"Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it."

 

"I even embodied it in a small brochure, with the somewhat fantastic title of A Study in Scarlet."'
He shook his head sadly.
"I glanced over it,' said he. 'Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it." 

--Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson, The Sign of Four

As someone trying to find their way to good writing and then, hopefully, to a few appreciative readers, I can imagine Watson's chagrin at Holmes's inability to congratulate him for A Study in Scarlet. I suppose it does help lessen the blow when Holmes goes on to complain about romance being part of the story rather than Watson's writing ability but it had to sting a little.  A kind word from a reader raises a writer's spirits, especially, perhaps, for a writer just beginning to put their work out into the public.

The Arthur Conan Doyle Society certainly lifted my spirits on January 5 when I received Doylean Honors for Excellence in Fiction and Poetry at the society's 2023 awards ceremony. I'm grateful to the society for the recognition. I feel encouraged to continue my work on the Doyle-inspired gothic tales. I work so very slowly it can be easy to lose momentum. This praise for my first gothic tale, "Whitney's Reflection," is wonderful validation that I'm on the right track, even if that track is painfully slow moving.

I was surprised to see that each of the three works acknowledged in the 2022 Fiction and Poetry awards appears in the newly-published Steel True, Blade Straight from Belanger Books. I haven't had a chance to read the book as yet but I have read the other two pieces honored: "The Ascent" by Paul Hiscock and "The Unintended Offenses" by David Marcum. Unlike Holmes, I can certainly congratulate the two gentlemen upon their writings.

"The Ascent", a lovely poetic work, concerns a subject that I've thought about often: the relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle and his first wife, Touie. I think Touie is often forgotten about entirely, or relegated to footnote status. I sometimes feel as if Doyle relegated her to footnote status, especially after meeting Jean Leckie,  but then I remember how much he cared for her in many ways over the course of her long illness and how much he grieved in the months following her death. 

 

Hiscock's touching work in Touie's voice gently examines this unevenness in their relationship. I found this part particularly moving:

...I assumed the ascent./We finished together,/Not quite hand in hand./He climbed quietly beside me,/Never leaving my side...

Not quite hand in hand. Brilliant, that.  

Marcum's piece, part Sherlockian pastiche and part what I would deem a Doyle confession of sorts is an interesting bit of fiction.  His imagining of the personal relationships between Doyle, Holmes and Watson shows us one way Doyle might have come to be the literary agent and the ways he might have failed Watson over their long collaboration. The uneasiness between Doyle and Holmes within the story seems to capture the spirit of the real life uneasiness Doyle felt about his most famous creation. 

I found the ending memorable as Doyle struggles with his shame over the way he treated Watson and as he longs for a sign of forgiveness from his deceased friend:

I prayed that he would hear my apology but no sign was forthcoming. He didn't let me know that he understood. There were no whispered words of comfort—simply the eternal wind sighing through the weary trees.

These words seem right as coming from the man who told us "What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.”

Such good work, all round. I am inspired by their work and grateful to be among them.

Tomorrow I return to the story writing, buoyed by the time I spent in New York with the Arthur Conan Doyle Society and the many Sherlockian writers I was lucky enough to speak with over the course of the BSI weekend. I wish I could personally congratulate each one.

 

 

 

 MY HOUSE IS  LONELY

 

"It occurred after my withdrawal to my little Sussex home, when I had given myself up entirely to that soothing life of Nature for which I had so often yearned during the long years spent amid the gloom of London. At this period of my life the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken. An occasional week-end visit was the most I ever saw of him...My house is lonely. I, my old housekeeper, and my bees have the estate all to ourselves. Half a mile off, however, is Harold Stackhurst's well-known coaching establishment ... He and I were always friendly from the day I came to the coast, and he was the one man who was on such terms with me that we could drop in on each other in the evenings without an invitation."--Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane"

I thought about this part of LION today as I saw several reminders on Twitter that the full Sherlock Holmes Canon comes out of copyright protection this weekend. I was reminded of the recent claims by a certain body that the portrayal of Holmes as emotional or involved with people was a late feature of his nature.

I could imagine someone using this part of LION to back up that argument. "See here," that someone might say, "Holmes is lonely without Watson. And, look,  he has a friend he drops in on, and welcomes the friend into his own home unannounced. He was not like this before."

