Quick, Watson, the game's afoot. Or perhaps what's really afoot: the footsteps of an enormous hound.
It's the 157th birthday of Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, born May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland, died July 7, 1930, in Crowborough, England.
His literary creations have long survived him, especially uber-observant consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick and amanuensis, Dr. John Watson, whom Conan Doyle introduced to the world in the 1888 serialized novel A Study in Scarlet.
For more than a hundred years, actors have played Holmes on stages and big and small screens, including Basil Rathbone, Christopher Lee and Jeremy Brett (the latter right at Holmes in TV adaptations of all of the short stories and novels, including The Hound of the Baskervilles). More recent Holmeses: Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey Jr., Ian McKellen (as the very autumnal Mr. Holmes) and, currently, Jonny Lee Miller in TV's modern-day Elementary (with Lucy Liu as "Dr. Joan Watson").
Sans Holmes, Conan Doyle might have still earned enduring fame with the novels The White Company and The Lost World. (In the latter, a sort professorial anti-Holmes discovers prehistoric flora and fauna in a mysterious region of South America.)
But he always felt Holmes prevented him from being taken as a serious author. Which is why he tried to kill Holmes off in 1893's story "The Final Problem," in which Holmes and archnemesis Professor Moriarty plunge, together, to their supposed deaths, over the Reichenbach Falls. After approximately 20,000 readers of the magazine that published Conan Doyle's stories canceled their subscriptions, he reluctantly revealed that Holmes had actually survived. (Moriarty didn't.)
Holmes' continuing popularity has spawned hundreds of clubs, many affiliated with the Baker Street Irregulars, an association of Conan Doyle fans and scholars named for the band of ragtag kids who served as Holmes' observer corps in London's sordid Victorian streets.
The late Jason Rouby, a Holmes aficionado who died in 2011, created a Little Rock-based affiliate called the Arkansas Valley Investors in the mid-1970s. There are at least two other Arkansas Sherlockian groups: the Harding Brothers of High Street at Harding University in Searcy and Moriarty's Mathematicians, a group of math majors headquartered in Lowell. None appear to be planning public birthday observances.
Style on 05/22/2016