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[justtwomushrooms]

An important animatic to share with you

[justtwomushrooms]

Ever since I found out that ACD was one of the judges at a competition for "most perfectly developed body" (run by strongman Eugen Sandow at the Royal Albert Hall in 1901) I've been obsessed with the idea that Holmes has a bit of a fixation on bodybuilders. He probably has a pin up of Eugen Sandow somewhere. Maybe Watson is a bit miffed about it until Holmes tells him that it's because he has a preference for powerful men with mustaches. Then Watson has a moment of revelation. 👀👀👀

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reminding myself once again that PG Wodehouse was quite possibly asexual and that most of his characters are semi-repulsed by sex as a concept

[justtwomushrooms]

The Criterion Bar’s Gay History

Most know the Criterion Bar as the place where Dr. John Watson met his young friend Stamford on that fateful night before being introduced to the one and only Sherlock Holmes, the man who would be the star of Dr. Watson’s writings.

What is not commonly known or spoken about is the Criterion Bar’s Victorian history…

That of being a Victorian Gay Bar.

Now official ‘gay bars’ were not exactly a thing in the Victorian Era due to anti-LGBT laws (including Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885). That said, the Criterion Bar was known (when the stories were written) as a meeting point for gay men in the Victorian era.

‘A New City of Friends’: London and Homosexuality in the 1890s

By Matt Cook

“..Ives noted that the Criterion Bar on Piccadilly Circus was ‘a great centre for inverts’ until it closed in 1905 .”

The Inverted City: London and the Constitution of Homosexuality 1885-1914, M. D. Cook

https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1620

The Criterion Bar is spoken about by George Cecil Ives, an LGBT advocate in the Victorian era and leader of the secret LGBT society, the Order of Chaeronea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Chaeronea

George Cecil Ives was also friends to both Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Cecil Ives were friends and cricket teammates on the team “Allahakbarries”, which, at the time, they thought meant ‘Heaven Help Us’.

When it comes to Sherlock Holmes, of all the bars within London that could be chosen for Dr. Watson and Stamford to meet, and for Watson to be lead from to be introduced to Holmes, Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle chose to use -that- one.

(Special thanks to @ImaBretthead for pointing out the bar’s past.)

“ Willie Hornung, the brother-in-Law Of ACD, was a friend of George Ives. He used him as the model for the gentleman thief Raffles, in his series of books. Sir Arthur was also acquainted with Mr. Ives.

Cafe Royal, The Langham Hotel, The Criteron Bar…These are not coincidences.”

- @ImaBretthead

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Most audacious claims from Baring-Gould's biography of Sherlock Holmes:

Moriarty was briefly Holmes' childhood math tutor and they hated each other.

Lewis Carroll was Holmes' professor at Oxford and they became good friends.

Holmes met Karl Marx and hung out with his anarchist friends because of their shared interest in assassinations, but wasn’t interested in politics enough to pay attention to Marx's economic theory or attach any significance to it.

Holmes toured America as an actor where he acquired a taste for oysters, met Chicago gangsters, and gained a firsthand knowledge of buffaloes.

Holmes had a lifelong feud with George Bernard Shaw over Shaw's opinion of Sarasate.

Holmes and Irene Adler had a lovechild during the hiatus who grew up to be Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe.

Sherlock Holmes solved the Ripper murders. Watson also solved the Ripper murders, independently of Holmes.

Watson wanted Holmes to marry Violet Hunter so they could have a double wedding.

Holmes particularly liked to assist clients named Violet because it was his mother’s name.

Holmes spent part of the hiatus researching the Yeti at the behest of the Dalai Lama. He discovered the Yeti but found him "a mild, inoffensive creature" and kept its existence a secret so it wouldn't be hunted or imprisoned in a zoo.

During the hiatus, Holmes became the first person to make a partial ascent of Mount Everest. He was able to do this because the Vernet branch of his family are natural-born mountain climbers.

Holmes fought a pterodactyl that his cousin, Professor Challenger, brought to London. Watson saved Holmes from the pterodactyl by killing it.

Watson was an amazing billiards player and he only ever played with the chief maker of billiards in England.