Well, baloney. I never read the part about Stackhurst without thinking of this:

'You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?' he asked. 'He was the only friend I made during the two years that I was at college. I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed much with the men of my year. Bar fencing and boxing I had few athletic tastes, and then my line of study was quite distinct from that of the other fellows, so that we had no points of contact at all. Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only through the accident of his bull-terrier freezing on to my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel.
'It was a prosaic way of forming a friendship, but it was effective. I was laid by the heels for ten days, and Trevor used to come in to inquire after me. At first it was only a minute's chat, but soon his visits lengthened, and before the end of the term we were close friends. He was a hearty, full-blooded fellow, full of spirit and energy, the very opposite to me in most respects, but we found we had some subjects in common, and it was a bond of union when I learned that he was as friendless as I. Finally, he invited me down to his father's place at Donnithorpe, in Norfolk, and I accepted his hospitality for a month of the long vacation.'

Holmes was not apparently interested in cultivating a lot of friends at once, but he was willing to have a friend and to enjoy the friendship.  Canon places the Trevor friendship during the 1st month of a long vacation twenty years on from James Armitage's voyage of 1855, 1875-ish.  More than thirty years  before the stated time frame of LION, "towards the end of July 1907." He had Trevor, Watson, and Stackhurst  and those are just the ones we know something about.

I think I will always feel a twinge of sadness when I read "At this period of my life the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken. An occasional week-end visit was the most I ever saw of him." But I won't think of Holmes as necessarily lonely, even if he missed Watson's companionship. 

His house may have been lonely  in that it was a half mile from his neighbors, and it might have been quiet with only two people in the household, but he was not necessarily lonely. My two person very quiet household has had visitors in it only four times this year but we are not necessarily lonely here. 

Holmes had his friendship with his neighbor, he had his work, he had his books, he had his old housekeeper to possibly annoy him. He also had Sussex and his villa "...situated upon the southern slope of the Downs, commanding a great view of the Channel." The ocean is a grand companion, always.

As for the occasional week-end visit, it can be very good indeed even when accompanied with a twinge of regret that it does not happen more often. The upcoming birthday celebration weekend is perhaps a perfect example. 

No, I don't believe Holmes was lonely in Sussex. I believe he was content. We should all be so lucky.

HAVE A LOOK AT THESE SCATTERED OBJECTS

'It is glue, Watson,' said he.

Sherlock Holmes had been bending for a long time over a low-power microscope. Now he straightened himself up and looked round at me in triumph. 'It is glue, Watson,' said he. 'Unquestionably it is glue. Have a look at these scattered objects in the field!' I stooped to the eyepiece and focused for my vision.--"The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place"

The Sound of the Baskervilles had their second in person meeting this past Sunday since pre-pandemic early winter 2020. It was my first in person official Sherlockian meeting since 2020. Other than an out-door picnic last summer, I had not ventured past Zoom for Sherlockian activities. I wondered if I would be comfortable there; the world has changed in many ways in the last three years.  Like the fragments viewed in Holmes's microscope, the SOBs (all Sherlockians, really) are scattered objects in the field of everyday life, objects sometimes held together by the glue of an abiding interest in Sherlock Holmes and, in the case of the SOBs, decades-long kind and dependable group leadership.

The nature of Sherlockian 'glue' has been on my mind lately as I prepare to venture to New York for the upcoming weekend activities. I wonder if I will be comfortable there? I've only gone once before, way back in 2007 or 2008. I knew no one and no one knew me. I went to the Mysterious Bookstore and I went to the first Gaslight Gala. People were kind but I was a stranger in a strange land.  Of course, much has changed in the ensuing years thanks to the proliferation of social media and my willingness to volunteer for things. In the midst of all this thinking, an odd scattered object turned up on Twitter, posted by The London Sherlock Holmes Meetup Group:

I have no idea if this is a factual thing, supposedly it is from the late 1940s. (Hey, its on the internet, it must be true, right?) It seems odd to think someone would go to the trouble to invent it. For the moment, then, I've decided to treat it as real. It is very difficult for me to understand why a group would want a very subjective (and in my mind, ridiculous) qualification test.

The last condition caught my eye, especially the need to spend a certain amount of money in the name of Sherlock Holmes. If spending money is an absolute requirement, I'm lucky to not have found Sherlockiana until my middle age because I certainly could not have afforded to give Sherlock Holmes a dime before then.  Prior to, I would have been a faithful soldier for any group but as one armed only with a library card. The 1948 group might not have been too impressed with me. I might not have been too impressed with them if handed that questionnaire.

