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Agatha Christie on Holmes and Watson

To All:

Enjoy. Quite a tribute to our beloved Doctor.

Chips

 

Holmes and Watson as Seen by Agatha Christie

“I must first pay tribute to Conan Doyle, the pioneer of detective writing, with his two great creations Sherlock Holmes and Watson—Watson perhaps the greater creation of the two. Holmes after all has his properties, his violin, his dressing gown, his cocaine, etc., whereas Watson has just himself–lovable, obtuse, faithful, maddening, guaranteed to be always wrong, and perpetually in a state of admiration! How badly we all need a Watson in our lives!”

–Agatha Christie, in her article, “Detective Writers in England”
found in Ask a Policeman; London: Harper, 2013.

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The Long Summer . . .

With the long days of summer stretching out ahead, thoughts turn naturally to those pleasant hours spent in activities of creation and scholarship. So much to read and think about; so much to write.

We extend to you an invitation for research, scholarship and articles for publication in the October issue of The Watsonian. The long days of summer can culminate in new ideas on the Canon, new ideas on Doctor Watson, and new ideas on The Game. Your scholarship can enrich not only all of our members and the Great Study we all are interested in, but it can enrich your life as well.

We welcome first time and experienced writers alike. We particularly hope for articles from young researchers of the Canon; so many questions remain for you to explore; so much light can be shed on the mysteries of 1895. If you are an experienced Canonical writer, perhaps mentoring a university or high school student would be a rewarding experience. And what better use of our days of summer could we find?

Out journal has recently achieved new highs in publishing excellence; we have received kind comments from all over the world on the articles, research, humour, crossword, and the miscellanea in this very full issue. Now, we need to begin preparing our articles and submissions for the October issue, an issue we hope will continue the standard of excellence established by Dr Joanne Yates, our Editor and Publisher. Our journal is a treasure, our very own Agra Treasure, and it is our members who give us wondrous large pearls every issue.

As the calendar turns to August, we will embark upon our month-long Second Annual John H Watson World Invitational Treasure Hunt. This year, we will attempt to create the most difficult 100 word Treasure Hunt in Canonical history. Last year we had a fine effort and we will try to raise the bar a notch higher in 2014.

KNOW ALL WHO READ, WORLDWIDE: You are invited to field a team of Quiz Masters from your International or U.S. scion club, association, or group. We suggest teams of five members, all working from the Canon as represented by the one-volume edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes; Doubleday, 1930 with the Preface by Christopher Morley. Additionally, the questions will be drawn from the historical scholarship of The Baker Street Journal, Baker Street Miscellanea, The Sherlock Holmes Journal, and other publications concerning the Canon.

We welcome inquiries from international teams and hope to have team participation from Canada, U.K., France, Italy, Spain, India, or wherever Watsonians and Sherlockians may be assembled. Please watch the Treasure Hunt page of this website for forthcoming details.

So . . . Enjoy summer. And please enjoy the creative satisfaction of your important contributions to the activities of our Society. We exist because of your enthusiasm. And we are thankful for what you give to us all.

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Early Today due to Guests Arriving

Weekly Quiz 2014: 22

RESULTS: Cheers to Melissa Anderson “Faith,” and our team members Airy Maher, Sheila Holtgrieve “Daisy” and Margie Deck “Gwen” on this week’s solution. All were perfect and several alternative answers were discovered. Answers below.

This week’s quiz is about Canonical small things: physically and philosophically.  Good Luck!

Please submit solutions by 12 noon on Wednesday, 4 June 2014 to: buttons@johnhwatsonsociety.com

file_download.png Download Week 22 Questions and Answers

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A Long Evening With Holmes

To all:

Here is a ode to Holmes and Watson that expresses so much of Baker street for me and I hope for you too. The last stanza is so beautifully an expression of my feelings:

The Adventure is solved, Holmes makes it all right
So back to the lodgings by dawn’s early light
And a breakfast by Hudson to wind up the night
When I spend a long evening with Holmes.
So the modern rat race can’t keep me in a cage
I have a passport to a far better age
As close as my bookcase, as near as a page
I can spend a long evening with Holmes.

Ah, if it could only be so.
“Chips”

–William B. Schweickert’s “A Long Evening with Holmes”.

