Jan 07 #1 Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press There seems to be little doubt about global warming, at least with regard to the birthday festivities in New York, where the weather was occasionally rainy but never cold. The now-traditional ASH Wednesday supper was held at O'Casey's, and the Christopher Morley Walk was led by Jim Cox and Dore Nash on Thursday morning (with lunch at McSorley's). The Baker Street Irregulars' Distinguished Speaker at the Williams Club on Thursday evening was Laurie R. King, who offered new and interesting Sher- lockian scholarship, and announced that Mary Russell will return to Sussex in her next book, which "will have something to do with bees." Laurie also reported that Mary is not pregnant. Laurie's lecture will appear The Baker Street Journal this year (see below for information on how to subscribe). The William Gillette Luncheon attracted a sizeable crowd on Friday at Mor- an's Chelsea Seafood Restaurant, where Paul Singleton, Andrew Joffe, Sarah Montague, Elyse Locurto, and Curtis Armstrong presented dramatic views of how the telephone was viewed and used at 221B Baker Street. And the tra- ditional open house at Otto Penzler's Mysterious Bookshop offered the usual opportunities to browse and buy. Paul Singleton arranged for an early-evening gathering at the Hotel Duane's Grille Room (where the first gathering of The Baker Street Irregulars was held on Jan. 6, 1934); the premises are now known as Morgans Bar, and there is talk ("not by me," Paul notes) of making this an annual ritual. The Irregulars and their guests gathered for the BSI's annual dinner at the Union League Club, and Julie Rosenblatt delivered the cocktail-party toast to the Woman: Candace Lewis (who went on to dinner at the Club with other ladies who have been honored in past years). The dinner featured the usual toasts and traditions, Paxton Whitehead's reminiscences about the play "The Crucifer of Blood", Dan Posnansky's report on a letter that Sir Arthur Con- an Doyle wrote about America and Americans, a spirited competition called "Pericolo" (aka "Sherlockian Jeopardy"), and much more. Mike Whelan (the BSI's "Wiggins") announced the Birthday Honours, and Ir- regular Shillings and Investitures were awarded to Warren Randall ("Harold Stackhurst"), Dayna McCausland ("Lady Clara St. Simon"), Mike Homer ("Enoch J. Drebber"), Mike Berdan ("Henri Murger"), Maggie Schpak ("The Soup Plate Medal"), Mattias Bostrom ("The Swedish Pathological Society"), and Elaine McCafferty ("Eliza Barrymore"). Mike Whelan also presented the BSI's Edi- tor's Medal to Peter Blau, Steve Doyle, Mitch Higurashi, and Bill Hyder, in recognition of their services as editors of books published by the BSI in the manuscript and international series. The Gaslight Gala, held at the Manhattan Club, celebrated "The Villains in the Canon" with performances by the Sherlettes (songs such as "Hello Sel- den", "Don't Mess with Mr. Milverton", and "Get Me to the Court on Time"), toasts, dramatics (Joanne Zahorsky-Reeves and Robert Reeves in "Feeling Skittish: Holmes & Moriarty's First Date"), a game ("Sherlockian Squares"), songs, raffles (a hand-painted tote bag donated by Laurie Frasier Manifold and a hand-painted sweatshirt donated by Cynthia Wein), and an auction. Jan 06 #2 On Saturday morning the dealers room at the Algonquin was (as usual) crowded with sellers and buyers, and at 12:30 The Cli- ents of Adrian Mulliner (devotees of the works of both Wodehouse and Wat- son) gathered for a Junior Bloodstain, which featured a dramatic reading of Anne Cotton's "Sherlock Holmes and the Horrible Hound" (with Anne starring as the Hound). The BSI's Saturday-afternoon cocktail party was held at a new location: the New York City Bar Association, conveniently in the same block at the Algon- quin Hotel. There was a spacious room for wining and dining and conversa- tion, and a comfortable auditorium for the entertainment. Mary Ann Bradley introduced the ladies who have been honored as the Woman, and Al and Betsy Rosenblatt reported poetically on the events of the previous year and the previous evening. Harold Billings won the Morley-Montgomery Award (an at- tractive certificate and a check for $500) for the best contribution to The Baker Street Journal last year, for his article on "The Materia Medica of Sherlock Holmes". The John H. Watson Fund's raffle prize, kindly donated by Jerry and Chrys Kegley and The Curious Collectors of Baker Street, was a collection Sherlockian jewelry hand-crafted by Maggie Schpak, and the Fund benefitted from energetic bidding in the traditional auction. The Watson Fund (administered by a carefully anonymous Dr. Watson) offers financial assistance to all Sherlockians (membership in the BSI is not re- quired) who might otherwise not be able to participate in the birthday fes- tivities. The generous donors to the auction were Bill Dorn (his Sherlock- ian calendar for 2007, signed by all who were featured in it), Laurie King (naming rights for one of the good or bad characters in the next Mary Russ- ell novel), and the Denizens of the Bar of Gold (a Street Dozen of artistic pillows created by Alice Zalik). A Saturday evening event was the "Lost in New York with a Bunch of Sher- lockians" dinner at Kennedy's, where S'ians from six nations joined Chrys Kegley and The Curious Collectors of Baker Street for additional festivi- ties. And on Sunday morning a convivial group of visiting long-weekenders gathered at the Oldcastle Pub & Restaurant for a brunch arranged by the Ad- venturesses of Sherlock Holmes. I've not reported on everything, I hasten to add; if you want more details than I've provided here, there will be much more in The Baker Street Jour- nal, which is published quarterly and costs $26.50 a year ($29.00 outside the U.S.), and checks (credit-card payments accepted from foreign subscrib- ers) should be sent to the BSJ (Box 465, Hanover, PA 17331); and there's an option offering a subscription to the BSJ and to the Christmas Annual for $36.50 (or $40.00 foreign). You can also subscribe at the BSJ web-site at , where there's additional interesting materi- al such as some of the papers written by past winners the Morley-Montgomery Awards, articles from recent issues of the BSJ, and information about the BSI's publications. And if you would like to see two slide shows of photographs taken at some of the events during the birthday festivities, Scott Monty has kindly pro- vided two slide shows at ; there's a link in his entry for January 23. Jan 07 #3 "Holland is a creation of such exquisite period evil that Dick- ens and Conan Doyle would have gladly fought naked on the froz- en Thames for the chance to create her." According to Michael Holden, in the Guardian (Dec. 23), about a character in the television dramatization of Philip Pullman's new novel "The Ruby in the Smoke" that aired on BBC-1 on Dec. 27. One can only hope that the program is broadcast by "Master- piece Theatre" on PBS-TV: Holden also wrote that "If you can only watch one bloodcurdling Victorian costume drama this Christmas--this should be it." There were familiar names on the Queen's New Year's honours list: Michael Holroyd received a knighthood for services to literature; Peter Greenaway, Penelope Keith, and John Wood were appointed CBE (Companion of the Most Ex- cellent Order of the British Empire); and Hugh Laurie was appointed an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). Holroyd wrote about the battle between Adrian Conan Doyle and Hesketh Pear- son about Pearson's biography of Sir Arthur; Peter Greenaway wrote and dir- the film "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982), filmed at Groombridge Place, which was the inspiration for Birlstone Manor; Penelope Keith was the re- ceptionist at the massage parlor in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1978); John Wood played Sherlock Holmes in the Royal Shakespeare Company's revival of Gillette's play; and Hugh Laurie read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" on BBC Radio 2 in 2002 (and as Dr. Gregory House in the Fox television series lives in a house numbered 221B). Helen Wesson died on Sept. 7, 2006. She was an energetic amateur journal- ist and (with her husband Sheldon) a fine printer, and her enthusiasms in- cluded miniatures and Sherlock Holmes: Helen presided over two Sherlockian societies: The Trained Cormorants of Gifu (she had visited the trained cor- morants while she lived in Japan) and the H.W., and she exhibited her Sher- lockian miniature rooms (the sitting-room and some of his London hideaways) at the Red Circle's miniature meeting in 1983. The Sherlock Holmes Society of London and the Old Court Radio Theatre Com- pany have issued a new CD, with dramatizations of "The Mazarin Stone" and "The Veiled Lodger" (dramatized by M. J. Elliott); as with their first CD (Jun 06 #4), the actors and scripts are excellent. Available from the So- ciety (Mole End, Sandford Road, Chelmsford CM2 6DE, England); L5.00 post- paid to the U.K., L6.00/E9.00 to Europe, L9.00/$12.00 elsewhere (sterling checks should be payable to Roger Johnson and dollar checks to Jean Upton; euros in currency, please). Further to an earlier item (Sep 00 #4) about the copy of Conan Doyle's THE GREEN FLAG AND OTHER STORIES OF WAR AND SPORT, brought to the Antarctic in 1910 by Capt. Robert Falcon Scott (it's still there, preserved in the small hut from which he launched his ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole), Saul Cohen wrote in Baker Street Miscellanea (winter 1982) about a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories brought to the Antarctic by Xavier Mertz on the Australasian-Antarctic expedition led by Douglas Mawson in 1911-1913; Mertz did not survive, but Mawson did, and found Mertz's book, which has now been discovered in Mawson's Hut at Cape Denison. According to a report in the Dec. 22 issue of the Melbourne Age, conservationists working on preserving the hut have found the book: a copy of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. Jan 07 #4 Much has been written about (and by) Felix Dennis, the British entrepreneur, publisher (he owns Maxim), poet, and (the Sunday Times "rich list" estimates) the 65th richest individual in the UK. He has a web-site at , and a Garden of Heroes on his 730-acre estate in Warwickshire. It's a sort of bronze Madame Tussaud's, according to an article in the Guardian (Nov. 3, 2002) with one-and-a-quarter life- size statues of people he admires, including Galileo, Muhammad Ali, Dorothy Parker, Icarus, Charles Darwin, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. SPONGEBOB DETECTIVE PANTS: THE CASE OF THE MISSING SPATULA, written by David Lewman, and illustrated by Harry Moore (New York: Scholastic, 2006; 12 pp., $5.99), has SpongeBob and Patrick investigating a mystery. Further to the report on , "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" has been added to their list of Sherlockian items available for lis- tening on-line. Patrick Horgan reads the stories, and reads them will. They also have some of the old Rathbone/Bruce radio broadcasts. Arthur Hill died on Oct. 22, 2006. He worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Co. in radio theater while still in school, and acted on stage, screen, ra- dio and television in England and the United States, winning awards for his appearance as George in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" in 1962. He played Preston Giles on tele- vision in 1984 in "The Murder of Sherlock Holmes" (the pilot for the series "Murder She Wrote"). "Sherlock Holmes investigates a wailing, soul-sucking ghost that turns out to be a banshee," according to a press release spotted by Ken Lanza. "Will Holmes be clever enough to find out the beast's secrets and stop its terri- fying reign?" Stay tuned: "Sherlock Holmes and the Banshee" is one of the new films greenlit for development for the SCI FI Channel, which is launch- ing a new slot called "SCI-FI Saturday: The Most Dangerous Night of Televi- sion". Peepolykus [pronounced people-like-us] is a British theater company that is touring with John Nicholson and Steven Canny's dramatization of "The Hound of the Baskervilles"; their schedule is available at . Three actors perform all of the roles "with style, grace, and a number of false beards," and the company asks their audiences to "refrain from bring- ing meat products into the auditorium." Spotted by Jim Suszynski: "That's the trouble with detective work. . . . Too many clues are worse than none at all." The quote's from FREDDY PLAYS FOOTBALL, accompanied by Kurt Wiese's illustration of Freddy in Sherlockian costume, in THE WIT & WISDOM OF FREDDY AND HIS FRIENDS, by Walter R. Brooks (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2000; 253 pp., $23.95); with a new introduction by Michael Cart [discounted to $4.98 at Daedalus Books and presumably else- where. The Friends of Freddy are at Box 912, Greenbelt, MD 20768, and they have a web-site at . Jan 07 #5 Those who wonder where Lauriston Gardens really was have diffi- culty finding a suitable location in London, but it is easier discovering a source for the name: in Edinburgh. Lauriston Place was just round the corner from one of the houses in which Conan Doyle lived when he studied under Dr. Joseph Bell at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. An article in the Edinburgh Evening News (Jan. 20) notes that the Infirmary moved to a new site in Lauriston Place in 1879, and to a new hospital in Little France in 2002; Lauriston Place is being redeveloped as part of planning for a new district in Edinburgh, and preservationists are objecting to a proposal to replace the Red Home, where the Infirmary's nurses once lived, with an L- shaped restaurant and civic square. Dorothy Stix spotted Sherlockian artwork in the game DIAMOND DETECTIVE (the trophy for getting to Inspector level is a badge with a portrait of Sher- lock Holmes); it's one of the games available at , and you can download and play it free for 60 minutes. The Mystery Writers of America have announced the nominees for Edgars (to be awarded at their gala banquet on Apr. 26 in New York). The nominees in- clude Steve Hockensmith's HOLMES ON THE RANGE (best first novel by an Amer- ican author), Daniel Stashower's THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL: MARY ROGERS, ED- GAR ALLAN POE AND THE INVENTION OF MURDER (best fact crime), E. J. Wagner's THE SCIENCE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: FROM BASKERVILLE HALL TO THE VALLEY OF FEAR (best critical/biographical), Nancy Springer's THE CASE OF THE MISSING MAR- QUESS: AN ENOLA HOLMES MYSTERY (best juvenile), and Steven Dietz's SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE FINAL ADVENTURE (best play). Stephen King, whose pastiche "The Doctor's Case" was published in the anthology THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SHER- LOCK HOLMES (1987), will receive the MWA's Grand Master award. Their web- site at lists the nom- inees in all the categories. Jay Pearlman reports that The Mini-Tonga Scion Society is alive and well: the up-dated web-site at offers news of the world of miniatures, and colorful photographs of Sher- lockian miniatures. links to a web- site about Sulgrave Manor, home of George Washington's ancestors; Sir Ar- thur Conan Doyle was a member of the British Peace Centenary Committee that helped raise the money needed to buy the house in 1914 as part of the cele- bration of the centenary of the Treaty of Ghent, which was the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812. Thanks to Gayle Harris for reporting the site. Robert Anton Wilson died on Jan. 11. He was renowned at the author of the "Illuminatus" trilogy; MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI (1981) featured Joyce, Ein- stein, Crowley, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and