One can spend a lot of money on Sherlockian things (true of most hobbies, I think) but I don't see it as absolutely necessary, depending on what route one chooses to take. I'm grateful that I don't need a lot of money to participate on a regular basis in the SOBs, or amongst like-minded friends on the internet. The trip to New York is a treat this year but I'm grateful that I can be a Sherlockian, no matter if I ever go to New York on birthday weekend, or ever pass some arbitrary questionnaire. If that is a true relic of the Sherlockian past, I hope it stays firmly there.

The glue held fast for the SOBs; the meeting was good. It was wonderful to present a silly play and discuss "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" for the gazillionth time. Nobody minded it was the gazillionth time.  The meeting had about twenty people which isn't too bad for a football Sunday the week before Christmas. That twenty included two new people, pleasant, knowledgeable, and engaging. One told us a fun story about his great-grandparent's marriage license listing his great-grandfather's occupation as "Commissionaire." The other had a lovely singing voice and an easy laugh. I hope our congenial welcome was strong enough to bring these two back. 

The two already had the sticky base: an abiding interest in Sherlock Holmes, the unifying thing among the random objects. Bob Katz surprised me at the October meeting of The Crew of the Barque Lone Star when he said this is one of his favorite lines from the Canon: '"There is only one man,' he cried.'" Bob is right, of course: there is only one man. The line is even better when coupled with the one that follows it:

  'There is only one man,' he cried.
'Exactly,' said Holmes.

Exactly. All will be well.  See you in New York.

 ---

 

My compliments of the season to all this post may reach.

 

"I HAD NO IDEA THAT YOU WOULD BE SO AFFECTED."

'My dear Watson,' said the well-remembered voice, 'I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.'

I've often marveled at some of the words Arthur Conan Doyle put into Sherlock Holmes's mouth at the time of the revelation of Holmes being alive in "The Adventure of the Empty House", especially "I had no idea you would be so affected."

In the past, when rereading the story, I would generally shout at the book at that point. "What do you mean that you had no idea he would be so affected?" I would ask the unresponsive book. "Of course he is greatly affected. His best friend has returned from the dead, materializing right before his eyes. Come on, Doyle, get a grip. Yes, Sherlock Holmes owes Dr. Watson a thousand apologies, and so do you." Silly to talk to the book, or the long departed author, or myself, really, but I imagine serious readers understand the situation.

Now, many years on from those initial reads, I find new meaning in the upon-the-return-of-Sherlock-Holmes-words. I've come to believe Doyle was talking to his readers: "I had no idea you would be so affected." The well documented response of his readers to Holmes's "death" and "resurrection" made clear to Doyle what Holmes meant to them. I think Doyle's statement actually goes a little further. Perhaps Doyle was talking to himself. Maybe in his weariness with the public's clamor for more and more Holmes, he temporarily lost sight of what Holmes meant to him, how Holmes affected him. 

Certainly his statements about Holmes mellowed over the years, from the stark weariness to the quiet affection stated in Memories & Adventures, "I do not wish to be ungrateful to Holmes, who has been a good friend to me in many ways." The Holmes and Watson friendship of the canon, the heartbeat of the thing, makes it evident Doyle understood the value of true friendship.

Those of us who always find comfort in the Holmes and Watson friendship can imagine Watson's devastation, and feel it over and over when we read "The Final Problem." We value their friendship in ways that can be difficult to explain to other people—people who don't understand how a paper friendship can mean so much to us. I suppose it is one of those things that either you get it, or you don't. 

I hear time and time again that it is the Holmes and Watson friendship that brings people into the world of Sherlockiana and keeps them there. We are affected by it. We are also strongly affected by the friendships we form in real life as a result of Holmes and Watson.

I've felt the two sides of Sherlockian friendship this week: the joyful, planning for the camaraderie of the January birthday celebration, and the devastating, learning that one of my oldest and dearest Sherlockian friends is gravely ill. Diagnosis and prognosis are dire. My friend is a lot like Watson. They are kind, generous, loyal, intelligent, well-read, artistic and funny in a quiet way. 

A grand Sherlockian, they know London, always answering questions for me.We talk a lot about maps. We have so little time left. I can hear the roar of the abyss.