Holmes started eating royal jelly from his bees to prolong his life and lived to 103. He gave Mycroft this royal jelly as well, which allowed him to be the head of the British Secret Service through both World Wars.

Source: Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective, William Baring-Gould, 1962

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As much as I go on about how Holmes and Watson are sold as a set and that every adaptation has to include both of them, I always think about what they would be like apart.

For example, Holmes in his teen/young 20's years, trying to get through University and failing because he's uninterested in most of the topics, apart from the ones he's obsessed with which he cannot and will not break away from. Holmes basically isolated from the world because all of the other students find him too strange, too eccentric to hang around and be taken seriously (I'm purposefully excluding Victor Trevor here because he's always been a Watson prototype in my mind). Holmes starting to take drugs to stop feeling so depressed, to actually feel normal for once or to compensate for his feelings of loneliness by telling himself he's okay with being shut off from the world. Holmes' solving his first cases with Scotland Yard, gradually gaining more and more of a reputation, both for being a clever detective and for being an outcast. Holmes battling with his sexuality and his gender identity, because he sees men his age getting married to women and he isn't interested in that but he's still a little too interested in men, and maybe he's hoping he grows out of it, but deep down he knows he can't.

And then Watson has his own narrative and storyline: successful army doctor trying to find his feet in the war. He knows how to include himself with the other soldiers and the other men- after all, he can relate to their experiences with women. But secretly he knows that isn't all, he knows there's something different about himself that he just can't figure out, but he comes close when he looks at certain army 'buds' for a little bit longer than he should. Watson might have gone to war to escape from a situation at home, and he's trying to shut it out with the chaos, and he's mostly successful but he still feels something inside of him.

Both of them are struggling to understand their identities, to find their place in the world and who they might even share it with. They're nearly there, there so close but there's something missing: they're whole, but sometimes, things have to come in pairs to work at their best.

[justtwomushrooms]

There are two wolves inside of you. One believes ACD had a perfect plan whilst writing the Holmes canon: every inconsistency or ‘mistake’ had a planned and well-thought out reason behind it, and we are supposed to solve the mystery he has set out for us. The other believes ACD could not fucking care less and was flinging Holmes stories out of his arse in order to be left alone.

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been rewatching russian sherlock holmes <3

[justtwomushrooms]

So this is a public service announcement in case there are any Raffles & Bunny fans who don't know that in 1975, well-respected literary fiction/espionage/crime author Graham Greene (The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Third Man, etc) wrote a play called The Return of A.J. Raffles, which is essentially a fix-it fic that not only does what it says on the tin, it makes their relationship canonically a romantic one, and humiliates the Marquess of Queensberry to avenge Oscar Wilde.

Internet Archive link (also links to find paper copies online)

Audio drama on Youtube

GDoc version posted by myqueenmycroft

Wikipedia entry with plot summary and interview quotes from Greene

I hope this can spackle over some cracked hearts somewhere.

[justtwomushrooms]

The place was pitch-dark, but it was evident to me that it was an empty house. Our feet creaked and crackled over the bare planking, and my outstretched hand touched a wall from which the paper was hanging in ribbons. Holmes's cold, thin fingers closed round my wrist and led me forwards down a long hall, until I dimly saw the murky fanlight over the door. Here Holmes turned suddenly to the right, and we found ourselves in a large, square, empty room, heavily shadowed in the cor-ners, but faintly lit in the centre from the lights of the street beyond. There was no lamp near and the window was thick with dust, so that we could only just discern each other's figures within. My companion put his hand upon my shoulder and his lips close to my ear.

"Do you know where we are?" he whispered

"Surely that is Baker Street," I answered, staring through the dim window.

"Exactly.

We are in Camden House, which stands opposite to our own old quarters."

"But why are we here?"

"Because it commands so excellent a view of that picturesque pile. Might I trouble you, my dear Watson, to draw a little nearer to the window, taking every precaution not to show yourself, and then to look up at our old rooms-the starting-point of so many of our little adventures? We will see if my three years of absence have entirely taken away my power to surprise you."