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The Dead Can Wait by Robert Ryan “Caesar”

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This from Marcel Berlins’ crime round-up:

The Dead Can Wait by Robert Ryan

Dr John Watson was not, it seems, quite as dim as he’s portrayed in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Robert Ryan (with the consent of the Conan Doyle estate) reveals his true mettle. The Dead Can Wait is in no sense a pastiche, but a seriously good, very readable, well-researched novel incorporating the First World War, detection and espionage. It is 1916. Watson has become an expert on the injuries and mental traumas suffered by soldiers in battle. The British are secretly developing a new kind of weapon. But, in its first test, seven men involved become insane, then die spectacularly. The sole survivor is rendered mute. Watson is commanded to discover the causes of the tragedy, but there are foreign spies around and enemies within.

The Dead Can Wait by Robert Ryan, Simon and Schuster, 463 pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £14.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop. Also available from Amazon.

 

This from Scott’s Miscellany:

There was a single line in one of the last Holmes books which said that Watson had gone back to his ‘old unit’  – that being the RAMC, and given that we were on the brink of WWI, that means he went back to war.

Thus arises one of the best post-Conan Doyle Sherlockian series, and a fantastic historical crime series.  The Major John Watson we come to know in the trenches in DEAD MAN’S LAND and again here in the UK in The Dead Can Wait is a humane, compassionate, competent individual, who nevertheless appreciates the help of his steadily deteriorating friend, Holmes.  The horrors of war are not stinted, but nor are they gratuitous.  In DML, we (well, I) learned a huge amount about nurses and the various auxilliaries and how they worked, while in TDCW, we (I) learn a lot we (I) didn’t know about ‘shell shock’ and then, later, about the early development of tanks. It’s fascinating, and yet none of it is presented as ‘here is the research I did, now suck it up and learn it’ which is so often the case in historical novels of this sort.  It’s all integral to the plot, and carries the dynamic tension even as we’re given a virtual tour of the tank testing grounds. There’s a truly scary German woman-spy, part of a network called the She Wolves, of whom I’m sure (I hope) we’ll learn more, and the very welcome return of Mrs Gregson, the red-headed, motor-bike riding, thoroughly competent nursing auxiliary.

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Weekly Quiz 2014: 21

Results:  Melissa Anderson “Faith,” Denny Dobry “Kirby,” Elinor Gray “Misty,” and our team of Margie Deck “Gwen,” Airy Maher LM, and Sheila Holtgrieve “Daisy” all had perfect scores on this week’s quiz. Melissa was, once again, in first in a matter of hours after the quiz was posted.  Congratulations Quiz Masters!  Answers below.

This week’s quiz is about water. Please submit solutions by 7 pm Wednesday, 28 May 2014 to buttons@johnhwatsonsociety.com.

file_download.png Download Week 21 Questions and Answers.

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The Journal Arrives!

Most of our members should receive the April issue of The Watsonian beginning today (Friday), as it was sent First Class last Monday. International mailings have also been sent First Class (at a whopping $8.91 postage per copy!) and should arrive beginning next week.

The Society welcomes your comments and observations regarding this second issue, especially as it relates to the length of the journal (172 pages), content, and quality of the articles.

We will be evaluating a number of factors concerning the size, production cost, and postage rates of the journal and your input will be critical. It is a bit ironic that technology allows us to print a journal of 172 pages and bind it for $4.50 a copy, but to get it to England, France, Italy, Spain, UAE, and elsewhere, it costs twice that amount for postage! The domestic U.S. postage alone is nearly $2.50 per journal. Our total cost for this issue was $1,400.00. That is very close to our budget of $10.00 per journal ($40 for four issues which is our current two-year dues rate). But, as postage and print costs continue to spiral upward, our only alternative is to charge more. Actually, a reduction in the page count to, say, 80 pages will STILL cost about the same to produce and mail; we would save only a dollar or so. We would not gain that much by publishing a smaller journal (except wear and tear on our talented Editor). The printers and the post office have rates pretty well figured out in their favour.

We believe the Society and our Editor, Dr Joanne Yates, have produced one of the finest journals to be found, and we have all of our contributors to thank for that distinction and accomplishment. This is your journal. What we want to know, is: “What do you want going forward?” Bigger . . . Smaller . . . About the Same . . . ?

Please take a moment to leave a comment here about the journal after you have a chance to review it when it arrives; also, please give us your thoughts on what you wish to see going forward. What you have to say is very important. Thank you.

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The Speckled Band: Limericks

To All:

 I became intrigued with the idea of how many different ways that a limerick could be written about the same story. So I copied the different limericks that I had about the short story “The Speckled Band” and put them here for you to enjoy.