many (marginal) allusions to Sherlock Holmes and the Canon. I've mentioned MySpace before, and Mary Russell has her own profile there, at . Her capsule biography states that she's 99 years old, because that's the limit at MySpace (she's actually 107 years old); Laurie R. King has complained at her own blog about MySpace's ageist policies . Jan 07 #6 Art Buchwald died on Jan. 17. He was a newspaper humor colum- nist for more than half a century. After the end World War II he went to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he was managing editor of the campus humor magazine (and wrote a parody fea- turing Hamhock Bones), and moved to Paris to write an entertainment column for the European edition of the N.Y. Herald Tribune. In March 1952 he in- terviewed Bill Rabe, then an Army officer in Europe, about the Old Soldiers of Baker Street (and in a later column published a letter in which Adrian Conan Doyle complained that his father had been neglected in Bill's inter- view); Sherlock Holmes was mentioned often in Buchwald's columns over many years, and he assisted Bill in the research that resulted in Bill's WE AL- WAYS MENTION AUNT CLARA (1990). Al Gregory offers (e-mail only) his 2007 edition of "The ABC of the BSI" (an alphabetical listing of Investitures, with recipients, from "Abbey Grange" to "Young Stamford") and "The Florin Society" (couples in which both spouses have received Irregular Shillings). SCANDINAVIA AND SHERLOCK HOLMES, edited and translated by Bjarne Nielsen (New York: The Baker Street Irregulars, 2006; 230 pp., $39.95), is the sec- ond volume in BSI's International Series, which is intended to make avail- able in English some of the fine Sherlockian scholarship published in other languages. The book offers contributions from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, covering a wide range of topics, including the history of the S'ian socie- ties in Scandinavia, with fine artwork by Henry Lauritzen, Robert Storm-Pe- tersen, and more recent artists. $43.90 postpaid to the U.S. ($44.90 else- where) from The Baker Street Journal, 2 Dettling Road, Maynard, MA 01754. You can also order on-line at . Roy Pilot, Gianluca Salvatori, and Enrico Solito are the editors of MANDATE FOR MURDER (New York: The Baker Street Irregulars, 2006; 177 pp., $35.00), is the fifth volume in the BSI's Manuscript Series; there's a facsimile of the original manuscript, with a transcription and notes, accompanied by ex- cellent scholarship on Italy, Italians, and artists by Philip Weller, John Genova, the editors, and others. $38.95 postpaid to the U.S. ($39.95 else- where); addresses as for SCANDINAVIA AND SHERLOCK HOLMES (above). The last volume of Leslie S. Klinger's SHERLOCK HOLMES REFERENCE LIBRARY is THE CASE-BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (Indianapolis: Gasogene Books, 2007; 264 pp., $26.95), with a thoughtful introduction by Chris Redmond. The annota- tions and appendicies are as always based on old and new Sherlockian schol- arship, and the nine volumes in the complete series are a splendid resource for those who want more information than is available in THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES and older annotated editions. $30.90 postpaid ($32.90 out- side the U.S.) from the publisher (Box 68308, Indianapolis, IN 46268). Reported: Roger Jaynes, author of SHERLOCK HOLMES IN A DUEL WITH THE DEVIL (Nov 02 #1), has a second pastiche SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE CHILFORD RIPPER (London: Breese Books, 2006; 150 pp.); Val Andrews' new pastiche SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE GHOST OF BAKER STREET also is available from Breese Books (156 pp.). Each book costs L7.50 postpaid (to the UK)/E12.50 (Euroland)/$18.50 (elsewhere), and their address is Endeavour House, 170 Woodland Road, Saws- ton, Cambridge CB2 4DX, England . Jan 07 #7 Alan H. Foster ("A Commission from the Sultan of Turkey") died on Oct. 18, 2006. He had a long career in corporate financial planning and risk management, and then was a professor of finance, ethics, and corporate strategy at the University of Michigan. He was a member of The Speckled Band of Boston and The Amateur Mendicants of Detroit; he re- ceived his Investiture from The Baker Street Irregulars in 1965, and he won the BSI's Morley-Montgomery Award for the best paper published in the Baker Journal in 1966. Philip Weller writes that a more complete map of La Gaiola (featured in his article in MANDATE FOR MURDER (The Baker Street Irregulars' manuscript-ser- ies volume for "The Red Circle") (Jan 07 #6) is available on request as an e-mail attachment; his address is <221b@acd-221b.info>. The new issue of the Sherlockian E-Times is at hand from Joel and Carolyn Senter (Classic Specialties) with news from the Sherlockians by Invitation Only Society, and offers of Sherlockian merchandise; the newsletter's URL is , and you can request an e-mail subscription at . Jim Cox prepared a "Christopher Morley Souvenir Portfolio" for the Christo- pher Morley Walk during the birthday festivities, with photocopies (some in color) of a "selection of curiosities" drawn from his collection. $12.50 postpaid from James D. Cox (2240 15th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94116). Reported in the Guardian (Jan. 9): Bottom and Titania, the Ancient Mariner and the Albatross, and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, are the famous coup- les from literature featured on a multi-media "Literacy Collection" CD-ROM for Windows offered to schools by 2Simple Software (Enterprise House, 2 The Crest, Hendon, London NW4 2HN, England) . Jon Lellenberg reports an excellent account of the battle of Maiwand at the web-site ; Dr. Watson is mentioned near the end, under "regimental anecdotes and traditions". is a fascinating demonstration of modern technology: type and click and listen (in different languages and voices). You can type quotes from the Canon, of course. Or anything else you want to hear. And a few commercials: a 17-page list of the Investitured Irregulars, the Two-Shilling Awards, the Women, and the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes costs $1.30 postpaid. An 82-page list of 851 Sherlockian societies, with names and addresses for contacts for 430 active societies, is $4.85 post- paid. A run of address labels for 357 individual contacts (recommended to avoid duplicate mailings to those who are contacts for more than one soci- ety) costs $10.65 postpaid (checks payable to Peter E. Blau, please). The list of BSIs and others also is available from me by e-mail (at no charge), and both lists are available at Willis G. Frick's "Sherlocktron" home page at . The Spermaceti Press: Peter E. Blau, 7103 Endicott Court, Bethesda, MD 20817-4401 (301-229-5669) Feb 07 #1 Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press The Sherlockian birthday festivities lasted much longer than the long week- end in New York: the annual dinner of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London took place at the House of Commons on Jan. 20. Mike Whelan awarded Jona- than McCafferty membership in The Baker Street Irregulars (as "Barrymore"). Harvard's Houghton Library will host a symposium and mount a major exhibi- tion honoring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 2009, marking the 150th anniversary of his birth. The symposium will be held May 7-9, and the exhibition will run from May 4 to Aug. 15, featuring material from the Houghton's collec- tions, the Baker Street Irregulars archives, and private collections. More information on the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sesquicentennial Celebration will be available at . "The Uncanny Appearance of Sherlock Holmes" (a new musical written by Brad Krunholz for the North American Cultural Laboratory) will be performed at the NACL Theatre in Highland Lake, N.Y., on Mar. 2 and 3 (the world prem- iere on Mar. 2 is a fund-raiser) (845-557-0694) and Mar. 9 and 10 at Hum- ber College in Toronto (416-564-6622) . John Baesch spotted an article in The Times (Jan. 27) about an auction, at Bonhams in London on Mar. 6, of more than 350 outfits tailored by Angels, the leading costumier for films shot in Britain. The items offered in the auction include a black Victorian-style cape/coat worn by Jeremy Brett in the "Sherlock Holmes" series (estimated at L2,000-2,500), a dressing gown worn by Brett in the series (L1,000-1,200), and a khaki linen shirt worn by Christopher Lee in "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (L100-140. Michael Dirda reviewed A. N. Wilson's new BETJEMAN: A LIFE in the Washing- ton Post's Book World (Jan. 28), and has reported (although not in his re- view) that the Betjemann patented tantalus (which has been described as a device designed to prevent the servants from tippling of pilfering) was in- vented by the poet's grandfather George Betjemann. One is reminded of the old story about the man who drew lines on the label of the whiskey bottle he kept in his hotel room, so that he would know that no one else was drinking from it. One day he returned to his room to find a note by the bottle: "Please do not draw lines on the label. It is a shame to have to dilute good whiskey." Nostalgia Ventures has added a collection of 20 programs from the 1948-1949 Mutual Broadcasting System's "Sherlock Holmes" series to its collection of Old Time Radio Shows. The ten-disk boxed set stars John Stanley as Holmes and Ian Martin and Wendell Holmes as Watson in recordings restored from the original disks in the University of Minnesota's Edith Meiser Collection and hitherto unavailable, and retails for $29.98. It's available in stores, or from the company (888-589-8885); the quality of the recordings is splendid, and it's delightful to listen to the programs. And it's nice to hear that Nostalgia Ventures plans to issue more programs from the season. There's more information about the series at ; click on "en- ter here" and search for "sherlock" and click on the cover and on "facts" to read commentary by Bill Nadel and Anthony Tollin. Feb 07 #2 The February issue of Smithsonian magazine has an interesting article about artist Joseph Cornell's box construction "A Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova: Homage to the Romantic Ballet" on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Cornell met Toumanova in 1940, and used feathers from her costume when he created the box in 1946. Toumanova, who died in 1996 (Jun 96 #2), portrayed the ballerina Petrova in the film "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (1970). Mark Alberstat reports that the Spence Munros are celebrat- ing their 25th anniversary, and are commemorating the event with a lapel pin. US$3.25 postpaid to North America; $4.65 elsewhere. His address is 5 Lorraine Street, Dartmouth, NS B3A 2B9, Canada; markalberstat@ns.sympatico.ca is his Pay- Pal account. Further to the item (Jul 06 #4) on the campaign to upgrade the protection of Undershaw, the house where Conan Doyle lived from 1897 to 1907, the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport has decided against the proposal. The rejection letter said that "the building lacks the level of special architectural interest which would justify a Grade 1 listing," and that "the integrity of the original design has been compromised," according to the BBC. The Victorian Society, which led the campaign, noted that the department also said that "the writer does not occupy a significant enough position in the nation's consciousness," and "cannot be said to be an auth- or of the standing of...Charles Dickens or Jane Austen." The Victorian So- ciety has appealed, and anyone who wants to object to the decision against the upgrade to Grade 1 listing should write to Tessa Jowell (Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport); her address is: Cockspur Street, Lon- don SW1Y 5DH, 5DH, England . An editorial in The Guardian (Feb. 8) quoted T. S. Eliot (a "recognized ex- pert on national culture long before the Department of Culture was thought of") as having written: "perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mys- teries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence." "If Undershaw cannot be saved on Doyle's account, the paper suggested, "then it should be on Holmes's; whom he alone could have created." Tessa Jowell responded (Feb. 13), writing that it is "an unre- markable late-19th-century domestic house with a later extension and with many of the original internal features long gone," and that the building most closely associated with Holmes is 221B Baker Street, adding that she "would be only too pleased to consider listing that building" should a re- quest be made. Roger Johnson spotted "The Valley of Fear" in Bucks County, which is a far classier part of Pennsylvania than the Vermissa Valley. There's a web-site at . Richard D. Lesh ("The Fatal Battle of Maiwand") died on Feb. 1. Dick was a professor of fine arts at Wayne State Teachers College in Nebraska, and the founder and sparking-plug of The Maiwand Jezails, and he led the society's long campaign to erect a monument to Dr. Watson on the battlefield. He re- ceived his Investiture from The Baker Street Irregulars in 1965, and their Two-Shilling Award in 1990. Feb 07 #3 "How much do I owe for 'borrowing' this book for 42 years and 8 months?" Stephen N. Sampogna wrote to his high school library in Richmond, Va., on Dec. 18. The book was a copy of the Doubleday edition of THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES (1960) that Sampogna had neglected to re- turn to the library when he graduated in 1966. The fines totalled $152.70, according to the librarian, who also noted that Sampogna probably had paid for the lost book in order to graduate, and waived the fines. The book is now displayed in the library, next to his letter and his 1966 yearbook pho- tograph, and a giant sign the reads "It's never too late." THE ANTHONY BOUCHER CHRONICLES: REVIEWS AND COMMENTARY 1942-1947, edited by Francis M. Nevins (Shreveport: Ramble House, 2005; 470 pp., $24.00), is an annotated bibliography of Boucher's reviews and commentary published in the San Francisco Chronicle; he was the author of THE CASE OF THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS (1940), one of the founders of The Scowrers and Mollie Maguires, and a member of the BSI. Nevins has contributed a long and insightful in- troduction, and a detailed index of the authors Boucher wrote about. There is Sherlockian content, of course, and much more. The publisher is at 443 Gladstone Boulevard, Shreveport, LA 71104 . Ramble House also plans to publish two pastiche collections: THE UNIVERSAL SHERLOCK HOLMES, by Richard A. Lupoff, and THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF SHER- LOCK HOLMES, by Gary Lovisi; $30.00 hardback, $18.00 paperback, and $25.00 hand-made). Calvin H. Plimpton died on Feb. 3. He served as president of Amherst Coll- ege from 1960 to 1971, and then as president of the American University of Beirut; he also was a member (as "Mr. Mortimer") of The Five Orange Pips, and his paper on his Canonical namesake was published in The Baker Street Journal in Sept. 1977. Susan Jewell spotted a "charm school" advertisement for Tiffany & Co. in the N.Y. Times (Jan. 24); they say it's a buggy, but it's obviously a hansom cab viewed straight on. Diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires, set in platinum, $1,150 (item 21671738) (800-526- 0649) . It occurs to me that there are more and more URLs in this news- letter, and that more and more of my readers have computers and access to the Internet, where some interesting things can be seen. Such as the first movie of a Pope, at , kindly re- ported by Ann Lewis. The Pope was Gioacchino Pecci, Pope Leo XIII (1878- 1903); it was at his express desire