The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 2 The Baker Street Irregulars

January 5, 2010

The five-penny piece tumbled into Harold’s palm. The coin felt heavy as it landed, heads up, and Harold closed his fingers around the worn silver. He squeezed for a few seconds before he realized that his hands were shaking. The room exploded in applause.

“Hurray!”

“Welcome aboard!”

“Congratulations, Harold!”

Harold heard laughter, and more clapping. A hand slapped him on the back, and another rubbed his shoulder warmly. But all Harold could think about was the coin in his own right hand. In his left, Harold gripped his new certificate. The coin had been glued, poorly, to the lower left corner and had become unattached when Harold overexcitedly grasped the paper. The coin had fallen off, and Harold had caught it midflight. He looked down at the tiny silver piece. It was a Victorian-era shilling, worth only five pennies in its day. It would be worth a lot more than that now, and to Harold it was worth a fortune. He blinked away the moisture that had formed in the corners of his eyes. The coin meant that he had arrived. That he had achieved something. That he belonged.

“Welcome, Harold,” said a voice behind him. Someone tousled the deerstalker cap on his head. “Welcome to the Baker Street Irregulars.”

These words, which Harold had hoped to hear for so long, sounded foreign and strange now as he finally heard them. All these people- two hundred bodies, laughing and joking and patting backs-they were all clapping for Harold. This Harold. Harold White, twenty-nine years old, with the slight belly, with the thick eyebrows, with the astigmatism, with the sweaty, shivering hands.

Harold couldn’t believe that he really deserved all this. But he did. He belonged here.

The Baker Street Irregulars were the world’s preeminent organization devoted to the study of Sherlock Holmes, and Harold was its newest member. Harold had published his first article in the Baker Street Journal, the Irregulars’ quarterly publication, two years earlier. “On the Dating of Bloodstains: Sherlock Holmes and the Founding of Modern Forensics,” Harold had titled the piece. It had explored the historical connections between Holmes’s first experiments in A Study in Scarlet with the work of Dr. Eduard Piotrowski. (“Dr. Piotrowski, practicing in Kraków in the 1890s, beat in the heads of baby rabbits and recorded the patterns made by the blood bursting from their skulls. Holmes’s experiments were similarly gory, though he at least had the decency to use his own blood, as well as the labors of his own skull,” Harold had written. He thought this was his most amusing line in the piece.) Harold had published two other articles after, in smaller Sherlockian magazines. Tonight was his first time at the Irregulars’ invitation-only annual dinner. Just to be included among the guests at the Irregulars’ dinner was an immense honor-but to be offered membership, at such a young age, with such a small history of scholarship to his name? Harold couldn’t think of another Irregular who’d been offered membership this quickly, after only one dinner.

Harold White, in the cheap black suit that hung loosely on the shoulders, in the chicken-stained tie, was in the middle of the proudest moment of his life. He adjusted the plaid deerstalker hat that rested magnificently on his head. The hat was by far his favorite possession. He’d owned it since he was fourteen years old, since he had first become obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and dressed as the famed detective for Halloween. As his love of Holmes grew from childish infatuation to mature study, what had once been a costume prop eventually became day-to-day clothing. He’d worn the hat proudly at his graduation from Princeton, even temporarily sewing a tassel on top for the occasion. As Harold moved from his nervous teens to his tedious twenties, the hat served him well through the cocktail parties, the autumn picnics, the friends’ weddings that cropped up more and more often. He had worn it when he accepted his first career-oriented job as a New York publisher’s assistant. He had worn it as he separated from his longest-lasting girlfriend, Amanda, about whom Harold never spoke.

The Irregulars’ dinner, held this year at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fourth Street, fell amid a grand week of Sherlockiana. For four days around January 6, Holmes’s birthday, all the world’s societies devoted to the celebration of Sherlock Holmes gathered in New York. Lectures, tours, book signings, sales of Victorian antiques and firstedition printings-for a Sherlock Holmes devotee, it was heaven.

