventure of the Illustrious Client"):

The villain attached himself to the lady, and with such effect that he has completely and absolutely won her heart. To say that she loves him hardly expresses it. She dotes upon him, she is obsessed by him. Outside of him there is nothing on earth. She will not hear one word against him. Everything has been done to cure her of her madness, but in vain.

Hopefully my efforts aren't in vain. Maybe I should think of it not as a madness but as acting like Sherlock Holmes:

"Some touch of the artist wells up within me and calls insistently for a well-staged performance."

Well-staged is a good goal, too.