Sherlock Holmes investigated the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca. "This is the real eggshell pottery of the Ming dynasty," Holmes explained (in "The Illustrious Client"). "No finer piece ever passed through Chris- tie's." The most expensive piece of artwork ever sold at auction in Asia is a tiny ceramic bowl, made during the reign of the Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong (1736-1795); it brought L9.8 million at Christie's in Beijing last November, according to an article in The Times (Nov. 29), spotted by John Baesch. The Manchu-led Qing dynasty conquered the Han-led Ming dynasty in 1644 and ruled until 1912. Feb 07 #4 The December issue of the quarterly newsletter of The Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minne- sota has Julie McKuras' discussion of the manuscript of Conan Doyle's story "Billy Bones" (held in the Children's Research Literature Collection), Jens Byskov Jensen's article about Carl Muusmann's pastiche "Sherlock Holmes pa Marienlyst" (published in Danish in 1906 and in English in 1956), Tim John- son's report on the growth of the collections, and much more; copies of the newsletter are available from Richard J. Sveum, (111 Elmer L. Andersen Li- brary, Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455) . The latest issue of Beaten's Christmas Annual is at hand from The Sound of the Baskervilles in Seattle), with scholarship (including Samuel Fry's ar- ticle on "Three Friends: Holmes, Stefansson & Doyle"), quizzes, reviews, a burlesque radio play, and news of the society; copies of the 46-page book- let are available from David Haugen, 3605 Harborcrest Court NW, Gig Harbor, WA 98332; $10.00 postpaid. Ian Richardson died on Feb. 9. He began his acting career in 1958 and was a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960; he was perhaps most famous as Francis Urquhart in "House of Cards" (1990), and for asking for Grey Poupon Dijon mustard in television commercials. He was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1989. Richardson was Sherlock Holmes in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Sign of Four" (1983), and Dr. Joseph Bell in "Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sher- lock Holmes" (2000). Joe Eckrich planned to publish a booklet containing all of the talks given at "Holmes Under the Arch II" in 2005, but reports that he will not be able to complete the project. And due to a water leak and a crashed computer he has only a partial list of those who paid for the booklet; please let him know how many copies you ordered: his address is 914 Oakmoor Drive, Fenton, MO 63026 . A run of the first 80 volumes of The Strand Magazine in publisher's cloth, offered at an eBay auction in January, when the final bid of L1,850 did not meet the reserve, was offered again, this time with no reserve, on Feb. 8, when it sold for L1,673 (not including the shipping costs: the total weight was estimated at 100 kilograms). Single issues of The Strand Magazine can also be interesting: "Royal Edi- tions" (bound in light blue silk over bevelled boards, and on thick paper) were published when the magazine had special articles about Queen Victoria and her family; there were at least three such issues (for Mar. 1891, Dec. 1892, and Nov. 1893). Copies of the latter two issues brought L258.00 each at eBay on Jan. 29. Of course if you're truly interested in The Strand Magazine, you might con- sider a run of the magazine offered by Vincent Brosnan from the collection of Theodore G. Schulz: 100 volumes of the British edition, plus 464 single issues in wrappers; 19 volumes of the U.S. edition, plus 201 single issues in wrappers; and a complete run of The New Strand in single issues, all for $20,000 plus shipping. A colorful brochure is available from Vinnie (1741 1741 Via Allena, Oceanside, CA 92056 (858-630-2013) . Feb 07 #5 The winter issue of The Magic Door (the newsletter published by The Friends of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto Reference Library) has Cliff Goldfarb's report on fragments of an issue of The Strand Magazine found at the site of an excavation in Egypt (abandoned by an archaeologist rather than buried with a pharaoh), and much about the ACD@35 conference held at the library last year. Copies of the newsletter are available from Doug Wrigglesworth (16 Sunset Street, Holland Landing, ON L9N 1H4, Canada) . And for those who want to plan ahead: Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson will present this year's Cameron Hollyer Lecture at the Library on Apr. 14; the lecture will be preceded by the annual general meeting of the Friends, and followed by a Bootmaker Pub Night. Sid Fleischman's THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA, OR PIRATES GALORE (2005) is now available in paperback (New York: HarperCollins/Greenwillow, 2006; 194 pp., $5.99); intended for children ages 10 up, it's a well written and interest- ing story about "the most notorious pirate ship in the Pacific." It's not Sherlockian, although Fleischman does acknowledge his debt to the Sherlock Holmes story for the name of the ship (and its ferocious figurehead). E. J. Wagner, author of THE SCIENCE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (Jun 06 #2), will be one of 12 speakers in a Forensic Science Seminar at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. The lectures are free and open to the public, and she will speak on "Superstition, Science, and Sherlock Holmes: The Development of Forensic Science During the Gaslight Era" on Apr. 13. "Holmes and Watson in pursuit of the Hound" isn't the caption of this illustration, which John Lock- wood found in National Police Gazette (Sept. 15, 1894). It's "Fitzsimmons Begins Training" and it shows him ("the Australian middle-weight") taking "a lively sprint with his trainer" at New Orleans. That's Bob Fitzsimmons, who began his professional career in Australia in 1883, and went on to make boxing history as its first three-division world champion. Don W. Baranowski's SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE ADVENTURE OF THE FRANKENSTEIN MON- STER (West Conshohocken: Infinity Publishing, 2006; 164 pp., $12.95) is the story that Watson told to Mary Godwin when he was courting her, long before he met Mary Morstan (and before she met and married Percy Bysshe Shelley); it was at Watson's request that she left Holmes and Watson out of the story when she wrote her famous novel. There are some problems with chronology, of course: her novel was published in 1818, and she died in 1851. Philip J. Carraher's SHERLOCK HOLMES IN NEW YORK: THE ADVENTURE OF THE NEW YORK RIPPER (West Conshohocken: Infinity Publishing, 2005; 203 pp., $14.95) is the third of his pastiches about Simon Hawkes, the alias Holmes used in disguise in New York during the Great Hiatus; the first of them was SHER- LOCK HOLMES: THE ADVENTURE OF THE DEAD RABBITS SOCIETY (Oct 01 #6). This time Holmes is pitted against a serial killer who may be London's Jack the Ripper. The publisher's web-site is . Feb 07 #6 "All smokers should be prosecuted as nuisances, and the manu- facture and sale of tobacco should be prohibited," George Ber- nard Shaw announced, according to a story in the N.Y. Times (Dec. 5, 1926). Asked to comment on this, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remarked: "Sherlock Holmes would smile at that." Stanford University's Community Reading Project is again publishing Sher- lock Holmes stories by mail and on the Internet in serial facsimile (Dec 06 #1). "The Empty House" (with notes by Mary Eichbauer) is now available at . Randall Stock noted a story in the Wall Street Journal (Feb. 9) about plans to reissue Playboy on six DVDs, one for each decade. The first two decades will be issued in October, accompanied by 200-page books, at $100 each (a lot more than you'll pay now for the magazine's first three issues (all had Sherlockian content). The Playboy disks will be created by the same com- pany that created THE COMPLETE NEW YORKER on eight DVDs (Oct 05 #1). There's an interesting exhibition of "Victorian Bestsellers" at the Pier- pont Morgan Library in New York through May 6; none of Conan Doyle's books are on display, but you can see a copy of Isabella Mary Beeton's THE BOOK OF HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT (1861). Their web-site's at . "Which word or phrases do you most overuse?" was one of the questions posed to Ellen DeGeneres in the "Proust Questionnaire" in the Mar. 2007 issue of Vanity Fair. "I say 'By Jove!' way too much," she replied. "Either I do or Sherlock Holmes does. Whoever it is, it has to stop." How many times does Sherlock Holmes use that oath in the Canon? Is there any other oath he uses more often? Dave Morrill spotted the first issue of THE HELMET OF FATE: DETECTIVE CHIMP (DC Comics, $2.99); it's the first of five-part series, and Detective Chimp is in Sherlockian costume. You can see the cover, and the first six pages, at . Paul Spiring reports a new web-site devoted to Bertram Fletcher Robinson at ; there are plans to publish ON THE TRAIL OF DR. ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: AN ILLUSTRATED DEVON TOUR, by Spiring and Brian Pugh; A CHRO- NOLOGY OF THE LIFE OF BERTRAM FLETCHER ROBINSON, by Spiring and Philip Wel- ler, and monographs on Dr. George Turnavine Budd (by Pugh) and Robinson (by Spiring). Thanks to Joe Coppola for spotting the television film "Written in Blood" (2002). The film stars Michael T. Weiss, Peter Coyote, Maureen Flannigan, and Luke Williams, and was written by David Keith Miller; a serial killer leaves clues taken from the Sherlock Holmes stories. Al Gregory has reported nice news for those who have charged foreign-curr- ency transactions to their credit cards: credit card companies have agreed to pay up to $336 million to people who were charged excessive transaction fees from 1996 to 2006. Needless to say, lawyers will receive a lot of the money. There's a lot more information at , and you can call 800-945-9890 to request a claim form. Feb 07 #7 "The Backyardigans" is a 30-minute animated series broadcast by Nickelodeon cable, and Pablo ("a precocious penguin") is seen in Sherlockian costume in "Whodunit?" (which first aired in 2006 and is re- peated frequently) and in THE MYSTERY OF THE JEWELED EGGS, adapted by Lara Bergen from a teleplay by Janice Burgess (New York: Simon Spotlight, 2007; 24 pp., $3.99). Thanks to Jim Suszynski for spotting the book. The BBC America Shop continues to expand its Sherlockian offers: they now have a framed color reproduction of the poster for John Barrymore's movie "Sherlock Holmes" (1922); item 14003 ($59.98) (Box 681, Holmes, PA 19043) (800-898-4921) . Four Southern Sherlockian societies (in Atlanta, Nashville, Birmingham, and Greenville) will hold their Third Annual Gathering of Southern Sherlockians at the Sheraton Read House in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Apr. 14-15. More in- formation about the event is available from Kent Ross at 6875 Fielder Road, Rex, GA 30273) . Miklos Rozsa's "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra" was written for Jascha Heifetz and premiered by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 1956; it was then used in the score for Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (1970). Now Rozsa expert Nic Raine has reconstructed and orchestrated the score for the film, and it has been recorded by the City of Prague Philhar- monic Orchestra and will be released on Apr. 18, the 100th anniversary of Rosza's birth; an added feature on the CD is more than 20 minutes of music composed for scenes that were cut from the final version of the film. The special pre-release price of the CD "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (Tadlow 004) is L12.95 postpaid (world-wide); Tadlow Music (57 High Street, Tadlow, Royston, Herts. SG8 0EU, England) . The next gathering of The Sherlock Holmes and All That Jazz Society will be held on May 6, as part of the West End Jazz Band's 6th Annual Hudson Lake Train Trip Concert and Buffet; Hudson Lake is an easy train ride from Chi- cago; more information is available from Donald B. Izban (1012 Rene Court, Park Ridge, IL 60068) (874-292-1270). You can hear samples of the band's music at their web-site . The International Guild of Miniature Artisans held its annual show at the Marriott Marquis in New York in February, and one of the dealers was Ferenc J. Albert (449 Capri Court, Marco Island, FL 34145) (239-642-2357); he spe- cializes in handblown glass miniatures, and offers an attractive one-inch scale (that's 1 inch = 1 foot) tantalus; $132.00. Greg Darak reports that the 1991 television films "Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady" and "Sherlock Holmes: Incident at Victoria Falls" (starring Christopher Lee and Patrick Macnee) are now available in two-disk DVD sets from Madacy Home Video ($14.98 each). The February issue of Classic Images has a full-color cover photograph of a six-sheet (81" x 81") poster for "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" (1939) that will be sold at auction on Mar. 31 by Heritage Auction Galleries (3500 Maple Avenue, 17th floor, Dallas, TX 75219) (800-872-6467) ; it is the first known copy of the poster, estimated at $10,000-15,000. Feb 07 #8 FACTION PARADOX: ERASING SHERLOCK, by Kelly Hale (Des Moines: Mad Norwegian Press, 2006; 187 pp., $17.95), is the last novel in a series "based on the spin-off range as created by Lawrence Miles," who invented the Faction Paradox cult in his "Doctor Who" novels; it's set in 1882, and "Rose Donnelly, maid-of-all-work, disguises herself as a boy in order to follow the callow, yet brilliantly determined Sherlock Holmes in his pursuit of a thief." Rose is a time-traveller, and there's consider- able sex and violence (the book's not for the faint-hearted). There's much more about the Faction Paradox series at . That's a mug shot of Gene Morrison, who conned British courts for almost 26 years, falsely claiming to be a forensic inves- tigator and testifying for the prosecution in 700 court cases. Morrison described himself as "Sherlock Holmes" and was paid at least L250,000 for giving evidence from the witness box and writing reports he based on cut-and-paste information from the Internet. His qualifications included three advanced degrees he bought at . And he received a five-year sentence for his deception. is the URL for the web-site of Peter Hartung, a Danish dealer who is selling original artwork from Nis Jessen's spectacular edition of A STUDY IN SCARLET (Jul 05 #6); he also offers copies of the signed and numbered special edition of the book. Derek Waring died on Feb. 19. He began his acting career on stage and con- tinuing in films and on television; he played Henri Fournay in "The Second Stain" in the Peter Cushing series on BBC-1 (1968), and Dr. Watson in Les- lie Bricusse's "Sherlock Holmes: The Musical" in Exeter (1988) and London (1989). Sorry about that: the CBE mentioned in the report on the Queen's New Years' honours list (Jan 07 #3) is the abbreviation for Commander of the Most Ex- cellent Order of the British Empire. The Serpentine Muse, published by The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, now has an annual award: the WHIMSEY [Whimsy Is My Specialty, Enjoy Yourself] award for the most whimsical piece published in the preceding volume. The award was established by Al Gregory in memory of his wife Jan Stauber, and this year's winner was Regina Stinson, who received a Canonical check for $221.17 during a ceremony at the William Gillette Luncheon in January. There has been considerable publicity recently about scanning books to make them available on the Internet: Google and Microsoft and other archives are working on such projects, and Sandy Kozinn notes that John Kendrick Bangs' amusing R. HOLMES & CO.: BEING THE REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF RAFFLES HOLMES, ESQ., DETECTIVE AND AMATEUR CRACKSMAN BY BIRTH can be read page-by-page at . It's an interesting site: with a little exploration you can find books by Conan Doyle, plays by Will- iam Gillette, John Dickson Carr's biography of Conan Doyle. The Spermaceti Press: Peter E. Blau, 7103 Endicott Court, Bethesda, MD 20817-4401 (301-229-5669) Mar 07 #1 Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press The Practical, But Limited, Geologists will honor the world's first foren- sic geologist at dinner on Wednesday, Apr. 4, at George's Greek Cafe (318 Pine Street in Long Beach, Calif., during the annual meeting of the Ameri- can Association of Petroleum Geologists; drinks at 7:00 and dinner at 8:00. Come one, come all, as they say, and watch geologists and Sherlockians try not to confuse each other. Dinner will cost $27.00 per person, and there will be a cash bar (beer and wine). Please let me know if you're going to attend my e-mail address is . An on-line poll at asking people in the United King- dom and Ireland to name "the books the nation cannot live without" wound up with Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in first place. THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES was 89th, behind Mitch Alborn's THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN and ahead of Enid Blyton's THE FARAWAY TREE. Further to the report on the manuscript of "The Illustrious Client" (Jul 06 #3), formerly owned by Dame Jean Conan Doyle and now by the National Libra- ry of Scotland in Edinburgh, the winter 2006 issue of Discover NLS has Owen Dudley Edwards' interesting four-page article about the manuscript, and the story (which had an alternative title: "The Adventure of the Blue Saucer"). The postal address is George IV Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1EW, Scotland, United Kingdom, and is the URL for the issue. "The Secret of Sherlock Holmes" (the play that Jeremy Paul wrote for Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke) will be performed by Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., Sept. 28 to Oct. 28, with Michael Hammond as Holmes and Dave Demke as Watson; the theater address is 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA 01240 (413-637-1199) . SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE GRAND HORIZONTALS, by Frank J. Morlock (Encino: Black Coat Press, 2006; 223 pp. $20.95), is a collection of seven plays that in- volve Holmes with French courtesans and Fantomas, Father Brown, Police Com-missioner Theodore Roosevelt, and Count Dracula (not all in the same play, of course). Further to the item "Smoking Ban Will Leave Theatre World Fuming" (Jan 06 #3) about a ban on smoking by actors working in film, television, and the- ater in Scotland, the ban was of some interest to the producers of a BBC-4 program that aired on Mar. 1. "Reichenbach Falls" (based on a story by Ian Rankin) starred Alec Newman as Jim Buchan (a younger and more modern ver- sion of Rankin's John Rebus) and Richard Wilson as Arthur Conan Doyle; ac- cording to a report by Hugo Rifkind in The Times (Feb. 21), Newman's ciga- rettes were emptied out and filled with jasmine incense; "He never actually takes a drag," said a producer, "He can't." Noted by Karen Murdock: The Chess Store (20811 NW Cornell Road #200, Hills- boro, OR 97124) (888-810-2437) offers two Sherlockian chess sets: a hand- decorated set with board ($429.00) and a different brown-and-ivory antiqued-finish set without board ($199.95) . Mar 07 #2 The publisher of Andrew Lycett's new biography CONAN DOYLE: THE MAN WHO CREATED SHERLOCK HOLMES, due from Weidenfeld & Nicolson in August (416 pp., L20.00), has started publicizing the book at their web-site . The American edition is due from Free Press in November, and you can pre-order the book at and . Lycett also has written bio-graphies of Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, and Dylan Thomas. The new issue of the Sherlockian E-Times is at hand from Joel and Carolyn Senter (Classic Specialties) with news from various societies, and offers of Sherlockian merchandise (including an attractive new necktie); the URL is , and you can request an e-mail subscription at . David Stuart Davies reports that SHERLOCK is closing. Despite David's fine editing and the magazine's interesting content, the publisher wasn't able to find enough paying readers. But David won't be bored: he is now editing a "Mystery & Supernatural" series for Wordsworth Editions, and nine books are planned for 2008, including a collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories by modern authors. Steve Hockensmith's amusing Amlingmeyers pastiche "Wolves in Winter" (pub- lished in the Feb. 2006 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) was tied for sixth place in the magazine's "Readers Award" poll. Variety has reported (Mar. 15) that Warner Bros. will "reimagine Sherlock Holmes as an action-adventure sleuth" in a film to be based on Lionel Wig- ram's unpublished Sherlock Holmes comic book; Wigram, formerly a creative executive at Warner, oversaw the first three "Harry Potter" films, and his "vision has Holmes losing some of his Victorian stuffiness and being more adventuresome, including playing up his skills as a bare-knuckle boxer and expert swordsman as he goes about solving crime." Wigram "intends to play up parts of the detective's character that have been largely overlooked" in previous adaptations of Conan Doyle's books for other media. This likely is the same film reported on by the Daily Express in a story on Mar. 22 that noted "Hollywood insiders" saying that Russell Crowe is "lined up" to play Holmes. The story also says that Clive Owen is a contender for the role. Of course one should be skeptical of such pre-production gossip. The latest issue of the August Derleth Society Newsletter has an intriguing cover: a black-and-white reproduction of the Dec. 1970 issue of the comic book CONAN THE BARBARIAN. And with good reason: that issue included a let- ter from Derleth praising the artwork of Roy Thomas, who drew Conan. There also is a review of the latest book from Arkham House: EVERMORE, edited by James Robert Smith and Stephen Mark Rainey (2006; 237 pages, $34.95), with 15 essay about Edgar Allan Poe, one of them ("An Author and His Character") by Vincent Starrett. Their web-site is at . The Der- leth society also has a web-site at ; membership includes the newsletter and costs $15.00 a year (Box 481, Sauk City, WI 53583. Aug- ust Derleth is best known to Sherlockians for his stories about Solar Pons; he was also a friend of and literary executor for H. P. Lovecraft, a poet, and a prolific writer in horror and other genres. Mar 07 #3 Further to the item (Feb 07 #1) about the sale of costumes at Bonhams on Mar. 6, Jeremy Brett's black Victorian-style cape/ coat (estimated at L2,000-2,500) sold for L1,900 (plus Bonhams' 20% prem-ium); his gray dressing gown (L1,000-1,200) sold for L1,600; and Christo-pher Lee's khaki linen shirt (L100-140) sold for L160. The sale highlight was the cloak Alec Guinness wore as Obi Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars" (1977), which sold for L54,000. Liberation Entertainment plans to release 60-minute animations of the four long stories on DVDs in May ($9.95 each); these are the animations produced by Burbank Films in Australia and released on videocassette in 1984; Peter O'Toole provided the voice of Sherlock Holmes. You can see samples of the films at . Dr. William R. Hanson offers a Sherlock- ian FDC for "A Study in Scarlet" with a cachet showing a view of Salt Lake City from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Apr. 1893), and his painting of the Hope party fleeing Salt Lake City. $10.00 postpaid (to the U.S. and Canada) or $11.00 (else- where); his address is 78 West Notre Dame Street, Glens Falls, NY 12801. The 27th annual Sherlock Holmes/Arthur Conan Doyle Symposium will be held in Miamisburg, Ohio, on March 7-9, 2008; Cathy Gill (4661 Hamilton Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45223) (513-681-5507) maintains the mailing list. Adam Hime's catalogs are always interesting, not only for the descriptions but also for what he has to offer. Catalog 34 is available at his web-site at with (among other treasures) manuscripts of "Lady Frances Carfax" ($500,000) and "His Last Bow" ($375,000). They're still on offer in catalog 35, along with a Sidney Paget portrait of Holmes ($60,000) and a copy of the first book edition of "A Study in Scarlet" ($265,000). Reported: Michael Quinion's GALLIMAUFRY: A HODGE-PODGE OF WORDS VANISHING FROM OUR VOCABULARY (Oxford University Press, 2006; L12.99/$25.00); accord-ing to Dot Wordsworth's interesting review in The Spectator (Oct. 7) it has a section on carriages, "and takes as his guide Conan Doyle, since Holmes was forever clattering around in one." Quinion appears to be an author for people interested in language; he also has written BALLYHOO, BUCKAROO, AND SPUDS: INGENIOUS TALES OF WORDS AND THEIR ORIGINS and PORT OUTBOARD, STAR-BOARD HOME: AND OTHER LANGUAGE MYTHS It has been a while since I have mentioned The Sherlock Holmes Collections web-site at ; it's a fine example of how useful on-line resources can be. It offers Ron De Waal's bibliography "The Universal Sherlock Holmes", seven supplements prepared by Tim Johnson, information about the collections, finding aids, exhibition catalogs, links to other important Sherlockian and Doylean web-sites and to a brochure for the "Victorian Secrets and Edwardian Enigmas" conference scheduled in Minn- eapolis on July 6-8, and much more. Mar 07 #4 When biographical questionnaires were mailed to living members of the Baker Street Irregulars this month, a cover letter from Julie McKuras and Sue Vizoskie was omitted. The questionnaire is available from them by e-mail and answers can be submitted by e-mail; they also have prepared a questionnaire relating to deceased Irregulars that you can re- quest from Julie or Sue. They hope that friends and family will be able to provide information and memories about those who are "beyond the Reichen- bach. If you have obituaries of deceased Irregulars, Julie and Sue would appreciate copies of those as well. Julie McKuras' address is 13512 Grana- da Avenue, Apple Valley, MN 55124 ; Sue Vizoskie's is 90 Ralph Avenue, White Plains, NY 10606 . "Professor Moriarty's is for sale" (Apr 06 #1), and it now has been sold. Dale Easter opened the restaurant in Saratoga Springs (N.Y.) in 1984, and decided it was time to retire. According to a story in the Saratogian on Mar. 19 (at hand from Ken Lanza), the new owner is Jeff Ames, who plans to change the name of the restaurant to Cantina, and the menu to California- style Mexican cuisine. "It is a bust to Longfellow, the American," Frank Cross told his wife Maude, "I believe he is more read than any poet in England." Frank and Maude discovered the bust in Westminster Abbey, A DUET: WITH AN OCCASIONAL CHORUS, and were careful to read the inscription: "This bust was placed among the memorials of the poets of England by English admirers of an American poet." A new stamp in our "Literary Arts" series honors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) and one his more famous poems, "Paul Re- vere's Ride". Roger Johnson notes in the March issue of The District Messenger that Red- field Arts is "in pre-production" on a film called "The Crimes of Sherlock Holmes" (it's to be the first of the series); the company's web-site is at , but they offer no information on script-writers or cast or credits or a date for beginning of filming. He also reports that YouTube has five minutes of video of Roger Llewellyn in excerpts from his one-man play "Sherlock Holmes - The Last Act!". The District Messenger is available at as well as by mail, and it's full of news from Great Britain and elsewhere in the Sherlockian and Doylean world. Emory Lee has reported an EasyRead edition of THE VALLEY OF FEAR (244 pp., $13.99) from , and from ; the com- pany publishes redesigned large-print editions of public-domain books. Freddie Francis died on Mar. 17. He began his film career as a clapper boy at Elstree Studio, and became a prolific cinematographer and director; he directed "The Deadly Bees" (1967), from Robert Bloch's screenplay based on H. F. Heard's novel A TASTE FOR HONEY (Heard's "Mr. Mycroft" was in Block's script but not in the film; according to Bloch, the script was revised by Anthony Marriott, who took vast liberties with Bloch's adaptation, and he had never seen his "deformed offspring"). Francis also directed "The Case of Harry Crocker" and "The Case of the Deadly Prophecy" in the Sheldon Rey- nolds television series "Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson" (1980). Mar 07 #5 A new biography of Harry Houdini has received considerable at- tention in the media after its authors announced that they are planning to exhume Houdini's body in hopes of determining whether the mag- ician had been murdered. THE SECRET LIFE OF HOUDINI: THE MAKING OF AMERI- CA'S FIRST SUPERHERO, by William Kalush and Larry Sloman (New York: Atria Books, 2006; 592 pp., $29.95), raises the possibility of murder, and sug- gests that Conan Doyle may have been involved, and of course that has been mentioned prominently in many of the news stories and reviews, which cer- tainly reminds one of the continuing campaign to exhume B. Fletcher Robin- son's body. The Houdini story ran on the Associated Press and Reuters wires, and it was picked up by newspapers and magazines and television stations all over the world (you only need to run a Google search), and of course there were many stories that Google didn't report, including an excellent (and amusing) de- bunking article by David Segal in the Washington Post on Mar. 24 (which may still be available on-line). One of the experts involved in the exhumation plans is James E. Starrs, who edited the anthology THE NOISELESS TENOR: THE BICYCLE IN LITERATURE (Apr 96 #4), which includes "The Priory School", two excerpts from Christopher Mor- ley, and a splendid Foreword by William Saroyan. He's also well known for forensic investigations of questions such as whether Alferd Packer dined on the party he was supposed to be guiding through the mountains (Starrs dug up the victims, and concluded that they had indeed been murdered, and quite likely butchered). Getting back to the book, which suggests that when Houdini's first visited London and met with William Melville (who then headed Scotland Yard's Spec- cial Brach), Melville enlisted Houdini as a spy; Melville went on to head the British intelligence operation that became MI-5. And the book raises the possibility that Houdini's death was not accidental, but rather delib- erate murder by a spiritualist organization that sought revenge for his un- masking of fraudulent mediums. The Washington Post article notes that the current publicity given to the plans for an exhumation does seem carefully timed to revive lagging sales of the book. Bob Byrne, who has an interesting web-site at , has launched an electronic newsletter: Baker Street Essays discusses the cases and their illustrations, and the first issue (16 pages, with colorful art- work) is available at the web-site. is the URL for an interesting video compiled by Jeremy Holstein, using photographs and artwork showing William Gillette as visual accompaniment to the audio recording he made in 1936 of scenes from his play. It's the complete recording (rather than the shorter version issued on various records); you can click on "Part 1" and "Part 2" to hear the complete recording. The original recording was made by Harvard professor Frederick Clifton Packard at his home near Boston; Packard read Watson's lines and his wife Alice was Alice Faulkner. Packard went on to found the Harvard Vocarium, which in 2003 