I understand Watson's feelings when that small square of paper fluttered to the ground. He deserved a thousand apologies for what was taken from him. So does my friend.

 

 I MUST THANK YOU FOR IT ALL

First page of the manuscript of A Study in Scarlet

"I must thank you for it all. I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: A Study in Scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it." --Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Watson, A Study in Scarlet

Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching and it seems appropriate to talk about gratitude for all things Doyle, and especially for the creation of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. With my scattered thinking of late I had forgotten to note the anniversary this week of the publication of A Study in Scarlet in the November, 21, 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual. Luckily for me, Mattias Boström posted a reminder on Twitter.

I think all of us who study Doyle and Holmes have a soft spot for the opening of STUD. The origin story of the Holmes and Watson partnership is irresistible.

I've written before of the intensely personal feelings I have about the beginnings of the partnership and about the securing of 221B as a home for the two of them--

 ###

Finding Sherlock Holmes in Five Volumes

I’m sure I have forgotten some, but I know I lived in no fewer than sixteen houses in my childhood due to the constant moving and rearranging of households of my various parental units. Yes, “units” is the easier word. (It’s complicated, as in my-adoptive-father-was-my-biological-mother’s-stepfather complicated.) The number of people living in any one of the houses varied at any given time from three to eight, and the number sometimes changed in the course of a night. Rural West Texas, poverty, and alcoholism were a volatile mix.

One thing all these houses had in common: There were no books beyond a small Bible I once received as Christmas gift and a 1968 World Book Encyclopedia set that a door-to door-salesman sold to one of my mother units. I have no memories of adults reading anything except a newspaper. Certainly no one read to me.

By the time the World Books arrived, I was an eight-year-old second grader in her third school without any sense of belonging anywhere. Fortunately, I landed in a small school flush with tax money from Texas crude. There, among lavishly-carpeted and air-conditioned class rooms smelling oddly of freshly sawn wood and sour gas, were a large library and Mrs. Callahan, the school librarian.

Mrs. Callahan, a tall, beautiful, smartly-dressed woman, read to us, and then taught us how to use a library. I discovered I could read, and read well beyond my classmates moving along with Dick and Jane. By mid-year, I no longer borrowed reading primers from the library. With Mrs. Callahan’s help, I discovered something I liked better: Stories with a bit of a mystery to be solved. I borrowed my favorite, The Ghost of Windy Hill, again and again. Outside school, I read what I could in the encyclopedias. I found holding the sturdy, tightly-bound volumes containing the answers to a million questions was often a panacea to chaos.

Four years, five moves, and three schools later, I landed within walking distance of the public library. Still without any books of my own, I borrowed more than I could possibly read, multiplying, however temporarily, the sense of security and calm provided by the encyclopedias. I read two or three novels a week. Books provided a world I could borrow for a short while. I read many several times over simply because no matter what had moved in my life, the book world was still there – as sound, true, and complete as it had been upon the first read.

High School brought its own miseries, but the units were slowing down with only five moves and two schools. Somewhere in those moves the encyclopedias vanished, but I finally managed to own two books: A yellowed copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and an American history textbook. Borrowed reading continued with a large variety of authors, including the short story “The Red-Headed League”. I enjoyed it with no idea of how much it would matter a few years later.

 A week after graduation, I found myself recruited by the local newspaper at scant wages. I moved into a small, furnished apartment at the back of a flower shop. The bookshelf was sufficient for the five books I now owned. Watson’s narrative of “The Empty House” has Holmes, disguised as a bookseller, assuring him that “With five volumes you could just fill that gap,” and in my case the five were the yellowed Rebecca, the history textbook, the Bible, a graduation gift copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and a woefully “Abridged” English dictionary someone at school had given to me. It seemed enough to be getting on with. I was terribly wrong. Scant wages coupled with poor decision-making equaled a decade of mostly failure. A failed early marriage and several jobs resulted in some thirteen moves of my own by my early thirties. My books numbered in the early thirties by then as well.