I crept forward and looked across at the familiar window. As my eyes fell upon it I gave a gasp and a cry of amazement. The blind was down and a strong light was burning in the room. The shadow of a man who was seated in a chair within was thrown in hard, black outline upon the luminous screen of the window. There was no mistaking the poise of the head, the squareness of the shoulders, the sharpness of the features. The face was turned half-round, and the effect was that of one of those black silhouettes which our grandparents loved to frame. It was a perfect reproduction of Holmes. So amazed was I that I threw out my hand to make sure that the man himself was standing beside me.

He was quivering with silent laughter.

"Well?" said he.

"Good heavens!" I cried. "It is marvellous."

"I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety," said he, and I recognised in his voice the joy and pride which the artist takes in his own creation. "It really is rather like me, is it not?"

"I should be prepared to swear that it was you."

— The Adventure of the Empty House

[justtwomushrooms]

Reading Sherlock holmes and I think I’m putting more thought into the continuity that Doyle did

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WIP I'm not gonna finish lol

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Creative process

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one page into Jeeves and the Nuances and Limitations of Translation (code of the woosters translated into german) and the nuances and limitations are already apparent. jeeves doesn’t shimmer out, er geht gravitätisch hinaus, which, while appropriate for jeeves, does not carry the same feeling of etherealness that shimmering does. kind of the opposite, really. however, bertie uses “zeitliche segnen” in place of “die,” which is funnier and has more flavor than the original. so we’re at zero sum currently.

i understand why bertie calls jeeves Sie. i’m not sure how i feel about him calling ME Sie, seeing as i consider him to be a good pal of mine, but i suppose that would be standard for authors directly addressing their audience

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Makes sense Jeeves is more traditional, Woodhouse said he'd be 35 on his first appearance, while Wooster is 24

That's definitely part of it but I think there's also an interesting class angle here. Jeeves isn't just interested in Wooster being dressed well, he's interested in him being dressed suitably as a gentleman.

There's a whole theme here about servants as enforcers of class hierarchies - see Jeeves' utter disdain for Rowbotham in Comrade Bingo, who in turn sees Jeeves as "an obsolete relic of an exploded feudal system". Jeeves may be politically as well as sartorially conservative.

I think that goes beyond Jeeves and Wooster - there's a trend in literature from and set in this period to portray servants as conservative, or at least more so than other people from a similar class background. This interview suggests that this might have had some basis in reality, for instance because more conservative families would prefer their children to go into service than into less respectable alternatives like factory work, and because servants often echoed the politics of their employers.

Though in Wooster's case, I assume he votes in whatever way Jeeves suggests that he should!

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Back at it again with the weird Sherlock shit from the original cannon

- Sherlock becomes a beekeeper

- Sherlock spends two years in Tibet and meets the Dali Llama

- Sherlock describes the countryside of Cambridgeshire as "flat as the palm of Watson's hand". The description is accurate.

- they foil an attempted murder by using a wax model of Sherlock. Incidentally, if you visit the Sherlock Holmes museum on Baker Street, you'll find a bunch of incredibly creepy life-size figures of the characters. The staff think they're haunted. I asked.

- to sneak through a dark house, Sherlock and Watson hold hands. Watson keeps commenting on it

- to establish an alibi, a man invites some guy to his house, gets him drunk, changes the clocks and shouts that it's 1am, when in fact it's much earlier. Presumably, this guy doesn't wear a watch

- A visitor to 221b says that it's a long carriage ride from Baker Street to his home in Hampstead. It's 3 miles

- the final appearance of Sherlock Holmes is in 1927, which means if he were real he could have met David Attenborough

- the line "elementary, my dear Watson" is never said in the original stories, but Sherlock often calls Watson "my dear"

- unlike in Sherlock (bbc), we do find out how Sherlock escapes Moriarty. The two tussle, then Moriarty falls off a cliff whilst sort of running backwards through the air like a cartoon. Sherlock hides on a ledge for a bit

That's all for now, but I'm sure I'll find more bonkers shit

[justtwomushrooms]

"(...) Draw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we still have to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings."

"The Illustrated Sherlock Holmes Treasury" - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle