Sherlock Holmes and his rogue's gallery
If you ever wondered whether folks around Baltimore were serious about literature, consider this: The area is home to not one, not two, but three groups dedicated to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Today in The Baltimore Sun, Chris Kaltenbach profiled the groups, which will gather Saturday at the Enoch Pratt library for their 30th annual conference, "A Gallery of Rogues: The Adversaries of Sherlock Holmes." Here's an excerpt from his article:
[S]ome half-dozen speakers will take to the podium Saturday to discuss "A Gallery of Rogues," the roster of bad guys and ne'er-do-wells Holmes was constantly running up against as he tried to make Victorian London a safer place. They'll be talking about the thugs, the schemers, the traitors, the suave evildoers who were always meeting their match in Holmes.
Die-hard Holmesians love to dissect the world Conan Doyle created, to try to extract tiny bits of information about the characters. (Did Holmes, for example, attend Oxford or Cambridge? Conan Doyle never said, but fans have their opinions.) And they love to try and rationalize the occasional inconsistencies that creep into the narrative. The wound Dr. Watson received while fighting in Afghanistan, for instance: Was it in his leg, as one story says, or in his shoulder?
"Conan Doyle was not a stickler for continuity," says Abdrew Solberg, in a tone more amused than critical.
It seems unlikely that Conan Doyle, who published his first Sherlock Holmes adventure in 1887, ever thought the character would still be popular more than a century later. He even tried to kill off the detective once, when Holmes and Moriarty fell to their deaths from atop a Swiss waterfall. "Conan Doyle was happy with that," says William Hyder, a retired Baltimore Sun copy editor and member of the Six Napoleons of Baltimore, a Holmes appreciation society that traces its roots to 1946. "He had gotten pretty sick of writing about Sherlock Holmes."
But the public wanted more from Holmes, and Conan Doyle brought him back after a hiatus of nearly a decade. He's been with us, in one form or another, ever since, most notably in an early-20th century stage play starring and written by William Gillette, in a 1940s movie series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, and in a series of British teleplays starring Jeremy Brett, whom most fans consider the definitive Holmes.
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
Comments
All I know about the Baltimore Sun relares to Sherlock Holnes pieces that I have read. Informative, I now write of something you may find newsworthy. A lifelong Holmes fan, and a scion founder, I have now a book out:
Baskerville Hall: The Journal of Dr. James Mortimer 1887-1928. iUniverse is the publisher. Praise the Lord.
Posted by: Thomas R. Smith | November 5, 2009 4:54 PM
There has never one like Sherlock Holmes! I started reading Holmes at 11 yrs and decades later still keep on reading and savouring Holmes.
Posted by: Joseph D'silva | November 8, 2009 1:36 PM