Eventually life became easier after I read many self-help books, applied some of their teachings, and made a more compatible choice of a husband. He arrived with a pile of his own books, fresh off five moves due to the whims of corporate America. Among his first gifts was an elegant winter coat (something long dreamed of but never possible) and a box of leather-bound classics from Barnes & Noble – definitely a keeper. We spent a lot of time reading, and watching a television program about Sherlock Holmes airing on the PBS channel. I had read several collections of Sherlock Holmes stories, but only recognized one in the program, “The Red-Headed League” from my high school reading. I did not understand until much later that I had actually read several pastiche collections. Somehow, in all the reading, I had missed Arthur Conan Doyle. I told myself to get that corrected soon, but “soon” proved to be several years out.

Meanwhile, the books continued to gather on the shelf. I spent some time with astrophysics and Einstein, metaphysics, art history, American history, English etymology, English political history, and a lot of poetry. I kept everything. The books, now numbering in the many, many hundreds, were getting difficult to move. Some of it had to go, but how? Colette’s words were my life: “Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.” I did not know how to find a unifying voice to make sense of it all.

Two moves later (corporate America still having whims), the answer appeared in a used book shop in the Texas hill country. For half off the $37.50 tag, I bought a 1992 two-volumes-in-one edition of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by William S. Baring-Gould. I read the introduction, was enthralled, and settled in for a good read. Of the first two in the chronology, “The Gloria Scott” was new to me, but not “The Musgrave Ritual”, as I had watched the Granada version many times. I liked them, but I did not understand how this was equal to the big fuss of the introduction. Then, finally, I read A Study in Scarlet. Dr. Watson’s words leapt off the page. I certainly understood the loneliness, the scarcity of funds, and the big question of “Where and how am I going to live?” For many years, I felt my life had often been “irresistibly drained” into a cesspool from which I had to be helped out. Here, then, was the voice I had been looking for.

I read the first part of the novel in one sit, virtually ignoring the annotation. For the moment, I wanted to absorb Watson’s words without distraction. I put Baring-Gould down, and went looking on the shelves. And there, among the volumes in that Barnes & Noble collection, sat The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as it had for eight years. I finished it within the week. I then spent several weeks reading the Baring-Gould.

As much as I could identify with Watson, especially after learning of the drunkard in his family, I could identify with Holmes as well. I understood his need to have his haven of too many books and papers, his unrelenting desire for answers, his scattered knowledge of many different topics, his sarcasm, and that little touch of the dramatic. I certainly understood when Holmes and Watson sometimes indulged in bad habits even when they knew better.

I knew I wanted to know them better. I bought the Granada series on DVD so I could watch them with fresh perspective. Luckily, the first volume of the Leslie Klinger New Annotated was published that year. I took to the internet, joining the Welcome Holmes group on Yahoo. I read about books about Holmes and Watson. I wanted to read so many of them, but I resisted buying beyond Klinger because there was still one more move to make.

After much planning – no quick move this time! – the keeper of a husband and I thought to disengage with corporate America. The disengagement would mean living modestly, in a much smaller house. One-half of the books would have to go. At first, I panicked. Then I remembered Watson’s words:

We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221b, Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting. They consisted of a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows. So desirable in every way were the apartments, and so moderate did the terms seem when divided between us, that the bargain was concluded upon the spot, and we at once entered into possession. That very evening I moved my things round from the hotel, and on the following morning Sherlock Holmes followed me with several boxes and portmanteaus. For a day or two we were busily employed in unpacking and laying out our property to the best advantage.

 

Holmes and Watson moved into Baker Street with only a small amount of personal items, and yet this chosen property proved to be a perfect fit. They made it into a home that was to serve them in varying ways for many years to come. Surely I could do the same. We carried box after box to the Half-Price Books Buy Counter.

The property we chose has proven to be a perfect fit, and we have made it into a home that has served us well for twelve years and counting. We have a small home library which is my fixed point in a changing age. Of my original five books, the yellowed Rebecca is still with me, as are that Bible and The Power of Positive Thinking. The Ghost of Windy Hill, the 1968 Weekly Reader Books favorite, was added in 2014. It seemed only right to have it when I came across it in a Goodwill bin for ninety-cents. The books have been pared down twice more since the move. I keep Watson’s example in mind, always trying to maintain a gap on a second shelf.

We still have a lot of books for a small space, roughly about eight-hundred volumes, of which two-hundred or so are related to Holmes and Watson in some way or another. I keep them close, as I do the local Sherlockian society members who have become dear friends. They often fill this small space with as much quiet affection as can be found in Baker Street.

If you were to ask me where to find Sherlock Holmes, I would tell you: “Sherlock Holmes is where he always is. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are together in the home that cannot be taken away from you.”

