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You can also find them on Facebook by searching Bookies Chicago or call them at 773-239-1110. This podcast is being brought to you by WXAV 88.3 FM and WXAV.com. WXAV, bringing the best podcasts to you. Hi, I'm Peter Creighton, and welcome to a very special birthday celebration for the world's greatest fictional detective.
The character of Sherlock Holmes has lived in our collective imagination for over 130 years. During that time, he has conquered print, radio, television, and film. In fact, it's safe to say that he may be more popular today than when he was first published in the Strand Magazine in 1891. So to celebrate Holmes' birthday, I wanted to explore his popularity and why he has never really left the forefront of our collective imagination.
If anything, he's gone on to inspire countless other great fictional consulting detectives while essentially giving birth to modern fandom. To find answers to these questions, I recently spoke with a Sherlockian expert. Peter Blau is the secretary of the Baker Street Irregulars, the very first Sherlock Holmes society in the United States. In our conversation, Peter discusses how the Baker Street Irregulars were first founded, why he loves all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and how the character connects people from all different societies and backgrounds.
Here now, my conversation with Peter Blau. All right, I'm Peter Blau, and I'm the secretary of the Baker Street Irregulars. Let's just start at the beginning. How did you first discover Sherlock Holmes?
Well, I don't remember. I assume that I read my first Sherlock Holmes story in an anthology in school, in grade school or junior high school. That's how most of my generation found Sherlock Holmes stories in books like that. But I read so much that Sherlock Holmes didn't leave out and grab me by the search.
And I also was imprinted by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce because, of course, I went to see those movies every Saturday morning and I listened to the radio programs. Yeah, and I think that's one thing people forget. We see the 13 or 14 movies they did, but the radio show is between Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. I mean, I think they number either in the hundreds or thousands that they produced.
Well, hundreds, certainly. And, of course, in those days, you didn't count television, so radio was how you got your entertainment and going to the movies once a week if you were lucky. But you sit there every night and listen to radio broadcasts, Captain Midnight and Don Lindslow in the Navy and Doc Savage and Sherlock Holmes. Do you have a favorite Sherlock Holmes story at all?
No, I'm mean about that. When people ask me, what's your favorite story? I always say, the story I read most recently. That's because all the stories are great fun.
There is none of the stories that doesn't have interesting things in it. However, the most popular stories, I think, are The Adventure of the Speckled Band and The Adventure of the Red-Headed League. Those are the two stories you find most often in school collections because The Speckled Band is a Greek, Gothic, young girl in peril story, and The Red-Headed League is really outre. I mean, it's weird.
So, they're fun. They are absolutely fun. Just a real basic question for you, too, again. What are the Baker Street Irregulars, and then how did this organization come together?
Okay, so the Baker Street Irregulars are a bunch of people who plainly are devoted to keeping the memory green, making sure that people remember who Sherlock Holmes is. There's not a lot of work involved in that. But most of us enjoy playing a game, which we call the grand game, and that's pretending that Sherlock Holmes lived and lives today. And the stories, both of them, were actually written by Dr.
Watson, and Arthur Conan Doyle was Dr. Watson's literary agent. So we always honor him, the capital L and the capital A, and posted him as a literary agent. But the Baker Street Irregulars were founded in 1934 by a man named Christopher Morley, who was a writer, and a editor at the Saturday Review of Literature, and he liked to found clubs.
He had all sorts of weird clubs, including one called the Three Hours for Lunch Club, which meant whenever somebody interesting came by and decided to review literature offices, and Morley would invite his guests and a few people who got together for a long lunch. And back in 1934, of course, there was a lot of drinking going on, even though it was prohibitions. And Morley then formed a club, and this is a complicated name, it's in German, called the Grillparser of the Zittenpulitzai of Orion, which was named in honor of the Austrian communist French Grillparker, because on the way to a legend, Morley happened to pick up a book, a biography of Grillparser, and the Zittenpulitzai of Orion means Morals Police Society, because what they were doing was drinking in speakeasies. But Morley discovered that a lot of people in that club enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories.
