#sherlock would know

[contact-guy]

"It is indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is a immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamor."

THE FINAL PROBLEM - part 7 of many - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5 - part 6. Another scene I've had written in some form for months. Getting close now...

This is in the Watson's Sketchbook series!

[cardinalcheerio]

I have a headcannon that at some point in his early robin days, Jason decided he wanted to be like Alfred and committed to drinking tea, using British slang and the accent while being robin.

This obviously confused the rogues a lot.

Fighting Mr. Freeze:

Jason: aye, what in the bloody hell do you think your doin? (Horrible British and gotham accent mix)

Freeze: I am- wait. Robin? Are you ok?

Bats: it's a phase. Just ignore it.

Freeze: keep forgetting he's a kid... anyways-

[ryuusea]

mornings with a math professor…

inspired by this twt

[who-always-pays-their-taxes]

Why do you (as in the royal you) as a member of a fandom,, seem to believe that things need to be,,, canon??? in fanfiction??? why would? that ever be? if you wanted to read pure canon, you could,,,, idk,,, read canon? pick up the source material,,, and if you wanted to read pure canon fanfiction just search the ‘canon compliant’ tag. that’s how ao3 works. so silly.

[naggascradle]

[hopelesslyprosaic]

A Different Kind of Queen of Crime- five ways that Dorothy L Sayers changed the way we see Sherlock Holmes

For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!

I got into Dorothy L Sayers, in the long run, because I loved Sherlock Holmes from childhood and that later launched me into early and golden age mysteries- but it was discovering Sayers that brought me back full force into the world of Holmes. Just an awesome lady.

[ogsherlockholmes]

I'm rewatching Granada Holmes and I know everyone talks about this so I'd like to add my voice to the crowd: Jeremy Brett is magnificent.

Tempted to just leave it there but seriously, I'm in awe of his performance and I must find out if he won any awards for it because, as someone training to be an actor, I'm absolutely mesmerised by his facial expressions, his line delivery, his body language... it's so exact and everything is so meaningful and tells us so much that it comes to a point where it seems to come to him too naturally.

I'll admit, I don't find some of the other actors very believable, but it's fine because it's still entertaining.

But Brett just...shines. He does these quick flash grins, those hand flourishes, he enunciates specific words and rolls his 'r's, he never drops the act and it's unbearably impressive because, despite the theatricality, it still feels real.

As well as being an incredible person, I think he's an incredibly inspirational actor, and I'll be shouting about this to my grave. I'm obsessed.

[secondbeatsongs]

going through some old logs, and I need you to understand just how truly unhinged early 2010s RP omegle was.

genuinely you could stay on there for hours with just one person, hashing out complex traumatic backstories, drawn-out love confessions, detailed action scenes...collaboratively describing graphic violence, past abuse, comfort, hurt/comfort, hurt/no comfort, any number of sex acts...and then one of you would be like, "oh haha it's 2AM! I have to sleep :(" and the other person would say, "omg saaaame. :( gnight!!!" and then you'd exit the chat and never speak to each other again, and this was. fine.

you could just spend an entire evening shoving your wretched, bleeding soul into a chat log with someone you'd never meet or learn the name of, achieve some form of emotional catharsis, and then go about your day or night like this was an average way to spend your time.

I'm really normal about this, actually

[ohrival1412]

"Shinichi and Hakuba after their Sherlock Holmes fanfictions are discovered" tHANKS FOR YOUR REQUEST HAHAH

@zaharex here are Hakuba E-8 and Shinichi G-8 !

[blueintimeart]

Idle doodles

[technically-human]

That's probably the afterlife, buddy

[loveinstreams]

anyways. new personal holmes & watson ideal casting

[moonbugs9058]

Psych for greatest ally

I like how no one in the Psych universe is homophobic despite the show being older. Sometimes people are gay and literally nobody cares. Lassie casually mentioned his mother and her girlfriend and the show treated it like any other romantic relationship would and that's special to me. Like it's never a big deal, and if a gay joke is made, it's never in the derogatory way. Even the pilot episode had a little gay quip in it ("maybe you should date him too" "maybe I will") and it's just so. wiuenfasjkdweisfdkmc.

There's a certain kind of nuance that Psych has when talking about any issue, be it race, sexuality, gender, insecurities or anything else, and I can't really put it into words but it means the world to me. From Shawn's confession to Jules being "I've been thinking about getting a car" to Lassie's casual "my mom's girlfriend" this show continuously steals my attention and my heart and my soul. Have i made it clear that i love this show yet edit: this is also worth mentioning (psych is an unintentional sherlock adaptation)

[22ndnervousbreakdown]

I'm sorry, The Naval Treaty and The Second Stain are meant to take place DURING THE SAME MONTH???? They had 2 separate cases where they needed to find an ultra important international document IN THE SPAN OF ONE MONTH????

Oh my god I just know they laughed soooo hard and judged those government guys soooooo bad

[buckingham-ashtray]

hey do you think if sher-[gunshot]

[son-of-drogo]

John Watson Headcannon I've been thinking about for a while: Not all of the women coming to 221B were coming for Sherlock Holmes' help. John Watson is a discreet man a good surgeon, and a competent doctor.

What I'm saying is that the good doctor sometimes performed illegal abortions.