###

We are now almost 17 years in the house, and the book collection needs constant attention to stay at the proper size. My interests expanding to include a larger portion of Doyle's work has stretched the limits but no matter. I'll gratefully play two-in-and-one-out for as long as possible as I work to unravel all that Doyle, Holmes and Watson mean to me.

 HE RAN OUT AND RAN IN

 

"...the two events must be connected.

He ran out and ran in, smoked incessantly, played snatches on his violin, sank into reveries, devoured sandwiches at irregular hours, and hardly answered the casual questions which I put to him. — Dr. Watson about Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Second Stain"

In "The Adventure of the Second Stain," Dr. Watson tells us about Holmes's mood and activities when the case was not working out, when he couldn't connect the death in Godolphin Street with the missing diplomatic letter.  I've always smiled at this description, picturing Holmes coming in and out and in and out and not accomplishing what he wanted. (We know the work was not going well because he was eating.)  He was stymied because he couldn't make the connections. I understand the feeling.

I've ran out and ran in from this working desk entirely too often of late. I understand the need to sit at the appointed writing place and just do it but sometimes the connections just will not come. Sometimes. Like now.

I am writing a piece that is inspired by Doyle's "The Beetle-Hunter," a cracker of a good story, and while I know where I want my story to go, I can't seem to get the parts to connect. My lead character (a young, seemingly broke doctor, of course) does not seem to have a good attitude for a Victorian gothic tale.  He is thinking and acting more like a man of the 20th century. I really like him (although he doesn't have a name yet) and I don't want to stop him but this is supposed to be a Victorian gothic tale.

The book I'm writing is comprised of Doyle-inspired Gothic pieces so I know some Gothic genre elements must find their way into this piece of writing—not only find their way there but hopefully move in tandem with some originality in the story telling. I want a light hand with the gothic bits but not so light that the connections aren't evident.  I want it to be something like the one stanza from Longfellow's Haunted Houses:

A sense of something moving to and fro.
There are more guests at table than the hosts
invited; the illuminated hall
is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts

Longfellow knows how to set the tone. I had the good fortune recently to read some slides Nancy Holder had prepared for a talk. One of those slides outlined the most common elements of the Gothic. I liked it so much I printed it out and tacked it up beside my desk. She identified:

*Atmosphere: eerie, dank, shadowy, mysterious

*Hauntable places: ruins, ancestral homes, abbeys, trap doors, hidden passages

*Hauntable people: those with secrets, rituals, curses, hidden crimes

*Women in distress: locked-up or murdered heiresses, forced marriages, live burials

*Isolation, Confinement    *Powerlessness    *Melodrama-Heightened Emotion

*The Macabre    *The Bizarre

An excellent and thorough list, yes? But Mr. No-Name Doctor keeps running around talking about Kodak photography and how that old house is not really one of the great houses of Britain. He drops intimations that he doesn't really need this bizarre job in that house with that woman in distress and her hauntable brother. I've tried putting him there three times now and he still hasn't darkened the door.

Therefore, I've ran in and ran out of the work. It has been good in other ways. I worked on "The Terror of Blue John Gap" project for the Arthur Conan Doyle Society. I wrote two pieces for the Beacon Society for next year's Gazettes. I wrote some practice job interview pieces for a friend. I set up a new computer for a friend who isn't computer literate. I made a few Christmas lists.

Good stuff, all that, but I'm supposed to be writing the story. It is time to start connecting the fellow to the elements. 

Maybe I'll have a sandwich first, even at this irregular hour.

 A LIFE STRANGER THAN FICTION

'My dear fellow,' said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, 'life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.'

As I'm slowly reading my way through the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, I'm finding some to be a pleasure and others....well, not so much. Fortunately, the most recent, The Stark Munro Letters, proved to be among the former rather than the latter. This volume of actual experiences disguised as fictional letters is fascinating. At first, the nature and exploits of the Cullingworth character seemed too fantastical to be easily believed but yet, according to Doyle, the text is a faithful rendering of the truth of the matter as he explained in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures:

In a book written some years afterwards called "The Stark Munro Letters," I drew in very close detail the events of the next few years, and there the curious reader will find them more clearly and fully set out than would be to scale in these pages. I would only remark, should any reader reconstruct me or my career from that book, that there are some few incidents there which are imaginary, and that, especially, the whole incident of the case of a lunatic and of Lord Saltire in Chapter IV occurred to a friend and not to myself. Otherwise the whole history of my association with the man whom I called Cullingworth, his extraordinary character, our parting and the way in which I was left to what seemed certain ruin, were all as depicted.

I actually enjoyed the book more once the Cullingworth period passed. As always, Doyle's story of his early days in practice, with its forced penury and his answers to it, is interesting to me. I admire his resilience and creativity. While reading letter XIII, I found myself somewhat fascinated by his eating habits in those early days. A healthy 22-23 year old man would be hard pressed to thrive on this diet:

I think that I have brought economy down to its finest point. No doubt, for a short spell I could manage to live on a couple of pence a day; but what I am doing now is not to be a mere spurt, but my regular mode of life for many a month to come. My tea and sugar and milk (Swiss) come collectively to one penny a day. The loaf is at twopence three-farthings, and I consume one a day. My dinner consists in rotation of one third of a pound of bacon, cooked over the gas (twopence halfpenny), or two saveloys (twopence), or two pieces of fried fish (twopence), or a quarter of an eightpenny tin of Chicago beef (twopence). Any one of these, with a due allowance of bread and water, makes a most substantial meal. Butter I have discarded for the present. My actual board therefore comes well under sixpence a day, but I am a patron of literature to the extent of a halfpenny a day, which I expend upon an evening paper; for with events hurrying on like this in Alexandria, I cannot bear to be without the news. Still I often reproach myself with that halfpenny, for if I went out in the evening and looked at the placards I might save it, and yet have a general idea of what is going on. Of course, a halfpenny a night sounds nothing, but think of a shilling a month! Perhaps you picture me as bloodless and pulled down on this diet! I am thin, it is true, but I never felt more fit in my life. So full of energy am I that I start off sometimes at ten at night and walk hard until two or three in the morning. I dare not go out during the day, you see, for fear that I should miss a patient.

I had to look up the definition of saveloy; apparently these sausages are still popular today. I could not find how the sizes in Doyle's time compare to the common ones available today.  I tried to find an image or size description for the tin of Chicago beef but I didn't have any luck. From looking at photos of early tinned meats, I think the package would have been about the size of a 12 oz Spam can today but I can't be sure. Either way, I doubt his serving was more than 3-4 ounces. He mentions forgoing butter, and makes no mention of any vegetables. He is making do with his "due allowance of bread and water" but he is not eating very much. And he is walking four to five hours at night. It hard to imagine the natural strength of a constitution that could manage to work all day, and walk half the night, on so little fuel.

He was a strong man but that time of sacrifice certainly made an impression on him for such detail to be included in this book of larger-than-life characters and unexpected events as well as the many pages discussing the meaning of the universe and how man's religions have shaped his world. Heady stuff to be wrapped around a discussion of bacon, sausage, fried fish and tinned beef.

I remember reading of these diets and budgets in his letters. I've just started Memories and Adventures and I'm curious to read what he writes about this time period in that volume; I expect this period of managed hunger will be discussed along with a few other things that are stranger than fiction.

Even if I were not already interested in his life, the preface of Memories & Adventures would draw me in:

I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded. I have known what it was to be a poor man and I have known what it was to be fairly affluent. I have sampled every kind of human experience. I have known many of the most remarkable men of my time. I have had a long literary career after a medical training which gave me the M.D. of Edinburgh. I have tried my hand at very many sports, including boxing, cricket, billiards, motoring, football, aeronautics and skiing, having been the first to introduce the latter for long journeys into Switzerland. I have travelled as Doctor to a whaler for seven months in the Arctic and afterwards in the West Coast of Africa. I have seen something of three wars, the Soudanese, the South African and the German. My life has been dotted with adventures of all kinds. Finally I have been constrained to devote my latter years to telling the world the final result of thirty-six years' study of the occult, and in endeavouring to make it realize the overwhelming importance of the question. In this mission I have already travelled more than 50,000 miles and addressed 300,000 people, besides writing seven books upon the subject. Such is the life which I have told in some detail in my Memories and Adventures.

Arthur Conan Doyle.
Crowborough,
June, 1924.

Certainly this sounds more like fiction than fact ("Who does this except in the movies?") but when his life is looked at in detail, the preface seems a little understated. Yes, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."