So they started quizzing each other. And in 1934, Morley wrote in his column, Tradewinds, at the Saturday Review, who let there out to be a society called the Bakersfield Irregulars. So he founded it, and for a long time it was his friends, but his friends kept inviting their friends, and eventually, by the end of the 1930s, there were so many people there, Morley didn't know that he decided, no, there's too many people, let's stop. So it suddenly stopped for a couple years, but a very nice man named Edgar Smith, who was the vice president at General Motors, said, no, I'll do the work.
So he started up again, and we're still going strong. What does the organization typically do, other than just keeping the memory of Sherlock Holmes alive and playing the game? Because there's some pretty interesting research that the Irregulars have conducted on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and Conan Doyle and all that.
Can you talk a little bit about some of those more academic research-based projects that Irregulars have conducted? Well, first I've got to explain that the Bakersfield Irregulars do whatever they want to do. There are no rules and regulations. We've got all sorts of people in the Bakersfield Irregulars, and all we do as a society is basically have an annual dinner in January in New York on a Friday that's close to Sherlock Holmes' birthday, which we believe was January 6th.
And we published a journal called the Bakersfield Irregulars, which is where we publish people's research and news of what's going on. I tell everybody that there's a website, www.bakersstreetirregulars.com, where you can find a link to the Bakersfield Irregulars and a chance to buy other books we've written. We publish a series of books. We have a manuscript series where we print facsimiles of some of the Sherlock Holmes manuscripts with scholarly apparatus, articles.
Well, some of the articles are scholarly, some of them are. We have an international series where we take the best of Sherlockian literature published in other languages and translate it into English so that people here can be exposed to some of the stuff that people in other countries are doing. Actually, translate it. We've also published volumes for Canadian and Australian literature, and I claim they need to be translated into English, too.
They're not too happy about that. And let's see, about every three years, we have a running of the Silver Blaze, the worst race in Saratoga in New York, and every three years or so, we have a conference somewhere. We've had an excursion to the Valley of Fear, which is the Chinebillow Valley in Pennsylvania. We've had an excursion to the Country of the Saints in Salt Lake City.
That's from a study in Scarlet. And we've been to UCLA to do films and television. We worked to Paco to do, I don't know what theme we had, but we have a few things that can come to these. And, again, news of all these things is at our website, BakerSteerReaders.com.
And it sounds like you guys really have fun with the organization, with what you do, and everything. It's not just sitting there writing papers, it's going out into the world and just having a blast. Yes, absolutely. And what I think is interesting is many of the, I say scholarly or pseudo-scholarly papers focus in on points where we're not sure.
One of the very nice things about the Sherlock Holmes stories is that they're full of contradictions and mistakes and things that need to be explained or explained away. And people come up with very ingenious ways of doing that. For instance, we celebrate Sherlock Holmes' birthday on January 6th, even though that's not in the Sherlock Holmes stories. And we believe he was born in 1854.
And that's the sort of the story, because in one story, that takes place in 1914, and it's the last bio, it says that he was a man of 60 years. So he subtract 60 from 1914, you get 1954. But January 6th is really powerful. Christopher Morley announced it.
And since he was the founder, he said fine. And nobody ever asked him why, so he never explained. Sherlockians have come up with some intriguing explanations. One is that there's one Shakespeare play that is quoted two different times in the story, and it's Shakespeare's 12th night.
And 12th night is January 6th. And someone else pointed out that in the opening of The Valley of Fear, Watson, correct, changes at breakfast before Sherlock Holmes, who comes down late for breakfast, and someone suggested that Sherlock Holmes went up late the night before celebrating his birthday on January 6th and was slightly hungover on January 7th. So you can see we don't take ourselves too seriously. No, no, it sounds like you guys just have a lot of fun with the mythos of Sherlock Holmes.