“Chips”

The Speckled Band

Doctor Roylott takes every precaution
to cling to each stepdaughter’s portion.
To avert Helen’s fate,
our friends lie in wait,
and he dies with a dreadful contortion.

         – Mr. Henry Baker (in the light of common day, Oliver Mundy)

“He spoke in a slow staccato fashion,
choosing his words with care,
and gave the impression of a man of learning and letters
who had had ill-usage at the hands of fortune.”

The Speckled Band

Helen’s bed ‘neath the ventilator,
meant the snake by the rope could locate her.
So ran the plot
of Doctor Roylott
who was trying to liquidate her.

         -Don Dillistone, June, 2004

The Speckled Band

Her annuity was the key factor
in why Helen’s stepfather attacked her.
He was mad as a hatter,
for a pet, kept an adder,
and the adder was meant to subtract her.

          -The Dancing Man

The Speckled Band

In the bedroom a milk-drinking snake
wanted a nice piece of cake.
He crawled down the rope;
he just couldn’t cope
with more tasteless food, for Pete’s sake.

           — Matilda – from the lumber camps of Michigan aka Bill Briggs

The Speckled Band

You would not want this in your hand,
though it could crawl up a silk strand;
it would never fight,
but it could bite;
it was the maligned speckled band.

              –William S Dorn BSI, ,DWNP;  from his book The Limericks of Sherlock Holmes; Pencil Productions 2005.

Bill emailed me that he found 10 copies of his book that he would be offering for sale at $18.00 postage included. In my opinion the book is one you should get if you love limericks. Contact Bill at: billdorn@mac.com

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New Book by Charles Press, JHWS “Rofer”

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Prof Charles Press, JHWS “Rofer,” has a new book by MX Publishing: A Bedside Book of Early Sherlockian Parodies and Pastiches

More parodies have been written targeting Sherlock Holmes than anyone else dead or alive, fictional or real. James M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, started it all back in the early 1890’s and Sherlockian parody has been coming out regularly ever since, right into the age of the internet. While Sherlock’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived, close to 400 appeared in Britain and America. In these early parodies, Sherlock is off on the wrong track in the great Coleslaw mystery, struggling with the disappearance of the President’s Whisker, rescuing that damsel in distress, Elsa Lohengrin, and even delving into the spirit world—and much more. Mark Twain, the Mr. Dooley of Finley Peter Dunne, Kenneth Grahame’s Ratty of The Wind in the Willows, John Kendrick Bangs, Bret Harte, Ring Lardner, C. K. Chesterton, and O. Henry all contributed to this early Bedside collection. Sherlock turns up at Wellseley College and Yale, Hades and The Garden of Eden, Peoria and the Oklahoma Territory, in the trenches of War I and often in his familiar Baker Street hangout. Sherlockian Charles Press began collecting these early lampoons as a hobby after retiring from Michigan State University. He is the author of two Sherlockian monographs, Parodies and Pastiches, Buzzing Round Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Looking Over Sir Arthur’s Shoulder, and “When Did Arthur Conan Doyle Meet Jean Leckie?” in The Baker Street Journal.  He is also published in the Spring 2014 issue of The Watsonian.

Available from Amazon; 356 pages; April 2014. $17.96

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Diabolical Quiz This Week

RESULTS:  We have some VERY talented Quiz Masters!  Within hours, Melissa Anderson “Faith” submitted a perfect 30/30 and Elinor Gray “Misty” was in next with 27/30 for this most obscure quiz.  Team honours go to Airy Maher, Loyal Member,  Margie Deck “Gwen” and Sheila Holtgrieve “Daisy” with a perfect 30/30.  Well done!  Answers below.

Here it is . . . the wicked one!  Good Luck.  Submissions by noon Wednesday please.

file_download.png Download Week 20 Questions and Answers.

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Something Wicked This Way Comes!

The wee voices in Buttons’s head have described (and even more scary, have answered) a Weekly Quiz to bedevil the mind.  See the Quiz Page at 7 pm tomorrow, Friday, to see if you are up to the Canonical challenge.  We prepare for the upcoming Second Annual John H Watson World Invitational Treasure Hunt to be contested in August.

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A Poem for Sherlock Holmes

This poem comes to me by the courtesy of Bill Peschel who has a interesting site which includes a section called the Poems for Sherlock Holmes. Bill says, “This poem, by journalist John Northern Hilliard, was published in 1922, was written after Holmes’s final retirement in “His Last Bow.”” I hope you all enjoy this as much as I do, although I do not know how. This poem brings out in me those special, indescribable feelings of joy and peace I get whenever I go back to Baker Street.

Sherlock Holmes
By John Northern Hilliard

When Sherlock Holmes, ingenious man, pursued his strange career,
we followed his deductions with an interest sincere.

Although in his time his victories monotonous became,
we must admit that since he quit work, life’s never been the same.

He always kept his wits on tap, he always had a clue,
he always could foretell just what a criminal would do.

A bit of string, a button, or a half smoked cigarette
made up the only evidence that Sherlock Holmes need get.

And when he bagged his man and had him safe behind bars,
he’d tell the tale to Watson over coffee and cigars.

Friend Watson then would spin a yarn from details of the case,
and label it “The Tonkin Three” or “Mystery of a Face.”

We have detectives who are shrewd, detectives who are wise,
detectives who, like M. Lecoq, are experts at disguise.

We have detectives whose brave deeds would fill a dozen tomes,
but never one that can compare with Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Dupin’s “Rue Morgue” deductions we today vote rather “slow,”
for Sherlock would have solved the case in half a day or so.

The novels of Gaboriau, the tales of Mrs. Green,
were tossed aside when Sherlock Holmes appeared upon the scene.

So here’s to Sherlock Holmes and may his glory never dim,
and here’s to his friend Watson for his faithfulness to him.

And here’s to Conan Doyle, may he attain the prophet’s span,
and all his life just write of Holmes, that great and noble man.

Chips

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New Page:  Chips’s Tid Bits

We are pleased to announce the addition of a new page to the Society’s website: Chips’s Tid Bits. Here, we will continue to feature the limericks, poems, aphorisms, and important miscellanea brought for our enjoyment and edification by our most active contributor, Ron Lies, JHWS “Chips,” of Denver, Colorado.

He is the Transcriber of Dr Watson’s Neglected Patients and has served as past Staff Surgeon, past Chief Surgeon and member since 1972. He belongs to The Sherlock Holmes Society of India; is a member of The Sydney Passengers, The Sherlock Homes Society of Australia; and is a co-founder of The Sons of Shaw, a society honouring the memory of John Bennett Shaw. His overwhelming interest in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson began in seventh grade when he read “The Speckled Band.”  He has always identified with Dr John Watson and now feels he is where he belongs with The John H Watson Society. And we agree.

Please visit the new page often, as “Chips” has weekly additions and often sends tid bits more frequently. Thank you, “Chips,” for making us all a great deal richer.

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Weekly Quiz 2014 – 19

RESULTS:  First in and 10/10 was Melissa Anderson “Faith” with Elinor Gray close and second in.  Team honours continue with Margie Deck “Gwen” and Sheila Holtgrieve “Daisy” with 10/10.  Well Done! Answers below.

This week’s quiz is a Study in Absence of Colour

Please submit solutions to these questions by 7 pm Wednesday, 14 May 2014 to buttons@johnhwatsonsociety.com

Download Week 19 Questions and Answers.

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Update on Journal Mailing

Buttons owes the membership an update on the delayed April issue of The Wastsonian.

For reasons that need not detain us here, the April journal, which we had targeted to mail on May 6th was further delayed and will now mail May 16th.  It will be mailed First Class postage and receipt in your mail boxes should begin by May 20th;  international receipts should begin by May 27th.

The journal is 172 pages (and a big, wonderful issue) and we have shifted to a new mailing system.  The first journal was mailed from our former printer in a bubble bag and the postage and handling charged was almost as much as the cost of the journal itself.  We have changed to a new printer and mailing system which is:  Buttons will drive 100 miles to Tampa, Florida to our new printer and pick up the journals. He will then drive back home to Ocala, put them in less costly poly-wrap bags, address them with labels, and take them to the post office and mail them using stamps. Yes, it is a bit “old school” but it saves the Society a lot of money.

The upshot:  With a new printer now, a new mailing routine, and adjustments to the editing, software system and mailing routine, the next journal (October) will likely be on time.  As always, the lion’s share of the creative work belongs to our great authors and contributors and our talented Editor, Dr Joanne Yates, whose design and layout make our journal one of the best in all of the Sherlockian–and definitely in the Watsonian–worlds.

Sorry for the delays on this issue. . . always learning and adjusting here . . . “We can but try . . . “