was named by the Library of Con- gress to the National Recording Registry, which is intended to "celebrate the richness and variety of our audio legacy." Mar 07 #6 Yuichi Hirayama offers JAPAN AND SHERLOCK HOLMES (Jan 05) for those who like signatures: the copies are signed by all three editors and seven of the contributors. The book launched the Baker Street Irregulars' International Series, which makes available in English some of the fine Sherlockian scholarship published in other languages. The price is $49.95 postpaid (checks for US dollars, and currency for pounds and eu- ros, please); 2-10-12 Kamirenjaku, Mitaka-shi, Tokyo 181-0012, Japan); the number of signed copies is limited, so you might want to use e-mail to ask him if copies still are available . The Lambda Literary Foundation, which celebrates LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisex- ual, and Transgender] literature, reports that Laurie R. King's THE ART OF DETECTION is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award (Lesbian Mystery). The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in New York on Mar. 31. Tim Kline's THE GAME OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: A COMPREHENSIVE COLLECTOR'S GUIDE is the result of a decade of collecting, and it covers more than 150 games of all sorts, ranging from the card game issued by Parker Bros. in 1904 to current computer games, with stops along the way for board games, finger- print kits, and chess sets; there are photographs (almost all in color) of all the games, and identifications of the publishers. The 40-page booklet costs $30.00 postpaid from Tim (1880 Marsh Lane #1608, Dallas, TX 75287). And Tim has started The Game Masters, a society for collectors of Sherlock- ian games; e-mail at . Geocaching is a modern version of the 150-year-old letterboxing, which is a kind of treasure-hunt for those who don't care if the treasure is valuable; geocachers use Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to find the caches. Geocoins were created in 2001; each coin has a unique number, and thus can be tracked from one person to another on the Internet, similar to the doll- ar bills you may have seen with rubber stamps telling you to go to the web- site . Tim Kline reports a Sherlockian geocoin off- ered by Star-Beam Enterprises ($19.99) at eBay; these are collectibles, of course, and unlikely to turn up in a geocache. "Who is chicsherlock? She is driven by wanderlust, an adventurous spirit that leads her hunting for the elusive." (spotted by John Baesch) is a web-site offering designer jewelry (and only the name is Sherlockian). Something recent about an older film: "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (1970). According to Maurice Zolotow, in BILLY WILDER IN HOLLYWOOD (1977), In 1963, after the success of "Irma La Douce", Wilder proposed a Technicol- or musical with starring Peter O'Toole as Holmes and Peter Sellers as Wat- son, but was unable to proceed with the project. This month entertainment wires reported that O'Toole, now 75 years old, said that "jealousies, un- certainties, and sexual confusion are not merely the domain of the young," adding that "You can't trust anybody. Billy Wilder once asked me to play Sherlock Holmes without reading the script. He told me I just had to trust him. I said, 'Even if you were Shakespeare, I still wouldn't trust you.'" The Spermaceti Press: Peter E. Blau, 7103 Endicott Court, Bethesda, MD 20817-4401 (301-229-5669) Apr 07 #1 Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press Ely M. Liebow ("Inspector Gregory") died on Mar. 30. He taught literature at Northeastern Illinois University for more than 40 years, and was famous (or perhaps notorious) for his deadpan humor; his autobiography at his NEIU web-site notes that "I was born at the age of 12 in a body-and-fender shop just this side of the village of Yehupitz. I was handed over (for two sub- machine guns) to Portuguese sailors seeking a new trade route to Chicago." He was a member of The Hounds of the Baskerville [sic] and many other Sher- lockian societies in and near Chicago, and he received his Investiture from The Baker Street Irregulars in 1979 and their Two-Shilling Award in 1991. His excellent biography DR. JOE BELL: MODEL FOR SHERLOCK HOLMES (1982) has been reprinted by the University of Wisconsin Press (286 pp., $26.95), and you can listen to an excellent memorial to Ely on the Internet at Wisconsin Public Radio's : a one-hour interview with Ely recorded shortly before his death. The May issue of Miniature Collector Magazine has a well illustrated arti- cle by Mary Lou Santovec about miniatures created by Janice Brooks, includ- ing her replica of the sitting-room at 221B Baker Street (30595 Eight Mile, Livonia, MI 48152 $5.99). Further to the item (Mar 07 #2) about Hollywood pre-production gossip that Russell Crowe is "lined up" to play Holmes in an action-adventure film from Warner Bros., many web-sites later reported that the producers had instead chosen Nicholas Rowe, who starred in "Young Sherlock Holmes" (1985), as the lead. The story was launched by Scott Monty, and appeared on Apr. 1 in his blog at ; it was quickly picked up and repeated by people who didn't bother to click on the "Background info" link that brings you to the Museum of Hoaxes list of "The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time". Scott Monty's report about Nicholas Rowe wasn't the only April Fool's Day hoax on the Internet, of course; Dan Baines' announcement that he had found the remains of a mummified fairy while walking his dog in rural Derbyshire received considerable publicity, some of which mentioned Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley fairies. Baines quickly acknowledged the hoax and put the fairy up for auction on eBay, where it was sold for œ280. You can see photographs of the fairy at . Marsha Pollak reports that Google now offers a news archive search that ex- plores historical newspaper and magazine archives (some of the pay-per-view and some of them free) at . There are about 26,500 hits for "conan doyle" and about 79,000 for "sherlock holmes". ON THE WRONG TRACK, by Steve Hockensmith (New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2007; 292 pp., $23.95), is the second in his series about Old Red and Big Red Amlingmeyer, Montana cowboys who enjoy the Sherlock Holmes stories as they appear in the 1890s, and attempt to solve mysteries on their own; the novel has lots of action, humor, and red herrings. There's a third novel in the works, and perhaps more short stories (three have appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine), and there are amusing samples of Hockensmith's work at his web-site at . Apr 07 #2 It has been some time since I asked (Mar 01 #4) about Investi- tured members of The Baker Street Irregulars who have appeared in films, and there have been quite a few added to the list (which now in- cludes both films and television): Curtis Armstrong, Elmer Davis, Al Greg- ory, Jerry Margolin, John Pforr, Donald Pollock, H. C. Potter, Mary Ellen Rich, Philip Shreffler, Richard B. Shull, Jean Upton, Bill Ward, and (poss- ibly) Julian Wolff. Julie McKuras has found one more: Evan Wilson, who ap- peared (as himself) in the British television series "Palestine" (produced by Thames Television and broadcast on ITV in 1978). The new CD "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (Feb 07 #7) is delightful, offering a reconstruction of the score, including scenes cut from the final version of the film. Ken Lanza notes that you can see video of a rehearsal at , and you can hear some of the tracks from the CD at . Ken also found the Mikl¢s R¢zsa Society at . There have been various reports on the Internet about Hercules, the world's biggest dog, according to the Guinness World Records; he's a three-year-old English mastiff who weighs 282 pounds and has a 38-inch neck, and he would certainly make a fine Hound of the Baskervilles. But of course there's a problem: just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's true, and Hercules appears to be a hoax. The Urban Legends web- site at shows a photograph of Hercules and debunks the story, and the Guinness World Records web-site has no mention of a world's biggest dog. Apr 07 #3 The Russian statue honoring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (Nov 06 #7) was to be unveiled on Apr. 27, coinciding with an inter- national festival of crime movies, according to the Russian news agency No- vosti; their dispatch noted that the statue "could bring a welcome change to Moscow's sculptural landscape, which is dominated by formal monuments to statesmen, often with a controversial legacy." Further to the report (Feb 07 #7) on the six-sheet poster for "The Adven- tures of Sherlock Holmes" (1939) at auction at Heritage Auction Galleries last month): it is the first known copy of the poster, and there were five bidders, and it sold for $31,070 (including the buyer's premium). You can see an image at . Ken Lanza spotted Indy Magnoli's "Magnoli Collection of Prop Replicas" on the Internet ; two of replicas on display are the pass- port Sherlock Holmes used in his travels in five of Universal's Rathbone/ Bruce films in the 1940s, and the original document recounting the curse of the Baskervilles. Michael Dibdin died on Mar. 30. His first mystery novel was the pastiche THE LAST SHERLOCK HOLMES STORY (1978), and he went on to win a Gold Dagger Award from the Crime Writers' Association in 1988 for RATKING, the first of his series about Italian detective Aurelio Zen. Further to the report on the Peepolykus touring production of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (Jan 07 #4), the three-man company has received rave re- views, and they'll open at the Duchess Theatre in London on Apr. 16 for a ten-week run. Their web-site is at ; you can click on "more show info" to hear a four-minute segment about the show from the BBC Radio 4 program "Today". According to the Daily Telegraph's review, "Only the most po-faced Conan Doyle enthusiast will fail to enjoy this wonderful- ly barking spoof." Reported: A READING DIARY: A PASSIONATE READER'S REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR OF BOOKS, by Alberto Manguel (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004; 205 pp., $22.00); with commentary on "The Sign of Four" as one of his books-of-the- month. The manuscript of "The Adventure of the Three Gables" will be sold at auc- tion at Sotheby's in New York on June 21. Previously owned by the Marquess of Donegall and then by Walter Pond, the 31-page manuscript has more than a hundred revisions by Conan Doyle, and is signed and bound in vellum. Soth- eby's estimate is $350,000-$500,000. Walter Pond's Beeton's Christmas Ann- ual for 1887 (a complete copy, with some repairs and restoration) will also be in the sale, estimated at $75,000-$125,000. The spring issue of the Tonga Times (published by the Mini-Tonga Scion So- ciety) has an excellent article about Ted Bergman's miniature of 221B Baker Street (with many photographs of the miniatures that fill five rooms), and other news from the world of Sherlockian miniatures. The newsletter costs $11.00 for three issues/$12.00 to Canada/$14.00 elsewhere) from Jay Pearl- man (1656 East 19th Street #2-E, Brooklyn, NY 11229), and the society has a fine web-site at . Apr 07 #4 Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the murder of Lord Westerbrook (in Russian) in an amusing 18-minute animation that was written and directed by Alexander Bubnov and released in 2005; it's now available on the Internet at YouTube, but the best place to view it is at Scott Monty's blog at , where you'll find links to the video (subtitled in English), the Russian script, and some preliminary artwork. Scott notes that according to YouTube, the film won the Best Dra- maturgy Award and the third-best rating at the Open Russian Festival of An- imated Film in 2006; the Mehr News Agency reported (Mar. 2), the awards at the 5th Tehran International Animation Festival included an honorary diplo- ma for the film. Bob Clark died on Apr. 4. Best known as the director of the adolescent sex comedy "Porky's" (1982) and the holiday-favorite adaptation of Jean Shep- herd's "A Christmas Story" (1983), he began his film career as an assistant director on 1967 and went on to produce "Murder by Decree" (1979). Francine Kitts notes that the "Solomon/Ex-Lambert" Stradivarius violin went to auction at Christie's in New York on Apr. 2; it sold for $2,732,000 (in- cluding the buyer's premium), rather less than the $3,544,000 someone paid for the "Hammer" Stradivarius last year (May 06 #8). Sherlock Holmes said that he paid 55 shillings for his Stradivarius. This year's Canonical Convocation and Caper will take place in Door County, Wis., on Sept. 28-30; there's a web-site at , or you can request additional information from Jane Richardson, 3427 East Exchange Street, Crete, IL 60417 (708-672-4303). There's a bit more to the report (Mar 07 #5) that plans are afoot to exhume Harry Houdini's body in hopes of determining whether the magician had been murdered. Houdini's grandnephew George Hardeen was in favor of the exhuma- tion but a few days later the Associated Press reported that Bess Houdini's grandnephews John and Jeffrey Blood have objected, saying that "the family believes this is likely being done to promote sales" of the book by William Kalush and Larry Sloman. THE EMPRESS OF INDIA, by Michael Kurland (New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2006; 310 pp., $24.95), is the fourth in his series about Professor Moriar- ty, and it's well done indeed (as are the first three: THE INFERNAL DEVICE, DEATH BY GASLIGHT, and THE GREAT GAME); in this one, Holmes is hired by the Bank of England to protect a shipment of gold en route to Britain from In- dia and almost immediately disappears, leaving the story to Moriarty (who is of course suspected of doing away with Holmes). Moriarty and Moran wind up on the same ship with the gold, and a nice assortment of intriguing sup- porting characters, and adventures and surprises. Kurland's web-site is at . is the URL for another example of how interesting digital collections can be. "Stud- ies in Scarlet" (reported by Les Moskowitz) offers images of full text of more than 420 trial narratives, with "a number of trials of the wealthy and renowned," as well as a verbatim account of the trial of William Palmer in 1856 (Sherlock Holmes mentions Palmer in "The Speckled Band"). Apr 07 #5 "The courts have decided that almost any act of license--from a scurrilous biography to filmed close-ups of writhing genitalia --is just what the Founding Fathers had in mind to defend when they wrote the First Amendment to the Constitution." That was written forty years ago by Alistair Cooke, in his foreword to SIX MEN (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); it's an excellent book, by a skilled writer, with biographical ess- ays on Charles Chaplin, Edward VIII, H. L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson, Ber- trand Russell, and Humphrey Bogart, all of whom Cooke met during his long career as a journalist. And there's comment on Sherlock Holmes, although not where one might expect it; a few years later Cooke was quoted as saying that "The three most memorable men of the twentieth century so far are Win- ston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and Sherlock Holmes" (Aug 85 #1), but that's not the point Cooke makes in SIX MEN: the two-page discussion of Holmes is in the chapter on Bogart. "It is no accident that Bogart can now be seen as a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes as are most fictional detectives invented since Conan Doyle, in a moment of unconscious social perception, cast the original mold." I mentioned (Feb 99 #5) but never got round to reviewing VISITORS FROM