Celebration to Mark 100 Years of Sleuthing Started in ‘A Study in Scarlet’ : Sherlock Still Stalks the Corridors of Imagination

The place was a South Bay hotel, the time was six years ago, and the occasion was a 100th anniversary celebration of the first time Sherlock Holmes met Dr. John Watson.

The topic of the real-life panel of crime experts: the sleuthing techniques of the master detective.

Everything was fine until a man in the audience posed a question to the panel. Standing before an audience of 200 or so, he had the gall to call Holmes a fictional character.

“The whole place exploded in pandemonium,” recalls Mary Jane Craycroft, a high school English teacher and member of the Torrance-South Bay Sherlockian Society, which sponsored the celebration.

“Everybody started booing.”

This weekend a similar panel will convene, this time as the society marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, “A Study in Scarlet.” The book tells how John Watson, lately returned from Afghanistan, meets his new roommate for the first time.

Beginning Friday evening, the society will gather at the Torrance Marriott hotel for a weekend of Sherlockian festivities. Besides the crime experts, various Holmes experts will speak, book dealers will be on hand, films will be shown and a Victorian costume party will be held after a formal tea.

The celebration, which is open to the public, will end Sunday afternoon when Holmes, played by actor David Fox-Brenton, will tell the gathering that he is retiring to keep bees at his home on the Sussex Downs.

The society’s convocation is just one of many being held around the world this year by Holmes’ devotees to mark the anniversary of the detective’s debut in English literature.

For example, the Baker Street Irregulars, named for the street urchins the detective sometimes employed, held its celebration in New York in January. The group was formed in 1934, four years after Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, died.

Paula Salo, who heads the South Bay Sherlockian society, said she founded the nonprofit group a decade ago. The group is a scion of the Baker Street Irregulars known as The Blustering Gale(s) From the South-West. The name comes from one of the Holmes stories, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” in which Watson refers to the wind as such, she said.

Salo, a Los Angeles city librarian who lives in Torrance, said the group has about 45 active members ranging in age from 30 to 75. Members try to meet once a month to discuss the detective and take quizzes on the stories.

Salo, 64, said her interest in Holmes began when she was 10 and a relative gave her family a Holmes’ book. Since that time, she said, she has read several times over the four novels and 56 short stories that chronicle Holmes’ exploits.

Salo admits that some Holmes’ tales are flawed. “There are a lot of holes in the stories and the logic is not always there,” she said.

For example, Doyle apparently could not make up his mind whether Watson had been wounded in the leg or shoulder while serving in the second Afghan War. One book states he was wounded in the shoulder; others state it was the leg.

“It’s the famous traveling wound,” Salo said.

Nevertheless, she said, the stories are well written and absorbing, largely because Holmes himself is a “fascinating” character.”

“He is a great intellect,” Salo said. “He puts emotion aside.”

Craycroft, who teaches at Leuzinger High School in Lawndale and whose grandfather shared the same name as Holmes’ archenemy, Professor James Moriarty, said she has spent hours preparing for one of the club’s meetings, even going so far as to prepare “study charts” dissecting particular stories before a quiz.

“I have crammed more for a quiz at a meeting than I have for any exam in my life,” Craycroft said.

Craycroft said she, too, has “read and read and re-read and re-read” the Holmes’ stories. “To me, it is just endlessly fascinating,” she said.

‘You Can Lose Yourself’

Part of the appeal of the Holmes stories may lie in the late Victorian period in which they take place, she said. “You can lose yourself in that ambiance.”

Arthur Axelrad, a professor at California State University, Long Beach who heads that school’s somewhat dormant Center for Sherlock Holmes Studies, said he also is uncertain why the detective appeals to so many people. Perhaps, he said, it is the icons, such as the deerstalker hat and curved calabash pipe that Basil Rathbone puffed while portraying Holmes in the movies. (Holmes’ enthusiasts insist the detective never smoked such a pipe.)

“Maybe it is the character of Holmes as the hero, the force of good,” Axelrad said, adding that the sleuth could be viewed by some as a “very civilized Rambo, a very cultured Rambo.”

Axelrad, who teaches Shakespeare as well as Sherlock Holmes at the university, said he will give a slide show at this weekend’s festivities on what “Sherlock Holmes’ London looks like nowadays.” He said that he collects Holmes’ material when he visits that city, and sometimes is asked some tough questions by fellow Holmes’ fans there.

“People in London have asked me, ‘Will you please explain? Was he real or was he a literary character?’ ”