[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 20 May, 2024 - r/HobbyDrama (2024)

If you're interested in the mystery fandom and Sherlock Holmes subfandom, in particular the Game (in which everyone acknowledges the obvious truth that Sherlock Holmes existed, his roommate wrote down his adventures, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Watson's literary agent), a few options of very different kinds (by no means exhaustive, just ones that I happen to have read and to remember off the top of my head):

A Life of Crime by Martin Edwards is a fabulous introduction to the genre as a whole, that gives you a pretty solid grounding in most other stuff you may encounter. For something more focused on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the UK, his The Golden Age of Murder about the Detection Club is awesome. But those are more about the thing itself than about the fandom.

From Holmes to Sherlock by Mattias Bostrom is an enjoyable mass-publication book about the development of Sherlock Holmes fandom, though if I recall mostly about the media more so than the fandom (though that was definitely part of it).

To start getting just a smidge weirder, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Vincent Starrett (no relation whatsoever to the movie), while almost a century old and definitely out of date, is a fun little overview of the Sherlock Holmes universe, the concept of Sherlockian scholarship and the Game, and the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI). Building significantly from it while also incorporating a few decades' more Sherlockian scholarship (and incorporating more of the Game into its structure and premise) is, of course, William Baring-Gould's Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which I was just looking through today and which I, being a K-12 Jewishly educated person, immediately thought of as "Sherlock Holmes Talmud"- the text in the middle surrounded by the various synthesized commentaries, as well as a bunch of articles.

Staying in the Sherlockian world, Sherlock Holmes by Gas Lamp is a book that collects a variety of articles of Sherlockian scholarship, most of which are done in the spirit of the Game, and also includes some articles that go into the history of the BSI and the development of scion societies (in more detail than Starrett). There are also some books that collect Sherlock Holmes pastiches and parodies, a serious fandom in its own right (and of course linked), but I don't have much patience for those so have never gone out of my way to read many.

But, for the real geeky deep dive, going beyond (but also into) Sherlock Holmes into the overall mystery genre fandom, if only up til the mid 2000s (when in fairness it had begun to change totally with the mass popularization of the internet), The Heirs of Anthony Boucher by Marvin Lachman goes into meticulous detail about pretty much everything, particularly as relates to the creation and publication of fan magazines (most of which he wrote for) and the creation of conventions, particularly Bouchercon (most of which he attended). Sometimes the detail is... possibly overly meticulous? But I still found it totally worth it, as the amount of petty drama was superb (I meant to write a post about it here but had to return it to the library before I had a chance). And you genuinely get the feel for what the fandom felt like as it grew, and what was on people's minds. It also updates what you know about the BSI and Sherlockian fandom past Sherlock Holmes by Gas Lamp.

On that note, actually, and maybe I should have put this at the top, but there's also a fantastic New Yorker article by David Grann about the life and very odd death of Richard Lancelyn Green, which in addition to/in service of telling that super weird story goes into both the American and British iterations of intensive and, in his case, all-encompassing Sherlockian/Holmesian (the first is an American term, the second is British) fandom. Marvin Lachman brings up Green's death very briefly in his own book, but doesn't dwell on it much- I'd guess at least in part because "the American" who's mentioned in the article was a friend of his who was mentioned several other times in the book in other contexts.

And, after all that, if you're still interested in Sherlockian fandom and the BSI after all of that, the great podcast I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, in addition to discussing the stories themselves, has a nice number of episodes and interviews specifically about being part of the fandom and contributing to Sherlockian scholarship, the Game, etc.