Once Sherlock Holmes has gotten into your head, its time to meet your fellow Sherlockians. Sherlockian.net is a fantastic place to begin to find your way to other like-minded Holmes devotees on the web. If youre ready to make things personal, and would like to enjoy a drink and a good yarn with Sherlockians in your area, Sherlocktron has an amazingly thorough list of Sherlockian societies across the globe. Dont be hesitant to write and say hi Sherlockians dont bite, and from personal experience I can assure you that they are the nicest, most open and inviting group of people in the world. I also highly recommend the Baker Street Blog, which is frequently updated wit commentary and news from the world of Sherlock Holmes.

When its time to get serious well, not too serious then welcome to the Baker Street Irregulars. They are the preeminent Sherlockian society in the world, and if you start hanging out with local Sherlockian groups, youre bound to meet a few members. Unfortunately, membership in the Irregulars is not open to the public. If you distinguish yourself in the field of Sherlockian studies, they will find you. Their Baker Street Journal is a must-read for serious students of the Canon.

And speaking of the Canon, heres a brief glossary of Sherlockian terms that might make your time in these parts more fun, or at least more instantly comprehensible:

Sherlockian (n) An admirer and/or scholar of the work and adventures of one Sherlock Holmes, the worlds first consulting detective.

Doylean (n) An admire and/or scholar of the work and adventures of one Arthur Conan Doyle. Some Sherlockians treat Holmes as a real person, and Doyle as the literary agent who sold John Watsons memoirs. Doyleans are more concerned with the historical Conan Doyle, as distinct from the potentially fictional Holmes.

Canon (n) The four novels and fifty-six short stories that comprise the original adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as written (or published) by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Pastiche (n) A piece of writing about Holmes that does not fall into the Canon, because it was not written by Conan Doyle himself.

Baker Street Irregulars (n) The worlds preeminent organization devoted to the study of Sherlock Holmes. Founded in 1934 by Christopher Morley.

Scion society (n) One of the thousands of local Sherlockian organizations that are sanctioned by the Baker Street Irregulars. Scion societies, sometimes called scion groups, can be found in most every major city on earth. Membership in most of these societies is open to the public, unlike the Irregulars.

Investiture (n) Every member of the Baker Street Irregulars is given an official title, or nickname, upon their admittance into the group. This is called his or her investiture. These investitures are all titles, phrases or characters from the Canon. E.g., The Abbey Grange, or The Giant Rat of Sumatra.

As per below, Ill be reading from the story at the Hollywood Standard, in LA, on February 4th, along with a bunch of other writers who are awesome. Come if youre in town, and if youd like anything signed Im sure we can tend to that as well.

So I’m trying to be very wary of that impulse. I really don’t want to pretend to know Christopher Hitchens any better than I did. We had only two interactions, once at a cocktail party and once over email. We weren’t friends or anything like that. But starting from when I was about 17, I have read almost every word he published � hundreds of articles and essays, over a dozen books, a volume of output so impressive that it makes every other writer I know seem lazy. I suppose that one could say that Hitchens read every word that I published too, a claim that is factually accurate only in that I have published exactly one book, which he read about a year ago. We are not so much a mutual admiration society as we were two people, the first of whom utterly worshipped the second, while the second seemed vaguely amused by the first on the rare occasion that he was reminded of his existence.

However, over the years I have been lucky enough to get to meet a small handful of my heroes. And every single one of these experiences has been kind of awkward and disappointing and cringeworthy  with one exception. And that’s the time I met Christopher Hitchens.

So here’s what happened: My novel The Sherlockian was edited by a brilliant man named Jon Karp. As luck would have it, Jon was also Hitchens� editor. Well, maybe “luck� isn’t the right word, because a big part of the reason I signed with Jon in the first place was that he edited Hitchens. If Jon could make me sound half as smart as Hitchens� That was the thinking. Anyhow, when Jon was finished making my book intelligible, he sent a manuscript to Hitchens to see if he’d write me a blurb. (Little known Hitchens fact: He was a pretty serious Sherlockian. It makes sense when you think about it the triumph of reason over tyranny, a certain resolute Englishness, etc.) Hitchens then wrote me a blurb that I quoted, ad neauseum, to every single one of my friend for weeks on end. They got pretty sick of hearing about it, but Christopher Hitchens had called me “ingenious,� and that’s basically one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me in my life. (My dear friend Alice, with whom I had spent many hours debating various of Hitchens� essays while we were in college, in response to my sharing the blurb with her: “This is one of the proudest moments of my life. It’s a complicated pride, but that’s the best kind!�)

Some months later, I was in Washington for a book launch party for my novel. Jon had sadly since left my publishing house, but my friend Tammy knew Hitchens socially, and she invited him for me. Much to my surprise, he accepted! Now, to just briefly touch on the super surreal part here: Because my mother is fancy, this party was hosted by Jill Biden at the Vice President’s residence. Right. So I was there with my family and my agent and my publisher and various DC dignitaries, and I saw Hitchens in the corner finally, and I snuck my way over to him, and we had the most lovely little chat. We talked for a bit about the first book of his that I ever read, and why it made such an impact on me, and he was gracious and funny and kind and wonderful for all the reasons that other people, who knew him far better, have done such wonderful jobs of describing in the last day.

As this was a year ago, he was already pretty sick. He’d found a way to surreptitiously steady himself against a nearby wall or chair without it looking like that’s what he was doing. He seemed tired, but still managed to stay for a few hours. And finally, as the evening was wearing down, I saw him across the room saying his goodbyes to the Vice President and Mrs. Biden. But as he was putting on his coat on the way out the door, he spotted me and dashed over. He grabbed my hand and thanked me for inviting him. And then, in a moment I will never forget as long as I live, he put his hand on my shoulder and said: “Congratulations. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you write next.�

Thoughts:

1) Dont pick a fight with Christopher Hitchens. Its not worth it. Hes smarter than you are, and hell win. Just Dont.

2) As it happens, Im fortunate enough that Hitchens actually liked my book, and wrote a very kind blurb for the back cover. So that makes me feel good.

3) I liked The Kings Speech. A lot. It was great.

3) Both Seidler and Hitchens know worlds more than I do about the history of the British monarchy, and the history of Britain between the wars, so I will not even begin to wade into this debate on historicist grounds.

4) However, I will wade in on the grounds of authorial license and responsibility. Seidler appears to have made a few things up in The Kings Speech. Okay, cool. I made a TON of things up in The Sherlockian. His problem seems to be though that he denies having made them up. And I quote:

Hitchens also accuses Bertie of supporting Chamberlain in appeasing Hitler. Well, just about everyone in England, except Churchill, did the same. Hindsight is always 20/20.

The logical error between the first of those sentences and the second two is readily apparent. Think of Seidlers claim this way: Hitchens says that person X held position Y. Well, just about everyone else in England held position Y. Hes admitting that, contrary to his film, person X really did hold position Y,which in this case happens to be Bertie and the appeasement of Hitler, respectively. Now, perhaps Bertie/Chamberlain were right to do so, and perhaps they was wrong. I wont make a claim there because I dont know enough about the subject. But its disingenuous to claim that you didnt put that inconvenient fact in the film because it wasnt true; it was true, it was just inconvenient for narrative purposes, so it was left out. Which is all well and good, and I wish Seidler would have defended his film on those grounds.

5) The really thorny question here is when IS it okay to leave out inconvenient facts for narrative purposes? Hitchens seems to say never, or at least never about issues so morally fraught and world-historically important. Im very conflicted about this position, as it grants the writer very little leeway to construct stories based on important or morally complicated real events. And arent those the most interesting ones to write about?

Another true story: In 2004, the world’s leading Sherlock Holmes scholar announced that he’d found the lost diary of Conan Doyle, which had gone mysteriously missing after the author’s death. Before the scholar was to publicly unveil these diaries, he was found murdered, strangled with his own shoelaces. The room had been ransacked. The diary was nowhere to be found. Sherlock Holmes devotees around the world began a search for the missing diary and for the murderer of their friend.

THE SHERLOCKIAN is a fictionalized account of these two stories, one taking place in 1900, one taking place today. It is a mystery novel not about Sherlock Holmes, but about Sherlockians.

The novel tells the story of Harold White, a young Sherlockian obsessive who’s read every great mystery novel cover to cover, and twice over. But despite being well-versed in a million blood-soaked stories, Harold has never seen a real dead body before in his life. That is, until he comes face to face with the murdered corpse of Alex Cale, the world’s most renowned Doylean historian, who had been set to make public his discovery of Doyle’s missing diaries. Now, Harold must put all of his expertise on fictionalized crimes in the service of solving a real one.

Meanwhile, the novel tells a second story, the one contained within the diary of Arthur Conan Doyle itself. After an attempt on his life, Conan Doyle searches for a killer who seems to be taunting him with messages. Having killed off the character of Sherlock Holmes eight years previous, but finding the public cold to his newer creations, Conan Doyle sets out to prove himself the better of his own fictional detective, and solve a real-life mystery himself. But Arthur begins to find that in the face of real evil, the world does not need Arthur Conan Doyle  the world needs Sherlock Holmes.

He now lives in the not-at-all-cold Los Angeles, despite being the sort of person who thought he would never, ever live in Los Angeles. Life is funny that way.

As per below, I'll be reading from the story at the Hollywood Standard, in LA, on February 4th, along with a bunch of other writers who are awesome. Come if you're in town, and if you'd like anything signed I'm sure we can tend to that as well.