OZ: THE WILD ADVENTURES OF DOROTHY, THE SCARECROW, AND THE TIN WOODMAN, by Mar- tin Gardner (St. Martin's Press, 1998/St. Martin's Griffin, 2000); the in- trepid trio journey through Oz (where they are assisted by Sheerluck Brown, a private-detective bear who wears a deerstalker) and an alternate-universe Wonderland to New York. Gardner does a fine job of capturing the style and humor of L. Frank Baum. Both editions are out of print, but readily avail- able from Internet booksellers; don't confuse this book with THE VISITORS FROM OZ, by L. Frank Baum (Hungry Tiger Press, 2005), which is a reprint of Baum's "Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz" with additional mat- erial that includes new illustrations by Eric Shanower. Further to the report on Mary Russell's MySpace profile (Jan 07 #5), Laurie R. King notes on her blog that Mary now has her own blog , on which she has some acerbic comments about her literary agent. Iwao Takamoto died on Jan. 10. Takamoto learned to draw in an internment camp, and after World War II went on to a long career in animation with Walt Disney and with Hanna-Barbera, where he created Scooby-Doo in 1969. Scooby-Doo has been seen in Sherlockian costume, on televi- sion in "The Hound of the Scoobyvilles" (1983) and on boxes of Nestle Scooby Doo Mystery Pops (in grocery stores now). The author's given name and the title of Kinky Friedman's SPANKING WATSON (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999; 218 pp., $23.00) might lead one to sus- pect that something truly interesting is going on, but that's not the case: the Kingster merely sets his Village Irregulars competing against each oth- er to determine who's really Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. Of course it's Ratso who has been Friedman's Watson throughout the mystery series, and we have heard of Ratso before: his real name is Larry Sloman, who is a friend of Friedman and co-author with William Kalush of THE SECRET LIFE OF HOUDINI (Mar 07 #5 and Apr 07 #4). Apr 07 #6 Laurie R. King's speech on "Meeting Mister Holmes" (presented during the January birthday festivities) has been published in the spring issue of The Baker Street Journal, which also has Sonia Fether- ston's entertaining examination of high fashion in the Canon. The BSJ is published quarterly and costs $26.50 a year (or $29.00 foreign), and checks (credit-card payments accepted from foreign subscribers) should be sent to the BSJ (Box 465, Hanover, PA 17331). There's an option offering subscrip- tions to the BSJ and to the Christmas Annual for $36.50 ($40.00 foreign); the BSJ's web-site also accepts subscriptions, and offers additional material, including papers written by past winners of the Morley-Montgomery Awards, articles from recent issues, and information about Baker Street Irregulars publications. Sorry about that: Charles Prepolec has reported that the Dec. 1970 issue of the comic book CONAN THE BARBARIAN (Mar 07 #2) was written by Roy Thomas, and that the artist likely was Barry Windsor Smith. Johnny Hart died on Apr. 7. He created the comic strip "B.C." in 1958, and achieved syndication in more than 1,300 papers. He also was co-creator of the comic strip "The Wizard of Id" with Brant Parker, and recognized by the National Cartoonist Society five times, including the Reuben Award as car- toonist of the year in 1968. This "B.C." strip appeared on June 22, 1982. Brant Parker died on Apr. 15. He created the widely-syndicated comic strip "The Wizard of Id" with Johnny Hart in 1964, and collaborated with others on the strips "Crock" and "Goosemeyer". He won seven awards from the Na- tional Cartoonists Society, including their Reuben Award in 1984 and their Elzie Segar Award in 1986. This "Crock" strip ran on Feb. 6, 1981. The Spermaceti Press: Peter E. Blau, 7103 Endicott Court, Bethesda, MD 20817-4401 (301-229-5669) May 07 #1 Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press William Safire's column "On Language" in the N.Y. Times Magazine is enter- taining and instructive, and occasionally Sherlockian or Doylean. On Apr. 22 he discussed the word "varmint" and cited various usages, including its appearance "in a 1907 A. Conan Doyle story as an adjective: 'thin, ascetic, varminty'." So: whom did he describe as varminty? Further to the report (Jan 07 #3) about the copy of Conan Doyle's THE GREEN FLAG AND OTHER STORIES OF WAR AND SPORT brought to the Antarctic by Capt. Robert Falcon Scott (and it's still there, preserved in the small hut from which he launched his ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole), the July issue of British Heritage has photographs of the hut, including one showing a visit by Princess Anne in 2003, when she launched a L10 million preserva- tion appeal. It has been quite a while since I mentioned London Walks (Jul 83 #1); they are still in business, now with the name the Original London Walks, and a web-site at ; they offer some interesting Sherlockian walks, and Ripper expert Donald Rumbelow leading a walk through "Jack the Ripper's Haunts". "The Fat Hound of the Baskervilles" was the head- line on a story in the [London] Daily Mail (Apr. 10, 2006). "As spaniels go," the paper reported, "he is hardly a springer. In fact, weighing near- ly seven stones [that's 98 pounds], Ashley is at best a sloucher. Given his girth, walkies can be only a short waddle for the dog whose life was in danger after he was fed huge amounts of sausages, bacon, and roast dinners." Eight-year-old Ashley has been rescued by Brenda Baskerville, who runs a dog-grooming shop in Cheshire and has limited Ashley to a strict diet: low-fat dog food and no treats between meals. There were many Sherlockian nominees for Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America (Jan 07 #5); the awards were announced at the MWA annual dinner on Apr. 26. E. J. Wagner's THE SCIENCE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: FROM BASKERVILLE HALL TO THE VALLEY OF FEAR won for best critical/biographical, and Steven Dietz's "Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure" won for best play. The nom- inees and winners are listed at the MWA web-site . Cicada is an interesting magazine for ages 14 and up; the November-December 2006 issue has "The Blue Carbuncle" with attractive black-and-white illus- trations by David Wyatt. $9.95 postpaid; Box 9304, La Salle, IN 61301. "Can Sherlock Holmes Restore the Reputation of Our Bungling Spies?" was the headline on a story in the Evening Standard (Apr. 14), spotted by Jon Lell- enberg. Officers from MI5 and MI6 and civil servants dealing with intelli- gence material are being sent to a course at King's College in London, and the reading list includes "A Scandal in Bohemia" (in which Holmes warns not to "twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." May 07 #2 Steve Rothman has curated an exhibition on "Thinking about Hav- erford & Christopher Morley" at the Magill Library at Haverford College in Pennsylvania; Morley grew up on Haverford's campus, and the ex- hibition, which runs through Sept. 30, commemorates of 50th anniversary of the death of the "local boy made good." Christopher Morley was the founder of The Baker Street Irregulars, and THE STANDARD DOYLE COMPANY: CHRISTOPHER MORLEY ON SHERLOCK HOLMES (1990), edited and with an Introduction by Steve, is still in print from Fordham University Press ($30.00). Who was "thin, ascetic, varminty"? The "unspeakable Louis" (better known as Louis XI, fervent adversary of Charles the Bold), in the discussion of Sir Walter Scott's QUENTIN DURWARD in Conan Doyle's THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR (and yes, it's a book rather than a story). Stylometry (the study of linguistic style) has been used for centuries to determine who wrote what, and A. Q. Morton may have been the first person to apply stylometry to Sherlock Holmes stories, in 1978 (he compared a pas- tiche written by Nicholas Utechin and Austin Mitchelson with Sir Arthur Co- nan Doyle's stories). Of course it's all much easier in the computer age: Peter Smith presented a paper on "Stylometric Analysis Using Discriminant Analysis: A Study of Sherlock Holmes Stories" at a conference in Tuebingen in 2002. Smith investigated whether there is any evidence to support the thesis that Conan Doyle may not have written all of "The Hound of the Bas- kervilles" and concluded "there is absolutely no support for this." The URL for his paper is . Sylvia Agnew opened her "Legend of the Hound Project" two years ago (Aug 05 #3), and she now offers a "Baskerville Dining Experience" at Lafter Hall, near Princetown on Dartmoor. According to a story in the Plymouth Western Morning News (May 5), the evening includes an atmospheric carriage ride, a five-course dinner with Sherlock Holmes, and mystery. More information is available at her web-site , with links to YouTube video. Further to the item on the National Library of Scotland's plans to acquire the John Murray archives (Feb 05 #5), the Library won a L17.7 million grant from the national lottery, and received more from the Scottish Executive, but still needs to raise L6.5 million to complete the purchase. Actor Sean Connery and author Ian Rankin have now joined the campaign, and Connery has described the archives as being of "world class importance". The archives include the company's correspondence with its authors, one of whom was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Gyles Brandreth has written a novel OSCAR WILDE AND THE CANDLELIGHT MURDERS (London: John Murray, 2007; 352 pp., L12.99), and in an article in the Dai- ly Telegraph (May 6) mentioned the meeting between Wilde and Conan Doyle at the Langham Hotel in 1889, and made an intriguing point: when Brandreth was in his early teens he knew John Badley, who had been a friend of Wilde; ac- cording to Brandreth, "Badley told me that he and Wilde had both been mem- bers of an occasional dining society, the Socrates Club. When Conan Doyle, four years after his first meeting with Wilde, introduced his readers to Holmes' elder brother (in The Greek Interpreter), he set him in an armchair in a gentlemen's club named after another Greek philosopher, Diogenes." May 07 #3 The new issue of the Sherlockian E-Times is at hand from Joel and Carolyn Senter (Classic Specialties) with a history of The Hansom Wheels and photographs from a recent meeting, and from "A Gathering of Southern Sherlockians", and as always offers of interesting Sherlockian merchandise; the URL is , and you can request an e-mail subscription at . Bouchercon is a long-established world mystery convention, run by fans for fans, and named in honor of Anthony Boucher; Bouchercon 38 will be in An- chorage on Sept. 27-30, 2007 , Bouchercon 39 is in Baltimore on Oct. 9-11, 2008 , and Bouch- ercon 40 will be in Indianapolis on (tentatively) Sept. 10-13, 2009. Those who fondly remember "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" will surely want to visit The Unofficial Kuklapolitan Web Page at . Bill Vande Water reports that the URL takes you to the "Magic Gift of Life" in which Helen Bolstad reports that Burr Tillstrom qualified for membership in the Mystery Writers of America thanks to Ollie's fondness for playing "detec-a-tive", and once went to a party honoring Anthony Boucher, where "shortly the two retired to a quiet corner, first, to swap Sherlock Holmes opinions, and second, to discuss learnedly plans for a space ship." Reported: David Timson's excellent readings of the Canon for Naxos Audio- books have extended to THE VALLEY OF FEAR on five CDs (L19.99/$34.98); the Naxos web-site offers an opportunity to listen to a sample of the recording, and an MP3 download (L11.91). If you're planning to attend the "Victorian Secrets and Edwardian Enigmas" conference in Minneapolis (and there's still time to register), the Univer- sity of Minnesota Showboat Players are presenting Charles Marowitz's play "Sherlock's Last Case" this summer, and Friday, July 6, will be the night to see it; their web-site has more in- formation (and they offer dinner), and you can buy tickets at the web-site or by calling the box office (651-227-1100). The conference web-site URL is . The new catalog from the BBC America Shop (Box 681, Holmes, PA 19043) (800- 898-4921) has more new Sherlockian items: a second Sherlock Holmes Marble Coaster Set ($49.98) with four more Paget illustra- tions on coasters cut from Botticino marble imported from Verona, and a set of Victorian Binoculars ($99.98) with a tripod connection and a tripod (the catalog notes that Holmes used Watson's "very excellent field-glass" during the events recorded in "Silver Blaze"). Further to the item (Oct 06 #1) about Jack L. Herman's play "The Unexpected Return of Sherlock Holmes" having been plagiarized from David Belke's "The Reluctant Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes" (1992), David Staples' interest- ing and amusing article in the Edmonton Journal (May 6) reveals that Herman Belke $2500 in an out-of-court settlement. And what does Herman do when he isn't plagiarizing? He's a police officer in Portage County, Ohio, and was (until he was placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation of his theft of intellectual property) the detective in charge of the sher- iff's concealed-weapons permits. May 07 #4 The March issue of the quarterly newsletter of The Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota has Bob Katz's "100 Years Ago" tribute to THE CROXLEY MASTER (accompanied by a nice story about his Bar Mitzvah), Tim Johnson's report on a library benefit in Savannah that included a visit by Sherlock Holmes, and news from and about the collections; a copy of the newsletter is available from Rich- ard J. Sveum, (111 Elmer L. Andersen Library, Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapo- lis, MN 55455) . SHERLOCK HOLMES: TA'ALUMAT HABALASH BEN HA'ALMAVET, by Michael Handelzalts (Tel Aviv: Mapa Books, 2007; 170 pp., NIS 64) is an attempt (according to a review by Dror Mishani in Haaretz) to solve "one of the greatest mysteries in the history of detective fiction and European literature over the last two hundred years: the secret of the success of Arthur Conan Doyle's London sleuth." The book is in Hebrew, and the title translates into English as SHERLOCK HOLMES: HOW REAL CAN A LEGEND BE. Jerry Margolin notes that Debby Applegate has won a Pulitzer Prize for bio- graphy for her THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN AMERICA: THE BIOGRAPHY OF HENRY WARD BEECHER (Jul 06 #1); Beecher's unframed portrait stood upon the top of Wat- son's books. Applegate spoke on "Henry Ward Beecher and Victorian America" at Amherst College last year, and you can listen to her one-hour lecture at . "As far as I know," Watson wrote (in "The Final Problem"), "there have been only three accounts in the public press: that in the Journal de Geneve on May 6th, 1891, the Reuter's dispatch in the English papers on May 7th, and finally the recent letters to which I have alluded." The 156-year-old news service agreed this month to be acquired by Thomson Corp. for $17.24 bill- ion. The new company will be called Thomson-Reuters Corp., and it will be the world's largest provider of financial market data and trading systems to investing professionals. Members of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London celebrated Conan Doyle's birthday on May 22 with members of the cast of the Peepolykus production of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" at the Duchess Theatre (Apr 07 #3); there's a picture at . And there's still time to see the play, which closes on June 23. Lisa Polisar's THE GHOST OF MARY PRAIRIE (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2006; 273 pp., $18.95) is a ghost story and a mystery, set in rural southern Oklahoma in 1961 and well written and nicely told. The protagon- ist is 15-year-old Jacob Leeds, who enjoys the Sherlock Holmes stories, and quotes from them from time to time. LOCKED UP, an anthology edited by Sue Pike (Ottawa: Deadlock Press, 2007; 278 pp., CA$15.95), offers "tales and mystery and mischance" along the Ri- deau Canal Waterway, which runs from Kingston to Ottawa and is celebrating its 175 anniversary this year; the stories are interesting, and especially Peter Calamai's "The Riddle of the Rideau Rifles" (set in 1894 and featur- ing a familiar investigator named Sigerson). Amazon may not have the book yet, but it's available from Sleuth of Baker Street, 1600 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, ON M4G 3B7, Canada . May 07 #5 The Isle of Man works hard to attract tourists and film compan- ies to the island; the web-site at has links that include a "film & television catalogue" with a listing for the Roxburgh/Hart "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (2002), filmed in Glen Maye, Jurby and Druidale. An article in the Daily Telegraph (May 12) lists loca- tions elsewhere for films and television series featuring Inspector Morse, Miss Marple, Poirot, Foyle, and Kingdom. The Friends of Gillette Castle State Park (67 River Road, East Haddam, CT 06423 publish the Gillette Gazette; the April issue has a two-page article "Tyke and Teddie Star as Will and Helen" (that's Tyke and Teddie Niver) and a report on plans to restore Gillette's electric locomotive. Membership costs $20.00 a year. Jon L. Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley have edited ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: A LIFE IN LETTERS, due from HarperCollins in Britain in Sep- tember (L25.00) and from Penguin in the U.S. in November ($37.95), and it's a book that Doyleans and Sherlockians will welcome: it's an annotated and illustrated collection of letters that Conan Doyle wrote to his mother and other members of his family, starting in 1867, when he left home to attend boarding school. The letters were among the family papers that were locked away for decades because of family disagreements; Dame Jean Conan Doyle re- ceived the letters shortly before her death and then bequeathed them to the British Library. Jon notes that the book reads like a far more candid aut- obiography than his MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES ("which was long on the adven- tures, but rather guarded where memories were concerned"), and he offers a teaser for Sherlockians: "what happened in October 1890 to make Conan Doyle resurrect Sherlock Holmes in short stories." Jon also notes that everyone should have both editions of the book, because there will be differences. Randall Stock has an excellent web-page, with much more information about ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: A LIFE IN LETTERS, at "The Best of Sherlock Holmes" at . The second edition of Ely M. Liebow's splendid biography DR. JOE BELL: MOD- EL FOR SHERLOCK HOLMES (Apr 07 #1) has a British distributor, Roger Johnson has noted: the Popular Press, 3 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8LU, England (L16.50), and of course it's also available at . Lee Shackleford's play "Holmes & Watson" was performed last year in Mary- land (Oct 06 #4), offering an interesting look at the relationship between Holmes and Watson after Holmes' return to London from the Great Hiatus, and some surprises; the latest version of the script is now available (Charles- ton: BookSurge, 2007; 131 pp., $14.95), with helpful production notes. Hans-Uno Bengtsson died on May 18. He was Assistant Professor of Theoreti- cal Physics at Lund University in Sweden, a former Assistant Associate Pro- fessor at UCLA (where he won the "outstanding teacher" award three years in a row), and an enthusiastic Sherlockian: his articles appeared in The Baker Street Journal in the 1980s and 1990s, and his analysis of "The Depth Which the Parsley Had Sunk into the Butter" (which was translated into English in the recent SCANDINAVIA AND SHERLOCK HOLMES) is a fine example of his appli- cation of physics to Canonical problems. May 07 #6 One can find Sherlock everywhere, as Mycroft almost said, and while it might be difficult, there tend to be connections from just about anything to Holmes or Conan Doyle. As at Hearst Castle, at San Simeon in southern California, where one can visit the library of William Randolph Hearst, who collected books and manuscripts as well as furniture and tapestries and paintings. His manuscripts were sold in the 1940s, when the Hearst Corp. was in financial difficulties, and his holdings appear to have included "The Abbey Grange", Charles Augustus Milverton", "The Missing Three-Quarter", and "The Valley of Fear", plus "How the Brigadier Took the Field Against the Marshal Millefleurs", "The Last Galley", "The Marriage of the Brigadier", "Michal Clark", "The Leather Funnel", "The Refugees", "Rod- ney Stone", and "The Striped Chest". One of the best, and by far the most amusing, books about Hearst is Marion Davies' THE TIMES WE HAD: LIFE WITH WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST; she began recording notes for her memoirs in 1951, a few months before Hearst died, and the book was published in 1975 and is still in print in a paperback reprint. Basil Rathbone's in the book, but not as Holmes (he and Ouida came to one of Hearst's costume parties, with Rathbone dressed as the French ambassador). Marion Davies had a delightful sense of humor, about herself and others, and it shows in the book. Martin Pope's play "Sherlock Holmes and the Dangerous Game" (an adaption of "The Illustrious Client") was performed in Long Beach (Nov 03 #4), and re- vived at the Maplewood Barn in Columbia, Mo., last year; according to a re- port at PLAYBACK:stl (May 29), Pope has plans to write a five-play cycle of Holmes plays, "culminating in a showdown between Holmes and Jack the Ripp- er," and is working on forming a theater company in Los Angeles, which he hopes will be the home for the series. "My Dear Watson" was a three-act play written by Edward Chodorov in 1941; producer Oscar Serlin is reported to have offered the r“le of Watson to Ni- gel Bruce; Otto L. Preminger then acquired the play, offering the r“le of Holmes to Basil Rathbone and Brian Aherne; in March 1942, Philip Merivale was under consideration at Holmes, and Melville Cooper at Watson, but as Rathbone later wrote to Vincent Starrett, Adrian Conan Doyle was disgusted with the play and "has absolutely forbidden its production." Susan Dahlin- ger reports that the William Reese Company (409 Temple Street, New Haven, CT 06511) is offering a mimeographed typescript of the play for $500. And a reminder: the Sub-Librarians Scion of the Baker Street Irregulars in the American Library Association will dine with the Red Circle of Washing- ton on Monday, June 25, at the National Press Club in Washington; drinks at 6:30 and dinner at 7:30, and everyone is welcome. Dinner will cost $41.00 including tax and tip, and there will be a cash bar and a choice of entrees (salmon, beef, or vegetarian plate). Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson will be dining with us, and there will be toasts and informal presentations by some of the visitors and locals. The deadline for reservations is Monday, June 18th (by phone) or Thursday, June 21st (by e-mail); payment in advance is neither requested nor required, but please specify your choice of entree when making your reservations. The Spermaceti Press: Peter E. Blau, 7103 Endicott Court, Bethesda, MD 20817-4401 (301-229-5669) Jun 07 #1 Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press The British publisher of ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: A LIFE IN LETTERS (edited by Jon L. Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley) reports that there will be readings from the book broadcast by BBC Radio 4 as its "book of the week" in five 15-minute episodes the week of Sept. 24-28; the program airs on the Internet at , and you can "listen live" or "listen again" for six days afterward. On Aug. 4, 2004, not long after it was revealed that the Richard Lancelyn Green collection, the Portsmouth News reported that pressure was mounting on the city council to have a building worthy of the collection, and "city museum boss" Sarah Quail said that "I'm absolutely certain that a collec- tion like this could act as a catalyst for funding." Now (May 30) the pap- er has reported that "culture chiefs in Portsmouth are under fire for all- owing the world's largest private collection of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia to collect dust." Simon Bosher, Tory spokesman for economic regeneration, said "we're sitting on a cash cow. It's like a goldmine but we've done no- thing but stick it away in a dusty attic." And reporter Emily Pykett wrote "It is feared Portsmouth has broken the terms of the will which stipulated the collection should be catalogued in two years," adding that "This leaves the city open to a potential legal challenge from museums in Oxford and Ed- inburgh, which stood to get the collection if Portsmouth turned it down." Pykett also reported that the council wants a new super-museum to house the collection, "which could attract up to 250,000 new visitors a year." Let's see: if the new super-museum were open six days a week for 52 weeks, that's 312 days. That's just over 801 visitors a day (the calculation is a simple one), which is far more than visit to collections in Minneapolis and Toronto. The BBC did a bit more research, and reported the next day that Neil McCaw, academic director of the collection, said that there were more than 40,000 items in the collection, all of them uncatalogued when it came to Portsmouth; the vast majority have been catalogued since then, and work continues. Scirard Lancelyn Green, Richard's brother and the executor of his will, said that Richard's family was "delighted" with the way the city council had dealt with the connection. The Baker Street Irregulars' running of The Silver Blaze has been held at Jamaica, Aqueduct, Belmont, and New York (Wayne B. Swift wrote an excellent history of the races in The Baker Street Journal's Christmas Annual 2000); Jamaica was closed and torn down by the end of the 1950s, and now N.Y. gov- ernor Eliot Spitzer has proposed that Aqueduct be closed and the land sold to developers. According to a report in the N.Y. Times (May 20), Belmont would be converted and run nearly year-round, and racing would continue at Saratoga, which now has a six-week summer season and was the venue for The Silver Blaze in 2006. The first issue of Excursionz Magazine has a well illustrated cover story on Gillette Castle (and one of the visitors shown in the cover photograph is a motorcyclist, which would please William Gillette), and much more in- formation about tourist attractions in the area. $3.00 postpaid from Ex- cursionz Magazine, c/o Larry Kalbfeld, 1300 Boston Post Road, Guilford, CT 06437 . Jun 07 #2 James E. Starrs edited THE NOISELESS TENOR: THE BICYCLE IN LIT- ERATURE (1982) (an anthology that included "The Priory School" and two excerpts from Christopher Morley), but he's much better known for the work that resulted in A VOICE FOR THE DEAD: A FORENSIC INVESTIGATOR'S PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH IN THE GRAVE (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2005; 284 pp., $24.95) (New York: Berkeley, 2006; 304 pp., $14.00). The book covers his exhumations and research into the cases of Alferd Packer, Jesse James, and others, and of course he mentions Sherlock Holmes. Of special interest (in view of current proposals to exhume B. Fletcher Robinson) are the "de- siderata for an exhumation" that Starrs discusses in his Introduction (and you can read what he has to say at by using their "search inside" feature and searching for "desiderata"). "On the edge of a jutting pinnacle, three or four hundred feet above him, there stood a creature somewhat resembling a sheep in appearance, but armed with a pair of gigantic horns." ("A Study in Scarlet"). Our postage rates have gone up, and so have ink- on-paper rates for this newsletter); the new 17c stamp for addi- tional first-class ounces shows a bighorn sheep. The bighorn is popular with the U.S. Postal Service, having been shown on six stamps since 1972, and it was included on an endangered species set issued by the United Nations in 2002. There's no mention of a murderous attack on Sherlock Holmes in a recent ar- ticle about the Cafe Royal in the Sunday Express (Apr. 8), kindly forwarded by John Baesch, but there's some interesting news: the Crown Estate (that's Her Majesty's property company) plans to sell the lease on the eight-story, 21-suite restaurant as part of a plan to revitalize the area around Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus. The asking price for the lease will be L80 million, according to the paper, and the "smart money" is on the restaurant being turned into a luxury hotel. As promised earlier (Sep 06 #5), Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle are indeed mentioned in Daniel Stashower's THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL: MARY ROG- ERS, EDGAR ALLAN POE, AND THE INVENTION OF MURDER (New York: Dutton, 2006; 336 pp., $25.95); it's a well written account of Poe's life and the events that led to "The Mystery of Marie Roget"; you can read the prologue and see some illustrations at his web-site at . The first issue of QuinCahier (May 2007) has arrived from the Societe Sher- lock Holmes de France, 24 pages all in color (and all in French), with news and scholarship and excellent artwork by Jean-Pierre Cagnat; 8 euros post- paid to France, 10 euros to Europe, and 12 euros elsewhere (36 avenue Jean- Jaures, 63500 Issoire, France). You can see what it looks like at the so- ciety's web-site , and order there with PayPal. Barrie Roberts died on June 10. He was a criminal lawyer, an accomplished musician specializing in folk music, and a mystery writer, with many novels and short stories to his credit. SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE AMERICAN ANGELS (Sutton: Severn House, 2007; 185 pp., L18.99) (and New York: Severn House, $28.95), is the 9th in his series of novel-length pastiches; it begins in London and moves to Scotland, with Holmes and Watson investigating a poss- ible Jacobite conspiracy and searching for golden lost treasure. Jun 07 #3 I'm not sure how common it is for the names of members of The Baker Street Irregulars to be used for characters in works of fiction, but Bud Livingston reports Otto Penzler as a Waffen SS tank comm- ander for Rommel in Africa in Elmore Leonard's UP IN HONEY'S ROOM (2007). Les Klinger is one of two members of the BSI who can be found as characters in Laurie R. King's THE ART OF DETECTION (2006), and Mike Whelan appears in Jerry Neal Williamson's THE TULPA (1981). Gayle Harris has forwarded news of a new on-line archive: the University of London Research Library Services . A search for "conan doyle" [without quotes] turns up 67 records, all apparently from the papers of psychic researcher Harry Price. Sherlock Holmes is alive and well, and speaking Hindi, on Pogo, the number two kids' television channel in India. Pogo is broadcasting Granada's "The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes" in English and Hindi, with Tom Alter and Aanj- jan Srivastav dubbing the voices of Holmes and Watson. The second issue of Bob Byrne's "Baker Street Essays" is available at his web-site , with 16 pages of discussion of eight of the Canonical cases. And the third issue of The Solar Pons Gazette (June 2007) is available at Bob's ; the on-line newsletter has 30 pages, with an excellent article by Roger Johnson (president of The So- lar Pons Society of London), reprints from the Pontine writings of Edgar W. Smith, A. E. van Vogt, and Cecil Ryder, and much more. Earlier