You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what, my gush?
What's that? Mary? Also Mary, I'm supposed to be the one saying the guest was, but I'll let it slide this time. What is up? Mary? Okay?
Well, today is a very important day and we need to celebrate.
Is it your Birthda better? It's not my virtue? Oh God, so much better? No nofense, my goshion, I'm taking I give up. Why is today so special?
It's November twenty first, which is the anniversary of Sherlock Holmes's first appearance in print. On this day, in eighteen eighty seven, a British magazine called Beaten's Christmas Annual came out with Arthur Conan Doyle's very first home story, a novel called A Study in Scarlett.
Well, I love a Study in Scarlet. But I had no idea.
That's the best part. A lot of people have no idea. The exact date of the story publication is weirdly hard to find. That's because this magazine, which was only published annually, didn't have a date anywhere on it, just the year, which is why you'll sometimes find December eighteen eighty seven given as the date of holmes debut because it said Christmas, right. But the thing about Sherlock Holmes superfans like me is
we want facts, we don't want guestimates. So a Sherlock historian named Matthias Bostrom decided to solve the problem of the overly vague publication date by digging into newspapers of the time, and he found a series of ads promoting Beaten's Christmas Annual and Doyle's novel, which was the big feature in it, that first appeared on November twenty first.
The ad copy said the magazine was available for purchase for one shilling and now pre orders were not a thing back then, which meant the magazine must have been on newstands that day, and November twenty first, eighteen eighty seven was a Monday, so just to be sure, Boston went back. He checked papers from the previous week and found no mention of Beaten's magazine for Sherlock Holmes. Therefore, we can deduce that today, November twenty first, is the real anniversary.
I love how analytical and how thorough that is is really amazing. These are my people. Well, it sounds like the game's afoot, so less discovered non intriguing facts about Sherlock Holmes. Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part time Genius. I'm Mongish articular, and today I have my friend and super producer Mary Philip Sandy in the studio with me. And right over there observing my every move and scribbling in a notebook is Dylan Fagan. He better not be
writing a rip rowing uncle of all my adventures. I have told him over and over not to do that. So let's get started. Mary. You know, I kind of vaguely knew you were into Sherila Holmbs, but I had no idea like how much a part of your life it was.
I mean, this goes back. My grandparents gave me a collection of the stories when I was like ten years old for Christmas. I spent the entire holiday vacation just hold up in my room reading this book over and over and over. I still have it, and I still read it to this day.
And was it just shla Colmbs or was it other mysteries and mystery novels as well?
It was really just Slack Holms. There was just something about it that captured my imagination to a degree that I think a lot of people can relate to because it's really exciting, really well written, and the characters just come alive, they jump off the page at you.
And was this a family thing too or just just you?
No?
No, I was just a lonely nerd in my room with my Holm stories and I still am. That's really it.
Well, the reason I'm asking is because homes definitely had a presence in my house as well. Like I loved mysteries, and I loved mystery novel I loved like Encyclopedia Brown, I loved and It Bliden's The Famous Five. I read all the Miss Marple and Rachael Poirot in the school library. But I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes so much so that for both third grade and fourth grade Halloween's I was sholock.
Is there photographic evidence? Okay, but it's definitely true. And also like I was telling a friend this earlier, but one of the biggest crisis I remember dealing with and this is how easy my life was. But like one of the biggest crisis was in sixth or seventh grade.
Seinfeld used to be aired on Wednesday nights, and this PBS show Mystery aired on Thursday nights, and my mom and I would watch Mystery, and then they moved Seinfeld into the same time slot, and it created all this conflict because I didn't want to tell my mom I might want to instead.
I still kind of really he wanted to watch these mysteries and Jeremy Brett being a Sherlock Holmes or whatever. But finally my friend Howard jumped in to save the day and he taped Seinfeld for me weekly, which is so sweet.
Howard saved today. That's amazing. That is amazing.
So tell me, did you ever go around the like neighborhood trying to solve mysteries or anything?