Now, the Baker Street Irregulars have had some pretty notable members in the organization over the years, just a few of them. You have Star Trek writer and director Nicholas Myers, the legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, and even Presidents Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt were honorary members of the Baker Street Irregulars, which, when I was doing my research, I was blown away that two presidents, one right after the other, were, with everything that was going on, they were still reading Sherlock Holmes and participating and just enjoying the literature. For you, what does that speak of the appeal of Sherlock Holmes and the Sherlock Holmes stories, that they can attract such a wide variety of people? Well, we have Sherlockians from all walks of life.
It was nice to be able to sit down for dinner with Isaac Asimov on the line, and I know Nick Meyer, and we have other writers like Neil Gaiman as a member and Michael Durda, but we never got to meet Roosevelt and Truman. But what's fun is to think about what it was like being president back in the 1940s, even though there was a war on. Yes, we had a chance to read books, and Roosevelt was a stamp collector. He had time to sit down and work on a stamp collection.
It wasn't quite as high pressure as it is today, but we still have plenty of politicians who enjoy the Sherlock Holmes stories. Supreme Court Justice Alito just mentioned the Sherlock Holmes story during one of the questions in a case two weeks ago at the Supreme Court. So we keep an eye on this sort of thing. But I think the greater field of the Sherlockian world is we have all sorts of people.
We have FBI agents and teachers and lawyers and doctors, mailmen. You name it. We've got them. Yeah, absolutely.
My dad's a Sherlock Holmes fan, and he's the one that got me into it when I was younger. And it's incredible because the character's approaching 132 years old, and we're still drawn to him, yet he's not really the most lovable character in all of literature. He's kind of moody. He's cross with people, but yet he's kind of also like the first ever superhero in literature, isn't he?
Yeah. Well, you know, people sometimes ask me what is it I like about Sherlock Holmes, and my answer always is nothing. He was not a likable person. He was rude.
He was arrogant. I have a great deal of sympathy for Dr. Watson, who I have thought with him year after year after year. What I like is the Sherlockians, the people who enjoy the stories.
The Sherlockians are what's interesting. But Sherlock Holmes is a wonderful character. Conan Doyle was really inspired when he created Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and Professor Morley and Irene Adler.
Conan Doyle was really a great writer. He was a good teller of tales, but not just the Sherlock Holmes stories. I recommend the Brigadier Gerard stories and the Professor Challenger stories. Conan Doyle is fun to read.
The Brigadier Gerard has worked with his estate at all over the years? No. I wouldn't say worked with so much as had problems with. Conan Doyle's children, first his son Dennis, and then his son Adrian, sometimes took umbrage at the idea of anybody making money off Sherlock Holmes.
They tried to prevent people from doing things. And at one time, Adrian threatened to sue the Baker Street Directors that they didn't stop publishing the Baker Street Journal, and they aptly ignored him and never got sued. After they died, his last surviving child's daughter, Jean, had very good relations with the Baker Street Directors. She was a member, in fact, even though she never got to come to one of the meetings.
But we've had good and bad relations with the estate. But Jean was a treasure. One of the Baker Street Directors, which was a sad society for many years under Christopher Morley. In 1991, Tom Sticks decided it was so.
And he brought in the first six women as full members of the Baker Street Directors. And Dame Jean was one of them. And now we have a lot. If you go to the Baker Street Directors website, there's one section devoted to the annual dinners.
And you can go through and see the photographs. We have photographs of almost every dinner since 1934. And you can see from 1991 onward the percentage of women increases. So I got kind of like an unusual question that I want to ask you.
You know, in the Strand Magazine and then in the compilation stories and the books and that. Now we're in this like digital age. You know, a lot of people read blogs and they're on their computer or their phones or what have you. Do you think a character like Sherlock Holmes could be as popular today as like a creature like created by digital means instead of being born of paper and books and that?