issues of the newsletter also are available at the web-site. Richard Roberts has an amusing teaser for his book RAGS TO RICHES: THE CASE OF THE HIRE SHOP FIEND (Dec 06 #3) at (the teaser shows the book's Sherlockian artwork). "Our coveted Sherlock Holmes Award," Jon Henley reported in the Guardian on Mar. 27, "goes to the Greater Manchester police, who, having been told by several witnesses that suspected thief Aaron Williams repeatedly screamed 'Don't let them take me,' as three men with knives dragged him from a se- curity van outside Salford magistrates court, explained that they had 'not ruled out the possibility that Mr. Williams was taken against his will.'" Will Thomas' THE HELLFIRE CONSPIRACY (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schus- ter, 2007; 316 pp., $24.00 cloth/$14.00 paper/$9.99 eBook) is the fourth in his Victorian mystery series featuring Cyrus Barker (an homage to Holmes' rival in "The Retired Colourman") and his assistant Thomas Llewellyn. As with the preceding novels, it's well written, with interesting characters and an imaginative plot, and appropriate late-Victorian atmosphere. Charles Press' PARODIES AND PASTICHES BUZZING 'ROUND SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (Battered Silicon Dispatch Box Press, 2006; 173 pp., US$21.00 postpaid) is an entertaining examination of the imitations published while Conan Doyle was alive, with excerpts and a bibliography and history. And with humor: I'm sure this is the first Sherlockian book in which the first chapter be- gins with a quote (and an appropriate quote) from Jimmy Durante; signed (or inscribed) copies are available ($15.00 postpaid) from the author at 6291 Whiskey Creek, New Era, MI 49445. Jun 07 #4 The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Britain, perhaps by An- drei Lugovoi, has brought a reminder of "The Valley of Fear": the Regnum News Service reported from Russia (June 6) that Lugovoi claimed that Litvinenko, in an attempt to recruit him to work for British intelli- gence, gave him Yevgeny Grishkovets' novel RUBASHKA to use as a "means for secure connection." The proposal was to use the novel for a book code, and a Russian specialist in cryptography noted that the book code still is pop- ular among criminals and celebrities; as for British intelligence using a book code, he explained, it reminded him of "the times of Sherlock Holmes." "It is rather strange," the expert added, that "Lugo-voi did not mention a book by Conan Doyle." The Regnum headline read: "Litvinenko Brought Brit- ish Special Services into the Time of Sherlock Holmes." Israel Shenker died on June 9. He was a correspondent for Time, and then a reporter for the N.Y. Times, and, according to Margalit Fox in her obituary for Shenker, he was "a scholar trapped in a newsman's body" who was known to readers of the papers "or his vast erudition and sly, subversive wit." In 1974 when the Royal Shakespeare Company's revival of William Gillette's play arrived in New York, Shenker's article "Sherlock Holmes Craze Is Far from Elementary" offered readers a warm and enthusiastic view of the Sher- lockian world. The Wessex Press sponsored its first "From Gillette to Brett" conference in 2003, devoted to Sherlock Holmes on stage, screen, radio, and television, and Steve Doyle reports that "From Gillette to Brett II" will be held Nov. 16-18 at the Indianapolis Hilton North Hotel in Indianapolis. The lists of speakers includes special-guest Jeremy Paul, who wrote many of the Granada series scripts, and the play "The Secret of Sherlock Holmes". The deadline for reservations is Oct. 5, and detailed information is available from the Wessex Press (Box 68308, Indianapolis, IN 46268) . A video advertisement can be seen at . Belgium has a portrait of Lord Robert Baden-Powell on a post- age stamp honoring the centenary of the founding of Scouting. Baden-Powell is mentioned in Conan Doyle's history THE GREAT BOER WAR, and Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes are mentioned in Baden-Powell's SCOUTING FOR BOYS. Basil Rathbone was an officer in the 10th (Scottish) Battali- on of the King's (Liverpool) Regiment during World War I, and was awarded the Military Cross for "daring and resource" on patrol; according to an article in the Liverpool Daily Post (June 11), the citation read: "Lieutenant Rathbone volunteered to go out on daylight patrol, and on each occasion, brought back in-valuable information regarding enemy's posts, and the exact position and condition of the wire. On 26 July, when on the enemy's side of the wire, he came face to face with a German. He shot the German, but this alarmed two neighbouring posts, and they at once opened a heavy fire with two machine guns. Despite the enemy fire, Lieutenant Rathbone got his three men and himself through the enemy wire and back to our lines. The result of his patrolling was to pin down exactly where the enemy posts were, and how they were held, while inflict- ing casualties on the enemy at no loss to his own men. Lieutenant Rathbone has always shown a great keenness in patrol work both by day and by night." Jun 07 #5 Ken Lanza spotted the report in Variety (June 12): "Gold Circle Films has picked up feature rights to Thomas Wheeler's fantasy- adventure 'The Arcanum' out of turnaround from Miramax." Miramax optioned the story in 1999 along with the publishing rights, and the novel was pub- lished in 2004 (Aug 04 #2). The novel "is set in 1919 and follows the tit- ular secret society comprising the era's leading occult investigators--Ar- thur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, H. P. Lovecraft, and Marie Laveau--as they battle demons descending on New York City." Gold Circle's president Paul Brooks said that "We see this as a potential franchise property." "What do Van Gogh, Iron Chef Morimoto, Sherlock Holmes, and Tai Shan have in common?" Malice Domestic XX will be held at the Crystal City Marriott in Arlington, Va., on Apr. 25-27, 2008, featuring Lindsey Davis as international guest of honor, Charlaine Harris as guest of honor, a lifetime achievement award for Peter Lovesey, and Daniel Stashower as the toastmaster; the ghosts of honor will be all those so honored in past years (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the ghost of honor in 2000). More information is available from the convention (Box 8007, Gaithersburg, MD 20898) . Laurie R. King has launched the Laurie R. King Virtual Book Club ("a book club where readers don't have to bring cookies, hire a baby sitter, or even change out of their pajamas") at . The club will discuss one novel a month, and there will be essays from Laurie about the book, and contests and drawings. A GRAVE TALENT was discussed in June, and THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE will be discussed in July. There is a new URL for Laurie's blog , and Mary Russell's blog will be found at . And there's an incentive for joining Laurie's Virtual Book Club: there will be a drawing in mid-July for a signed (and inscribed, on request) copy of the first edition of THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE; you can find signed copies offered by Internet book dealers for $300 and up. The June 11 issue of The New Yorker had an interesting article written by D. T. Max about the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the Univer- sity of Texas in Austin. "Ransom, who earned the nickname the Great Aquis- itor, not only bought these writers' manuscripts and letters, he tried to gather everything from baby book to death mask," Max reports. As a result, the Center has Arthur Conan Doyle's undershirts. The article may still be on-line at . "Victorian Secrets and Edwardian Enigmas: The Riddles of the Rooms of Baker Street" is the title of an exhibition that has just opened in the Elmer L. Anderson Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; the exhibi- tion is open through Aug. 20, and features the miniature that Dorothy Rowe Shaw created for her husband John Bennett Shaw, the full-scale sitting-room that Allen Mackler created for his own home and bequeathed to the Universi- ty, and other material from the Special Collections. Registration for the Norwegian Explorers' conference on July 6-8 has now closed; if you aren't going, you can get an idea of what you'll miss at the conference web-site at . Jun 07 #6 "What do Van Gogh, Iron Chef Morimoto, Sherlock Holmes, and Tai Shan have in common?" is the question on an envelope mailed by the Smithsonian Associates. Needless to say, they've all been subjects of presentations at Smithsonian Associates events, and you can find more in- formation about the program at . And what do you get when you cross Father Christmas with Sherlock Holmes? I suggested some years ago (May 96 #5) that Sherlockians visiting San Diego might wish to stay at the Hotel del Coronado (which is the world's largest wooden hotel, carefully preserved and registered as a national landmark) in the room where William Gillette stayed in December 1898, when he settled in to write his play "Sherlock Holmes". I'm happy to report that the room is quite comfortable, with a balcony overlooking the hotel's courtyard (rather than the ocean), and considerably more expensive than it was in 1898. People who spend much time on the Internet have surely encountered Internet slang, which is now widely used in text-messaging: abbreviations such as u, brb, lol, and omg. Peter Ashman says this suggests a line of Holmes-Watson text messages: tga!, ykmm, and ysbydno. And for those who don't spend much (or no) time on the Internet, the first set of abbreviations are shorthand for you, be right back, laughing out loud, and oh my god. You get to fig- ure out the Holmes-Watson text messages on your own. David Kotin (manager of special collections, archives, and digital collec- tions at the Toronto Public Library) plans to retire in July, after a long career at the library and many years of help the Arthur Conan Doyle Collec- tion, and to Sherlockians and Doyleans everywhere. Collections such as the one in Toronto can't survive without strong support from within the library system, and David's efforts have been valuable indeed. His successor will be Mary Rae Schantz, who is currently manager of the library's performing arts & languages, periodicals & newspapers, and urban affairs departments. is the URL for Scott Monty and Burt Wolder's "I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere" twice-monthly 30-minute podcast. A podcast is one of the wonders of modern technology: audio on demand, or radio for your computer; you can listen on the Internet, or download broadcasts to your PC or iPod, or subscribe to have the podcast delivered by e-mail. The first of the podcasts is an interesting conversation between Scott and Burt; fu- ture podcasts will include guests. Steven Dietz's play "Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure" (it won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America) is scheduled at the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, Pa., Oct. 18 to Nov. 4. The box office address: 12 North Prince Street, Lancaster, PA 17608 (717-397-7425) . Walter Pond's copy of Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 sold for $156,000 (including the buyer's premium) at Sotheby's in New York on June 21, sett- ing a new record for Beeton's; the Insley Blair copy sold for $153,600 in Dec. 2004. Pond's manuscript of "The Adventure of the Three Gables" (esti- mated at $350,000-$500,000) wasn't sold when bids didn't reach the seller's reserve. Details (and illustrations) are available at Randall Stock's web- site . Jun 07 #7 There's still no word on whether or when the British television mini-series "Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars" (which was broadcast by BBC-1 on Mar. 25 and Apr. 1) will be seen in the United States, but you've likely seen Jonathan Pryce (Sherlock Holmes) in one or more of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films; he has played Governor Weatherby Swan (Elizabeth Swan's father) in all of them. Maggie Schpak's handiwork can also be seen in the films: she created Capt. Jack Sparrow's rings, and jewelry and ornamentation worn by other characters in the films. And what do you get when you cross Father Christmas with Sherlock Holmes? Santa Clues. According to the Sunday Mirror (Dec. 24, 2006), that's one of the ten worst puns found by researchers in Christmas crackers in Britain. Boris Yeltsin died on Apr. 23. He was Russia's first freely elected presi- dent, and became the leader of post-Soviet Russian. According to the Sher- lock Holmes Gazette (spring 1992), the Times reported just before Christmas that Yeltsin was an ardent admirer of Sherlock Holmes, and had ordered from a London store sweaters with a Sherlock Holmes logo for himself and Mikhail Gorbachev. It was Holmes vs. Holmes in the battle for this year's Tony Award for best performance by a leading actor in a play: Frank Langella was nominated for "Frost/Nixon" and Christopher Plummer for "Inherit the Wind". Langella won the award for his performance as Nixon. Don Terras has noted Daniel T. Willingham's article "Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?" in the summer issue of American Educator, with a sidebar by the editors asking "Did Sherlock Holmes Take a Course in Criti- cal Thinking?" (they suggest that "no one better exemplifies the power of broad, deep knowledge in driving critical thinking than Sherlock Holmes"). The article is on-line at , and copies of the magazine are available without charge from the American Fed- eration of Teachers (555 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001). John Baesch spotted an interesting look at "cultural literacy" in Britain: Gordon Brown, the new prime minister, "is renowned for his ability to make himself scarce at the first hint of political embarassment," according to Roland White in his "Atticus" column in the Sunday Times (Apr. 29, 2007). "Yet this instinct, which has earned the chancellor a reputation as Macav- ity the political mystery cat, seems to have failed him last week." White saw no need to explain to his readers who Macavity is, nor to mention T. S. Eliot or OLD POSSUM'S BOOK OF POLITICAL CATS, in which he modelled Macavity after Moriarty. John also has noted an interesting letter offered by a dealer: "I have al- ways liked Boucher's stuff. He writes like an educated man, and the Seven Sneezes starts as if it were going to be superb. Did you ever read a Sher- lock Holmes pastiche of his - I forget the title? Darn good." The letter was written by P. G. Wodehouse in 1967 to Don Benson at Pyramid Books; the pastiche was Anthony Boucher's CASE OF THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS. The Spermaceti Press: Peter E. Blau, 7103 Endicott Court, Bethesda, MD 20817-4401 (301-229-5669) Jul 07 #1 Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press HOUNDING THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES: A POETIC PORTRAIT OF THE DETECTIVE NOVEL, by Yair Mazor (Madison: Goblin Fern Press, 2007; 101 pp., $12.95), offers an interesting examination of the clues that Conan Doyle offered in the story that would allow a perceptive reader to solve the mystery before all is revealed at the end of the case; Mazor concludes that "the reader is given equal opportunity to solve the case independently, without the detec- tive's help, sometimes even receiving clues (verbal analogies) that are not available to the detective." Steve Doyle reports that the "From Gillette to Brett II" conference in In- dianapolis on Nov. 16-18 (Jun 07 #4) is already half full, and that there are some additional speakers on the schedule: Michael A. Hoey (son of Den- nis Hoey, who played Lestrade in the Rathbone films) and Jenny O'Hara, who played opposite Larry Hagman in "The Return of the World's Greatest Detec- tive" on NBC in 19