Do I still do that?
Yeah?
I still do that to this debt, No, truly, Like you know, it'll be like, hmmmm that restaurant. That restaurant's changed a dishaunting. I wonder why, you know, because in New York there's always things changing, and there's always a reason if you pay attention, there is always a reason.
My neighbors love me. I remember in third grade there was like a new kid in my neighborhood and he ended up being very sweet kid. But he would stretch the truth a lot, and so like we biked down there, we met him, and he's kind of lulky, and he told us he was like the second grade world boxing champion or whatever, like something nonsense, very very realistic. Yeah, of course. And I was like trying to deduce how you could tell he wasn't. So I was like, see,
you can see he doesn't have any ten lines. Oh yeah, he hasn't been around the world, like you know that this is absolutely fake. No.
A few years ago a friend of mine got catfished and I helped crack that case. Really Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, of course we could do a whole episode on that.
For our catfish. Yeah yeah, yeah, well I think we probably should get started. Do you want to hear that story? Since you are the resident Sherlock Holmes head, why don't you start?
Okay? So, like I said, people around the world have become obsessed with Sherlock Holmes for very good reason. And today there are statues of Sherlock Holmes in London, in Edinburgh, in Moscow, and of course in Chester, Illinois, which is a town of about eight thousand people on the Mississippi River, and that's actually the home of the only Sherlock Holmes statue in the United States.
Do you know what's funny is that my old boss, this eccentric guy named Felix Dennis, he had this garden of heroes that he had in his backyard. So he had like a sculpture made of Roger Banister, of like Bruce Lee, of all these people. And Sherlock Holmes was in that garden of heroes as he should be, which is so ridiculous but cool in a way.
It doesn't make sense, but it also kind of does you know.
But that was not Chester, Illinois. So tell me what does this little town have to do with Sherlock Holmes.
Absolutely nothing. But it is also the home of Elsie Chrysler Segar, the cartoonist who created Popeye, you know, the spinacheating sailorman right. Cigar was born in eighteen ninety four, and he grew up reading Sherlock Holmes. He was a big fan. He even worked a bunch of Sherlock references into Thimble Theater, the popular comic strip where he introduced his famous characters Olive oil, Ham, Gravy, and Popeye. Unfortunately,
Sierra died in nineteen thirty eight. He was only forty three, and apparently he was working on a Sherlock inspired detective story that he never got to finish. To honor him, the town of Chester began putting up statues of the Popeye character. There's like a trail you can walk around and see them all. And in twenty nineteen they unveiled a statue called Sherlock and Cigar. It's the famous detective.
He's wearing his hat and the cape. He's holding a magnifying glass in a newspaper, but his face was made to look like Cigars. And there's also a time capsule buried next to the statue. I love this. They put a time capsule in the ground under the statue and they're planning to dig it up on cigars two hundredth birthday. So everyone mark your calendars on December eighth, twenty ninety four. We are all going to Chester, Illinois to find out what's in that time guy.
So that's so crazy. It's also crazy that they switched out his face for Cigars.
I know, it's really there's pictures of it online. It's really interesting looking.
Did Cigar have like a curious looking face like anything?
Just perfectly normal looking guy? He doesn't look like Popeye at all.
So it is pretty well known that a Scottish surgeon named doctor Joseph Bell was the model for Sherlock Holmes. But I was wondering what is the opposite of Holmes. You know his mortal enemy, Professor Moriarty, and he is such a memorable character even though he only appears in a handful of stories. And the crazy thing is that Conan Doyle actually doesn't build out a huge life story
for him. We know he's exceptionally brilliant. He's a great mathematician, an astronomer, chess player, a former academic, left teaching and became a consulting criminal for the London Underworld. But there are intriguing clues that point to a person who might
actually have been Conan Doyle's inspiration. So, for example, Moriarty is said to have written a treatise on the binomial theorem when he was just twenty one, and a book called The Dynamics of an Asteroid that Holmes says is so good that no one in the scientific community can criticize it. Well, it turns out there was an exceptionally brilliant, high profile Canadian American mathematician and astronomer named Simon Newcombe.
He actually taught at Johns Hopkins for a while well, and he wrote a paper about the binomial theorem when he was only nineteen, and this occurred in the eighteen sixties, which you know, sounds familiar. He also published several papers about the movements of individual asteroids.
Wow, that's that's kind of uncanny. Don't tell me this Newcomb guy was also a criminal mastermind.
No, but apparently he was super, super intense. His colleagues were intimidated by him, and it's been said he was more feared than liked. And apparently Arthur Conan Doyle had a close friend who was familiar with Nucomb and his work. So we may have this cranky professor to thank for one of literature's greatest baddies.
Wow, thank you, professor Newcombe.
Yeah.
Science and medicine are such an interesting part of the Sherlock Holms stories, and it really makes sense given Conan Doyle's own career as a doctor. But one thing that fascinates me is how Holmes influenced and reflected the emerging field of forensic science. Take fingerprints for example, you know, dusting a crime scene for Prince is like Law and
Order one oh one. Now, even though people had been studying fingerprints for centuries, it wasn't until eighteen ninety two that a murder was solved using fingerprint evidence, and that was a case in Argentina, and Argentina actually became the first country in the world to make fingerprinting an official method of identifying individuals, especially in the context of crimes.
So it's really remarkable that Sherlock Holmes was talking about fingerprint evidence as early as eighteen ninety in The Sign of the Four. He was ahead of the times and way ahead of Scotland. Yard as usual, they did not use fingerprints until nineteen.
Oh one, that is crazy.
And there was also a French criminologist named doctor Edmond Locard who is considered the father of forensic science. In nineteen ten he worked with the Leon Police Department to set up the world's first crime investigation lab and that's where he developed modern techniques like chemical analysis of ink
and handwriting identification. He was also a pioneer of dust analysis, that is the study of dust, mud, other tiny particles found at crime scenes, like bits of things tracked in by shoes or tiny traces of fibers from clothing, and that work really echoed the level of precision that Holmes often used to solve cases, and Lecard gave him credit for all of this. He once said, Sherlock Holmes was the first to realize the importance of dust. I merely copied his methods.
That is incredible. The one thing I think about when I think about fingerprints, though, is that the one creature that has fingerprints that can be confused with a humans is koala's.
So the Koala did it.
It wasn't the officer or the butler.
My Kohala butler committed that crime. It was nowhere nearar.
So one of the things I can't help think about is how different Charlock Holmes would be if he were written today, right, Like, he probably wouldn't be smoking or vaping, so as bad for you. But you know what's worse is cocaine.
Yes, it is.
Cocaine is slightly worse. And Conan Doyle's depiction of the rug is a fascinating look at the way public perception of cocaine has changed over the time. So if you look at the sign of the four which you just referenced, that came out in eighteen ninety, and it opens with Holmes injecting himself with what he calls a seven percent solution of cocaine, and Watson observes that he's been doing this three times a day for the past several months.
But at the time, cocaine didn't actually carry the stigma it does today. It was considered a cutting edge medical marvel, and doctors used it as an anesthetic and prescribed it for nervousness and lethargy. You could buy cocaine tablets for nausea, cocaine sprays for nasal congestion, even cocaine toothpaste for gum sensitivity. So by making homes a cocaine user, Conan Doyle was saying, Hey, this guy knows the latest trends in science, and he's got lots of energy.
For solving crist so much energy.
But just a decade later, obviously, public opinion shifted. In nineteen oh one, a doctor named John Willie published a report of a young patient who'd become addicted to cocaine. His arms were bruised from the needles, and he was so sick he couldn't leave his home. Obviously, it's a very destructive drug, and according to Willie, the young man was an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes and wanted to
be like his favorite detective. Now The British Medical Journal actually covered the case and warned that authors who glamorized the drug use would quote have much to answer for. And even though cocaine was still used in medical settings,
more and more people became concerned about its dangers. So finally, in nineteen oh four, Conan Doyle broke Sherlock's coke habit in the Adventure of the Missing three Quarter, and Watson describes his efforts to help Holmes quit cocaine, calling it quote the drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career.
Wow, don't do drugs. He like Sherlock Combs. Well, I guess, don't be like Schurlock Coombs that he did drugs. He like the later Sherlock Holmes where he's not doing drugs.
That's the yess.
Well, here's the fact that I love. Even if you don't know his name, you probably know the work of the artist Sidney Paget, who became famous for his illustrations of Conan Doyle's works. Paget drew over three hundred and fifty pictures of the Detective and his adventures, and for many of us, his art shaped our idea of Sherlock Holmes as much as the stories themselves. I mean I can see them in my mind even just saying his name.
But there's another illustrator I want to tell you about, and that's Arthur Conan Doyle's father, Charles Charles Altamont Doyle came from a big family of creative people. His dad, that is, Arthur's grandfather, was a well known artist and political cartoonist. Two of Charles's brothers, Richard and James, that is, Arthur's uncles, also went on to become successful artists. As a young man, Charles supported his growing family by selling book illustrations, but he dreamed of being a world famous
painter and that just was not happening. He struggled with depression and alcoholism, and eventually he lost his job. He became unable to work, and he was admitted to a psychiatric asylum, which back then was a terrible place to be. And Arthur Conan Doyle had great sympathy for his father's struggles. He never judged him, and he really admired his father's talent.
So in eighteen eighty eight, he commissioned his dad to illustrate the book edition of A Study in Scarlet, which was being published as a standalone novel after its first appearance in Beaton's magazine. Charles actually drew all those illustrations from his cell in the asylum. Oh wow, and they capture some of the most exciting moments of the story.
They're really great, actually. And here's another little detail that I find really sweet in a story his Last Bow, Sherlock Holmes goes undercover with a fake name, and Conan Doyle chose the alias Altamont in honor of his dad.
That is really sweet. You know. I know little things about Conan Doyle, right, like they was friends with Harry Houdini, like all all these spiritualist things whatever. But I had no idea that he came from this artistic family.
Yeah, it was in his blood. It was in his blood. And his dad's art was really incredible. He did a lot of paintings and other drawings when he was locked up, and he kind of channeled all of the anger and frustration helt about being in this asylum into his art. And it's you know belatedly, I think really really interesting. Actually, Arthur Conan Doyle had an exhibit of his works after his dad had died, Yeah, to showcase what he could do. It was really, really, really touching.
That's incredible. So after this, I'm going to look up Arthur Conan Doyle's fathers are and you're going to look up pictures of me in third grade as Yeah, Sherlock.
Holmes equally equally important.
It's important. But that is so sweet. So you know, illustrations aren't the only way we picture Sherlock Holmes. We have to shout out some of the great actors who portrayed him. Basil Rathbone, Jeremy bred, Benedict Cummer, Badge, Will Ferrell.
I always forget that Will Ferrell played Sherlock Holmes. I actually I haven't seen it, but I do know it's out there.
Yeah, I mean, I can't believe you haven't seen it. It's this twenty eighteen Buddy comedy Holmes and Watson, with Will Ferrell and John c Riley, and The Hollywood Reporter described it as devastatingly unfunny.
Okay, I will I will not put that on the two watch list. Then it's a shake.
This seems like such a great idea.
I know what could go wrong.
