Sherlock Holmes Fandom

Sometimes, when things are tough in my world, even an entertainment read is too hard a read for me. I need something short, something that engages my mind, not my heart. I suppose my heart is busy enough as it is.

From the Sherlock Holmes Museum, 2011.

This time, I reached for "Laurie R King´s Sherlock Holmes". I suppose that I don´t need to spell out who the author is, or go into much of an introduction. Laurie R King has been mentioned often on this blog, as I have read her entire series about Mary Russell, the female counterpart of Holmes - in the King universe, anyway. King says in the introduction that she didn´t really know very much about Holmes when she started out with the Russell-books, but she has learned along the way. These days, she is a member of a group called The Baker Street Irregulars, one of many who participate in what they call "The Game", which is a kind of play scholarship

"built upon the solemn declaration that Holmes and Watson were absolutely real, that Conan Doyle was but their literary agent, and that the stories are absolutely factual - if only we lesser mortals can figure out the apparent flaws and omissions."

One text is a lecture called "Dr. Watson´s War Wound" where King tries to analyse the nature and circumstance of the single jezail bullet that managed to wound Watson both in the shoulder and in the leg. There is also "A Holmes Chronology" where King explains why Holmes is not as old as everyone imagines him to be. There are the collected quotes from Holmes´ lost book on beekeeping that King used in "The Language of Bees". There is an introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle, originally commissioned by Penguin for their website. And a few more things.

I can´t say this little book (at 64 pages, and it only seems to be published in Kindle format) was a fabulous read. Nor did it wet my apetite for any more Sherlockiana. It was ok, though, I giggled a bit and that´s what I wanted. It has that dry, academic humour. I get most of it (I think), but I laugh harder at other things. Actually, as I looked through my pictures from our visit to the Sherlock Holmes Museum a few years ago, I found this snap of a letter that made me smile just as much:

I think little Brandon may have had some help. Wouldn´t it be great if King would write a Holmes&Russell-mystery involving dinosaurs and fish in America? With an Irregular at their side called Brandon?