It proved too much to resist reserving a space for them here. It is my hope that devotees of the master may read these words and say to themselves, "I understand perfectly."

Dear Hounds,

I'm a new member, still without a nickname, but ready to make my maiden post. I call it . . .

"Hooked on Holmes"
[Or, "Why I have a very high tolerance level for speculative pastiches
and questionable screen adaptations"]

  More than twenty years ago, I happened on a book
  Whose cover was intriguing, so I thought I'd take a look.
  "Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud"--that was the author's claim;
  Now, Freud I'd heard of, sure, but what about that other name?

  My adolescent curiosity made me insist
  On finding out, so I asked Mom, "Did 'Sherlock Holmes' exist?"
  Would you believe she wasn't sure?  And neither was my dad!
  I'd have to buy that book myself, and check (or I'd go mad!).

  [The irony, of course is, were I asked the same today,
  I'd know the answer, but I'd not be sure just what to say!  :-) ]

  I bought Herr Meyer's book, but only read a little bit
  Before I had to put it down.  I didn't _want_ to quit,
  But even what I'd read showed me that I should not embroil
  Myself in this until I looked up "Arthur Conan Doyle."

  So, "Read Sir Arthur's Books" went on my list of "Things to Do,"
  Then subsequent events transpired which made me see it through.
  For (as in Art) in Life coincidences _do_ abound,
  And that same summer came the re-release of Fox's "Hound"
  (In cinemas again, that film from nineteen thirty-nine--
  With advertisements making much of Rathbone's "needle" line).

  I went, I saw, was conquered; read my Doyle in passion's heat,
  And ne'er looked back, once set upon the road to Baker Street.

What's your story?

Karen Welbourn

At the age of 10 I was introduced to the Master by my mother, who bought me a book titled "Conan Doyle Stories." I still have it. I read many of the stories and was always interested in them, but not, shall we say, in a maniacal way.

Many years later, I saw the film "Gandhi." I was struck by a mention that Gandhi had met during the 1930s with Bernard Shaw, who happens to be one of my idols. I began to read a great deal about Gandhi and learned that, in 1889, Gandhi and Shaw had several mutual acquaintances and might indeed have known each other at that time. Indeed, they might have had an "adventure" together, and their meeting in the 1930s actually was a reunion.

I developed a plot-line for a story to be called "The Demon of the Mahatmas," in which Shaw would try to rescue Gandhi from membership in the Theosophical Society and Helena Blavatsky. The "love interest," of course, would be Annie Besant, and the device by which the story would be told was a Sherlock Holmes pastische. I resolved to learn how to write such a pseudo-Watsonian work and set it in 1889, melding both fact and fiction in a rather Nicholas Meyer sort of way. "The Demon of the Mahatmas" was finished and, sad to say, never published. Actually, for the good of Sherlockiana, it's just as well.

However, a few years later I was approached by a producer to devise a mystery format for a series of events at an inn in the region. Having become very familiar with (and respectful of) the Holmes mythos, we plunged immediately into producing a series of Sherlockian events. Those began 10 years ago and are still being produced on a regular basis.

The upshot is that I have Richard Attenborough and Mohandas Gandhi to thank for my long association -- and fascination -- with the world of Sherlock Holmes. And, someday, that story about Holmes, Gandhi, Shaw and Besant will be told ...

--
The Lurking Man Upon the Moor

John C. Sherwood

Artistic director, The Victorian Villa Inn, Union City, MI, USA
     (800) 34-VILLA for inquiries
Sherwood Mystery Visits, 120 W. Hanover St., Marshall, MI 49068
     (616) 781-5478
Opinion page editor, Battle Creek (MI) Enquirer
     (616) 966-0688
E-mail:    sherwood@internet1.net
           John_C._Sherwood@glfn.org

It seems a thousand yesterdays, when I was just fourteen, I was assigned a book report at school, by Mrs. Green. She vetoed my first choice, saying "a comic book? No way!" And turned down the idea of that "Bible" by La Vey.

Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan was proposed, and swept aside, Perhaps a bodice-ripper? No, that too would be denied. Each new idea was blasted, as too sinple or too crude, I had to think of something ere report cards were reviewed.

Instinctively, the ways of logic exercised my youthful mind, By process of elimination, authors would I find Whose works would be acceptable for this damned book report. I started with a mightly list, and tried to make it short.

My first step was to wash out all the authors still alive. Death is the test of whose works will or will not long survive. The author must be English, my "culture" to express. I learned from watching all those British snobs on PBS.

Now came the difficulty, once my list was down to size, Of finding one whose works would interest rather than anesthesize. Chuck Dickens I passed over as too Gothic and abstruse, Shakespeare was far too obvious, and worn from over-use.

But after many sleepless nights of strain and mental toil, I found the school's anthology of Arthur Conan Doyle. He's dead, and he is British; Mrs. Green cannot protest, And this "Hound of the Baskervilles" far outstrips all the rest.

My book report brought home an "A", I brought home one thing more, That Doyle book, I hid it in my room, behind the door. For Sherlock Holmes had captured me, and now I could not wait To read the other tales, my appetite to sate.

Now twenty-seven years have passed, and still upon my shelf Resides the Doyle Anthology; I kept it for myself. I've other tomes of Sherlock Holmes, I should send that one back, But something makes me hesitate and keep it on the rack.

That book once changed my life, it made me look up and admire A hero who used brains, not brawn, a consciousness much higher Than Superman or Sergeant Rock or others of their ilk. I took to Holmes' philosophy like babies take to milk.

I'll keep that old anthology as long as I may please, I never could afford the astronomic past due fees!

Godfrey Emsworth, aka

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Dave Scott
De Land, FL

http://pw2.netcom.com/~davescot/main.html
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Unlike those who have known the master consulting detective from the crib, I met him in my fiftieth year. I had just discovered that Conan Doyle was long at rest before the word Nazi crossed the first lips. If Doyle didn't write all those Rathbone/Bruce movies I had grown up with, then who did? And if he didn't write those, what did he write?

I was visiting a discount book stall when I discovered an illustratrated Sherlock Holmes with all the Paget drawings. I read it at the lake while the kids swam. I didn't realized that I had already begun to identify with a Holmsian world I did not yet know existed.

I went to the library to see if there might be such a thing as a mystery magazine. And perchance I could find an issue in which some mystery-type might be selling a Sherlock Holmes T-shirt. The identification was taking hold.

I found instead, an organization that called itself the Baker Street Irregulars and a list of other groups listed as scions, one of which, the Crew of the Barque Lone Star, resided in Dallas, Texas, where I too reside for the moment.

The rest is history.

I dove in with all fours (what an intolerable metaphor!). My fellow Sherlockians, I learned, were rabid, yet fascinating. One works two jobs to support his obsession with collecting foreign-language editions (he has several thousand now, including pig-Latin and Gregg's shorthand, for crying out loud), and he can't read any of them. Go figure. Another is the U.S. Masters Judo champ. There's a forensic hypnotherapist (gesundheit!). A P.I. Some scholarly types, and a cop who dresses up in Victorian bobby's uniforms and with a phony limey accent collars people in Texas pubs . . .

Anyway, here I am today with a packed Sherlock Holmes reference shelf, a mantle covered with Sherlock Holmes stuff, a growing forensic library, memberships in scads of Sherlock Holmes affinity groups, including this group of international looney tunes (said he affectionately), an article coming out soon, I'm assurred, in the Sherlock Holmes Journal, and a pastiche on a publisher's desk in London. Is there no limit to this insanity?

Probably not.

The Crudest of Writers
"There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude." IDEN
aka Ron Brackin,
rbrackin@kma.com