But I actually wanted to tell you about another actor named will and that is William Gillette. Gillette was actually one of the first people to play Homes and he helped create two iconic sherlockisms. So backing up a bit, William Gillette was an American actor and playwright who helped Arthur Conan Doyle write a play about his famous detective. It was simply titled Sherlock Holmes. It actually premiered in New York in eighteen ninety nine and it had a
long run on Broadway. It was followed by a hugely successful American tour, and then it moved to England and had a long run there. So Gillette played Homes actually over a thousand times, becoming very very famous and very very wealthy. So he designed and built himself a castle in Connecticut, where he was from. And this is actually a castle that I made my mom take me to as a kid. Why how what? I don't know. I think my aunt had mentioned it or something and I
was like, Oh, we have to go there. And it's kind of crazy because it's like filled with homes like tricks, right. He has like trick mirrors so you can see around the corner of places. He has like little secret passageways. I remember something having to do with smoke, but I can't exactly remember, but it was like it was like exactly the type of thing a kid would design, you know, like a kid who was obsessed with homes in a way.
But anyway, back to Gillette as homes. When the play premier, Jellette made a decision that would change Sherlock homes forever. In the original paget illustrations, Homes is shown smoking a normal pipe with a straight stem. Gellette actually wanted to be able to deliver lines while pacing the stage and smoking, and he realized that with a straight pipe he'd actually have his hand in front of his mouth all the time, so he swapped it out for one of those beautiful
curved stem pipes. And that's obviously how we picture homes.
It was a prop decision.
It's just a prop.
I did not know that.
It's pretty amazing, right. And the second sherlockism we owe to Gillette is the phrase elementary, my dear Watson, which, as any homes head knows, Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote that phrase, and in the canon Holmes does use the phrase elementary to describe his deductions, and he addresses his friend is my dear Watson, but he never puts those
two things together. And Julett added a line to his play Holmes says to Watson, elementary, my dear fellow, And later on the other scriptwriters made a slight change, replacing Fellow with Watson.
Well, and thank goodness they did, because what else would we have as a catchphrase? Well, elementary, my dear listeners. We have a few more facts to go, but before we get to those, let's take a quick outbreak.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where I'm sitting here with my super producer Mary and we are talking all things Sherlock Homes. So, Mary, I am curious, like you know, there have been a lot of recent adaptations of homes. Yes, the Downey Junior ones, the Benedict Commer badge. I think there was elementary, right, like some show on CBS. Which ones do you like? What do you like in the cannon?
All right?
Well, obviously Jeremy Brett is the best. That is the gold standard as far as i'm yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I could do a whole episode on my feelings about the BBC Sharlock and what happened there. But Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were so good. Their performance, their chemistry together was just really exceptional. I will say there's actually an adaptation that I haven't seen that I want to see. It's called Miss Sherlock and it was made for Hulu Japan. It's set in Tokyo and the
two leads are women. I believe it is the first major adaptation with Holmes and Watson being women and it's set in modern day Tokyo. So I'm really excited. Have to track that down.
That's really wonder really cool. And did you ever watch this movie Young Holmes? Yes, I have a friend Lucas who sent me like the cliff of the last scene, which is so ridiculous.
Very different vibe than what I'm talking about. Sure, my gosh.
Yeah, but I actually forgot how much I loved Sherlock Holmes until the BBC series came out. Yeah, with Bendic Coumer Batche. But I'm curious what about the Aola home stuff.
I have not actually seen that, but I've heard it's really great. I've heard it's great.
Yeah, yeah, I know, my kids have watched in.
Like I tried to get Julian to watch it, but he wasn't interested. Animation only that's the rule.
So as long as we're talking about great moments of film and stage, I want to show you the very first Shrlock Holmes film. I'd say we can watch it right now because it's less than a minute long. But it's also a silent film, which is not great for podcast purposes.
Yeah, not ideal. Well, what is the name of this film.
It is called Sherlock Holmes Baffled, and it was made in nineteen hundred by the Biograph Company in New York City. It actually wasn't meant to be shown in theaters. It was made for a machine called the Mutoscope, which created a moving image by flipping through a reel of cards. The device was coin operated and only one person could watch it at a time. It had a viewfinder at the top so you could peer in and Sherlock Holmes Baffled packs a lot into its short run time. First
of all, it's a slapstick comedy. So Holmes finds a burglar trying to rob his house, and when he tries to grab him, the burglar disappears, and then he reappears, and then he escapes through a window, leaving Sherlock Holmes. You know, baffle right there? It is. It's in the title, and the disappearing burglar was an impressive effect for the time. It was done with stop motion photography, which had only
entered the cinematic lexicon a few years earlier. But the best part is Sherlock Holmes Baffled contains a mystery of its own that to this day has not been solved. Nobody knows who the actors.
