Keeping Up With the Holmeses

Call it the Case of Sherlock Homes--tract homes, that is.

The facts are elementary, yet devilishly singular. Living on an otherwise unremarkable cul-de-sac in the San Fernando Valley city of North Hills is one Chuck Kovacic, a communications specialist with a penchant for dressing as Sherlock Holmes. An entire room in Kovacic’s home has been converted into an uncanny re-creation of the Baker Street sitting room where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s pipe-smoking, violin-playing, cocaine-ingesting sleuth applied his rapier-like mind to many a baffling intrigue as fog snaked through the byways of Victorian London.

The plot thickens. Living right next door is Kovacic’s best friend and fellow Holmes fanatic, Jerry Kegley. Kegley regularly impersonates Dr. John Watson, medical man, Afghan war veteran and Holmes’ loyal sidekick and chronicler. The garage at Kegley’s home bears a suspicious resemblance to a Victorian men’s club.

Kegley, 41, is President for Life of the Curious Collectors of Baker Street, a Los Angeles-based Sherlock Holmes society. Kegley encountered the Sherlock Holmes stories at age 13 through the TV series and films starring Basil Rathbone, many of which transplanted the detective from Doyle’s Victorian setting to the 1940s to outwit Nazis. Once Kegley read “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” he heard the siren song of the Victorian era. “I’ve pretty much been there ever since,” he says.

In junior college, Kegley joined an earlier Los Angeles Holmes group and even logged several years as a private investigator. He founded the Curious Collectors in 1992, with the club’s 120 or so members composing one of hundreds of chapters of the New York-based Baker Street Irregulars (named for the London street urchins who served as covert information-gatherers to Holmes). Each chapter bases its name on a title, character, incident or item in the Holmes canon.

Kegley and Kovacic met in 1984 through the Holmes society. Kovacic, an Ohio transplant, is an actor and artist who spent about 20 years portraying Holmes on “mystery train” excursions and other events, where a gig became an obsession. Soon he was collecting Holmes costumes and props, and obsessing over all things Sherlockian. “As I got more involved in Sherlock Holmes, I thought it would be a perfect set-up to do the sitting room at 221B Baker Street, where Holmes lived,” says Kovacic, 54. “I began researching the Victorian period and went to London a number of times and talked to Sherlockian scholars to make sure my room was authentic.” Kovacic, who moved to the cul-de-sac in 1999, gives tours to Holmes fans, complete with a soundtrack of Victorian street sounds.

When Kovacic found out that the house next door was available a couple of years later, he called his partner in crime, and the rest is mystery. Kegley, who completed the transformation of his garage last year, has pretty much settled on Watson as an alter ego, though he has portrayed Holmes’ arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty. “I’m almost bald now, and my build is more like Watson. Chuck is Sherlock because he has hair, and is slimmer.”