Do you think the popularity would still be there or do you think the way he was created is the way he had to be? That's an interesting question. I think one of the things that's interesting about Sherlock Holmes is that he has appeared in so many different formats. It started out in print, then on stage starting in the 1890s, then in films, television and now on the internet, on their computer.
Wherever you go, you can find Sherlock Holmes. Now there are superheroes around today. I confess I'm not familiar with many of them but Robert Downey Jr. who's done two Sherlock Holmes movies, he's got this wonderful series Iron Man.
And Iron Man was, I believe, created in comic books and then is in films and is now on television and probably has more fans than Sherlock Holmes. Certainly there are a lot of people who really admire James Bond thanks to Daniel Craig and others. So Sherlock Holmes isn't unique. He's just been around for a long time.
And maybe that's the greatest strength is the character's adaptability, being able to go from print to radio to film to television to podcast Everything Under the Sun now. Just another personal question for you. Do you have a favorite Sherlock Holmes? Do you have a favorite film or do you prefer him on the radio?
What's your favorite portrayal of the character? Well, again, I try to avoid that sort of thing. You get imprinted. Basil Lapham was my first Sherlock Holmes.
And for many years, nobody else could be as good as Basil Rathbone until Jeremy Brecht came along in the 1980s. And Jeremy Brecht's Granada series was just spectacular. And there was a whole generation of Sherlockians who said, Jeremy Brecht, yes, no one can be better than Jeremy Brecht. And then lo and behold, Benedict Cumberbatch came along.
And he's got a legion of fans. And someone once asked Jeremy Brecht, did he ever think that anybody would be better than he was at Sherlock Holmes? And he said, of course, he was looking forward to the next really good actor to be Sherlock Holmes. So it's wonderful to watch different actors do different things with Sherlock Holmes.
I enjoyed them all. I enjoyed Rathbone. I enjoyed Brecht. I enjoyed Cumberbatch.
I'm looking forward to the next one, too. Well, Peter, I only got one final question for you. And thank you so much for spending some of your time today to talk to me about Sherlock Holmes. But before we go, can you get to the website again very quickly for the Baker Street Irregulars?
From www.bakersreetirregulars.com. Be sure to go there and check everything out on the Irregulars and Sherlock Holmes. For those who have never read Sherlock Holmes, where would you tell them to start? Well, I would suggest The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle wrote two long stories, A Study in Scarlet and A Sign of the Four. And people were enthusiastic about those. But it wasn't until the short stories started appearing in the Strand Magazine in July of 1891 that Sherlock Holmes really took off. And they're great stories.
Sherlock Holmes, I think, is better in the short stories than the long ones. But you start off with A Scandal and Bohemia. It's a wonderful story. You read the first page of A Scandal and Bohemia.
And you won't know that it's a story about a detective. It's a romance story until the detective appears. And these are really good stories. It's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
If you buy The Complete Sherlock Holmes, all 60, skip over to A Study in Scarlet and A Sign of the Four. You can come back to them. Because, as I say, every story is a lot of fun. But most people think The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the book has the most really good stories.
Or the longer story, The Hound of the Bastard Girls. That's not a story you want to read on a windy night with a branch of Sherlock Holmes against a window. It's a spooky story. Peter, this has been an absolute pleasure talking with you today.
Thank you so much for giving some of your time. Glad to do it. And that was my conversation with Peter Blau. To learn more about the Baker Street Irregulars, please visit their website at BakerStreetIrregulars.com.
I hope you've enjoyed this conversation on literature's greatest consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. I hope I've enticed you enough to go and pick up and read a Sherlock Holmes story. If I may be so bold, I'd like to recommend The Five Orange Pips. That one's my favorite.
I'm Peter Creighton, and thanks for listening. Thank you very much for listening to this WXAV 88.3 FM podcast. Be sure to visit our website, WXAV.com, for more information on your escape from ordinary radio.