Are, what, why?
How come? I mean, if you can remember, this was made for this like cheap penny arcade device, so it wasn't a big feature. And back then movie actors often went uncredited, So we don't know who was the first person to play Sherlock Holmes in a movie. But we can watch him failing to catch that thief whenever you want. It is on YouTube.
Oh of course it is good. I'll check it out.
What is your last background of you?
Okay, so you can't talk about Sherlock Holmes without mentioning his fans, and we did just that a few years ago in an episode called What does it Take to Be a super Fan? Everyone should go back and listen to that one as soon as you're done with this one. But I want to tell you about a very particular aspect of the fandom that is really interesting and often overlooked, and that is the fact that for many, many years, official Sherlock Holmes fan societies like the Baker Street Irregulars
were for men only, no girls allowed. And you know, this is the thing with being a Sherlock Holmes fan, right, these stories exist in a world of white men in a very different time, which is fine, but to some extent that spilled over into the fandom and created barriers that didn't need to exist. And in the nineteen sixties, a young woman named Evelyn Herzog ran up against this. She had discovered Sherlock Holmes as a kid, much like I did, and became a huge fan as a teenager.
She actually wrote to the Baker Street Irregulars, which is this legendary Sherlockian society founded in nineteen thirty four, and she was like, hey, how can I join? And they wrote back saying, well, you can't because a the BSI is invite only, and also it didn't accept women. I should mention there were some smaller groups that were co ed, but you know, the big institutions like the Baker Street Irregulars, which was and is the most important one of all,
Evelyn couldn't join. So she goes off to college and she meets some other women who love Sherlock Holmes as much as she does, and they begin meeting in her
dorm room to talk all things Sherlock. They read papers and literary journals, they read the journal that the Baker Street Irregulars put out, and in January of nineteen sixty eight, inspired by the Women's Rife its movement, they decide they have had enough, and so they make these big signs that say things like BSI unfair to women, and they go pick it in the freezing cold outside a Baker Street Irregular's dinner in Manhattan. They're marching around on the sidewalk.
At one point the police even show up, but the women stood their ground.
That is so dramatic, but good for them, right, Yeah, And I can't believe it took till like nineteen sixty eight to like make a protest about this thing. So did the Baker street irregulars change their policies after this incident.
Not right away, no, no, that would have been a great ending to this, but no, it actually no, you know, in its own way. It is great because Evelyn and her friends launched their own society, one that is still around today. It is called the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes and it gave women who were excluded from other Sherlockian groups a community of their own. The BSI did not end its men only rule until nineteen ninety one, ninety one,
I know, better late than ever. Yeah, but when it finally did, Evelyn Hertzog was one of the very first women to be invested in the group. And today both the BSI and the Adventuresses remain invite only. You guys can get my number if you want it, but they welcome members regardless of gender, and we love to see that.
That is insane. So do you know anything about this invitation process?
You have to be nominated by someone, So if anyone would like to get in touch with me, just contact part time genius. Don't let me out.
I love that fact, But more than anything, I love the one that you said about Arthur Conan Doyle's Dad and those illustrations. I feel like that definitely earns this week's trophy, so I'm going to give it to you.
Thank you. I'm an award winning Sherlock Holmes podcaster.
Takeure Street O regulars, let them know. Well, that's it for this episode of Part Time Genius. From Dylan, Gabe, Mary, Will and myself. Thank you so much for listening. And don't forget we do have an Instagram account. It's just at Part Time Genius. Hit us up. We're waiting for your comments and questions and likes. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongage Chatikler and research by
our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norbel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,