Guilt by association
For 65 years, a Boston club has made Sherlock Holmes mysteries a scholarly pastime
CAMBRIDGE -- At a glance, nobody would think this scene remarkable.
On the second floor of the Houghton Library for rare books at Harvard, a roomful of men of middle-to-elder years in business attire and a few women sip sherry from little flutes and lean to examine rare manuscripts in glass cases. They are jolly and convivial. Soon they will repair to the Harvard Faculty Club across the street for a dinner and speaker.
Look closer, however, and one is struck by a singular, unsettling detail. All or most of the men are wearing a small gold pin on their lapels in the shape of a sinister serpent. Some wear ties bearing the same image. The facts of the case are clear. These men's minds are on murder.
No, this is no ordinary club. This is the Speckled Band of Boston. Most of their officers are here: Dean Fairbrother (the Herpeton), Daniel Posnansky (the Cheetah), and Richard Olken (the Poker). Only John D. Constable (the Keeper of the Band), is missing. Where is he? It is a mystery. But then, the Speckled Band is all about mysteries -- the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
It was the Speckled Band's midyear dinner, with two purposes: to view samples of literary documents from the H.W. Bell Speckled Band Collection, and to hear a talk by Leslie S. Klinger, editor of the best-selling three-volume ''New Annotated Sherlock Holmes." Volumes 1 and 2, published together in a slipcase by W.W. Norton a year ago, have sold upwards of 60,000 copies. Volume 3 has just been published.
This year is the 75th anniversary of the death of Conan Doyle, and the 65th of the Speckled Band. While Conan Doyle recedes in time, Sherlock Holmes does not. Since the master detective was ''created" (more on this later) in 1887 by the Scottish-born physician, interest in the 56 short tales and four novels has only intensified.
''The Hound of the Baskervilles," is surely as famous an English title as ''Moby-Dick." Memorable film or TV versions of Holmes include the 1930s and '40s classics starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce; the 1980s Masterpiece Theatre series, in 44 episodes, with Jeremy Brett and David Burke; and have continued right up to last month with a new Masterpiece Theatre movie (a composite of Holmes tales called ''Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking") starring Rupert Everett.
The oldest continuous society devoted to the man in the deerstalker hat with pipe and magnifying glass is the Baker Street Irregulars -- a reference to the street Holmes lived on -- founded in New York in 1934 by critic Christopher Morley. The Irregulars' quarterly, The Baker Street Journal (Bakerstreetjournal.com), has been published since 1946.
Today there are more than 190 Irregular offshoots -- known as ''scion societies" -- in the United States and at least 80 in other countries. (A useful website is Sherlockian.net.) There's even one in Baghdad, the Baker Street Arabs. The Speckled Band, founded in Boston in 1940, is the oldest.
Sherlockians refer to the Holmes stories as ''the canon" and to their cult as ''the game." The fantasy of the game is that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, that the adventures are true, that the texts are nonfiction accounts by John H. Watson, MD (also a real person), and that Conan Doyle was Dr. Watson's literary agent. Thus understood, the canon presents endless subjects for scholarship, since the stories are full of baffling inconsistencies, not to mention impossibilities.
In ''The Adventure of the Speckled Band," for example, the murder is committed with ''a swamp adder . . . the deadliest snake in India." However, there is no such snake, so Klinger's ''Annotated" contains a two-page table on all the possible snakes that it might have been, with their characteristics, including cross-references to previous scholarly analyses of the herpetological problem.
''The game" began with ''Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes," a 1911 parody of Bible scholarship by the English churchman Ronald Knox, and took off after Conan Doyle's death in 1930. Dozens of books followed. In 1967 came the monumental two-volume ''Annotated Sherlock Holmes," by William S. Baring-Gould, a Time magazine executive. Baring-Gould was supreme for decades, but ''serious" scholarship has long passed his work by. In 2001, Robert Weil, a senior editor at W.W. Norton, wanted someone to prepare an updated ''Annotated" and found Leslie S. Klinger.
A Hollywood tax lawyer with an all-star clientele, Klinger became a passionate Sherlockian when he was given the Baring-Gould as a gift in 1968, while still in law school. ''I read it at night," he said, ''and was fascinated by the cult of the Sherlockians." Later he began writing scholarly articles and books, and in 1998 edited the multivolume ''Sherlock Holmes Reference Library."
The new ''Annotated" ''has cultural and historical detail that was missing from previous books," Weil said in a telephone interview. ''We wanted the Victorian politics, the social life, the literature. Les did all that stuff; he broadened it hugely beyond just appealing to the Holmes canon." Though it was a mammoth undertaking, Klinger said, ''it was easy to break it down into bite-size pieces." Besides the pure pleasure of reading the stories, ''I am an acquirer of knowledge. It gives me pleasure to walk down the byways, to learn about this and that, beginning with the stories."
One cannot join the Speckled Band, but must be invited, and must demonstrate Sherlockian prowess with a scholarly paper, which must be accepted. Robert Boardman of New Bedford presented a study of gemstones in Holmes stories. Boston lawyer Daniel Polvere wrote on ''Holmes the Music Critic." Dean Fairbrother of Newton, known as the Herpeton of the group (all officer titles come from details in ''The Adventure of the Speckled Band"), researched steamboats in the canon. Peter Hotton, a retired Boston Globe editor (now the Globe's ''Handyman on Call" columnist), presented a paper titled ''Was Sherlock Holmes a Handyman?"
So far, at least, all the Speckled Band members (they currently number about 60) have been men; members of the oldest all-women scion, the New York-based Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes (www.ash-nyc.com), once picketed the annual meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars until it agreed to admit women in 1991. The Houghton occasion also included the Friends of Irene Adler, the Cambridge-based scion, which admits both men and women.
It's not a youthful group on the whole, though there are younger members. ''When I joined the Speckled Band," said W. Scott Monty II, 35, of Maynard, ''I was by far the youngest, and it was said that I had brought the average age down from the deceased to the comatose." Aspiring canonists are eagerly sought, however. Monty is cofounder of the Beacon Society (beaconsociety.com), devoted to encouraging literacy in young people by introducing them to Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlockians readily acknowledge that the Holmes stories are not great as mysteries, perhaps not even as literature. Conan Doyle himself tired of his famous character and killed him off but then was forced by outraged fans to contrive a way to bring him back. Of course, exactly how Holmes avoided what appeared to be a fatal tumble into Reichenbach Falls, as he grappled with the archvillain Professor Moriarty (see ''The Final Problem"), why he would have faked his death (see ''The Adventure of the Empty House"), indeed if he actually survived (was Holmes redux a clever imposter?) are the subjects of endless debate and research.
Klinger cites three attractions. There's the character of Holmes himself, pensive, enigmatic, observant, always apart from the crowd. Then there is Dr. Watson, the brave and loyal friend who is close to Holmes but always as astounded by the master's cogitations and solutions as his readers. Finally, there is the idealized atmosphere of Victorian England, with its drizzles and fogs, its hansom carriages, its cozy fires and confident cultural values -- and outbreaks of crime and horror.
There are psychological explanations, too.
''My theory," says Thomas Horrocks, associate librarian for collections at the Houghton Library, ''is that Holmes and Watson are gentlemen. They aren't like James Bond. Seldom does Holmes use violence. A lot is done by thinking and deduction. We think, 'I could do that if I were more observant.' You could always be like Sherlock Holmes. All you need to do is to think."
And the mystery of the missing Dr. Constable, the Keeper of the Band? Turns out he was only out of town. Elementary.
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 