Of the hundreds of Sherlockian societies in attendance, however, the Baker Street Irregulars were by far the oldest, the most senior, and the most exclusive. Truman and FDR had claimed membership, as had Isaac Asimov. Only the Irregulars, and their few guests, could attend the annual dinner, and their rare invitations were the object of heated cravings from Sherlockians the world over. The Irregulars were even responsible, as everyone knew, for deducing January 6 as the day of Holmes’s birth. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had never actually written the date January 6 in the “Canon”-that is, the four novels and fifty six short stories that make up all the original adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But an extensive, Talmudically deep reading of these tales allowed Christopher Morley, one of the founding Irregulars, to propose January 6 as the most likely candidate for Holmes’s birthday. All the other organizations were considered “scion” groups of the Irregulars and needed an official sanction from the Irregulars in order to form. Applications for membership in the Irregulars did not exist-if you distinguished yourself in the field of Sherlockian studies, they would find you. And if the leader of the Irregulars deemed you qualified, you would be presented with a shilling piece as a sign of your membership-like the coin, the faded and ancient silver, that Harold squeezed between his whitening knuckles.

The applause dissipated into chatter. Chairs were pushed back from the dining tables, white linen napkins draped across the plates of halfeaten chickens and boiled vegetables. Tumblers of scotch were downed in long gulps. Hands were shaken. Good-byes were offered.

Harold felt suddenly foolish, clutching his shilling. He had fantasized about this moment since he’d first learned of the Irregulars. And now it was over. He wondered what he would have to do next to have this feeling back. He wanted so much to hold on to his successes and not let them fade away into the dull clamor of normal life. Harold watched servers collect the silverware, sweeping the dirty forks and dull butter knives into plastic tubs.

Harold lived in Los Angeles and worked as a freelance literary researcher. His primary employers were movie studios, whose legal departments hired him to defend against charges of copyright violation. If an angry novelist sued the makers of the summer’s biggest action blockbuster, claiming that they had stolen the idea from his little-read political thriller of twenty years back, it was Harold’s job to write a brief saying that no, in fact both works took their basic plot elements from a lesser-known Ben Jonson play, or one of Dostoyevsky’s difficult short stories, or another work that was similarly obscure and similarly in the public domain. Harold’s name was well used and well lauded in the legal departments of the studios, except in the rare cases when they would sue one another.

Harold’s main qualification for this position was that he had read everything. He had simply read more books-more fiction-than anyone else whom either he or his employers had met. This had been accomplished, at his age, via an acute ability to speed-read. As a child, as he ploddingly read through the pages of every Sherlock Holmes mystery, his desire-his animal need-to know what happened next posed a problem: It took him longer to get through the stories than he could bear. So he taught himself to speed-read from a mail-order self-help book. His fellow students would tease him about this ability, as they found it unthinkable that anybody could read a four-hundredpage novel in two hours and still have any significant amount of information retention. But Harold could. And he would prove it to them, reading books alongside his peers and letting them quiz him about plot elements and descriptive passages. Sure enough, Harold retained more information, more quickly, than anyone he had met at his grade school in Chicago, in his college years at Princeton, or in his adult life since.

“Harold!” came a deep and resonant voice from behind. A set of hands squeezed Harold’s shoulders. He turned and looked up into the face of Jeffrey Engels. A snow-haired Californian with a nearly permanent grin etched into his cheeks, Jeffrey was easily the best-liked and most respected Sherlockian in the room. Harold suspected that it was Jeffrey, in fact, who had campaigned for Harold’s investiture in the Irregulars. But he knew better than to ask, as Jeffrey would never tell him, one way or the other.

“Thank you,” said Harold.

Jeffrey ignored Harold’s comment. His usual grin was gone, replaced with a dour stare.

“This affair has taken a grave turn,” said Jeffrey quietly.

“To what?”

“To murder!” replied Jeffrey.