Murder, My Dear Watson

by John Lellenberg

  Good text or bad, the next question is: Who wants to read Sherlock Holmes from a computer screen? The stories are readily available in print, more comfortable to read than the best computer screen. Researchers are trying to develop screens as thin and versatile as paper, but for now, whether in my armchair or the bathtub, I’d rather read a book than a Web page.

  However, electronic texts are searchable. If you want to know which story mentions a picnic, an electronic text will let you find out quickly. Similarly, you can compare various versions of Holmes’s famous dictum about eliminating the impossible—“Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”—without flipping pages and dog-earing your book. Last year I wrote something alluding to various colors of light as they appear in the tales, and an electronic search helped me quickly find red light, yellow light, green light, and so on.

  So much for texts. There are other Sherlockian resources on the Internet, and an important one is a society, the Hounds of the Internet—a “listserv” that delivers E-mail messages to everybody signed up to receive them. If a member addresses something to the Hounds, all the three hundred members of the list receive it. Because Sherlockians seem to be as enthusiastic in this form of communication as they are in print publications, not to mention face to face, the result is an electronic conversation that goes on almost continuously.

  The Hounds have become an important element of Sherlockian culture. Some serious literary discussion goes on there; the Hounds are particularly strong at elaborating and explaining details of Victorian life and background. But the Hounds list is important for other reasons, too. It’s now the chief way that news spreads in the Sherlockian world. If an article with Sherlockian implications is published in a major newspaper, it’ll be mentioned in a Hounds posting while the paper is still on the newsstand. What makes the Hounds a society are the personal interactions, the intermittent teasing and bad jokes, and the periodic flareups of angry words; that’s how people behave, online as well as face to face. And the Hounds have other characteristics of a Sherlockian society, the special customs, private jokes, and adopted names that borrow phrases from the original stories.

  There are other Sherlockian “gathering-places” on the Internet. People who have never met, or live far apart and meet only occasionally, converse electronically as though they were all in a room together. And unlike other Sherlockian societies, electronic ones continue twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Naturally, individual conversations develop “off-line,” that is, in E-mail not sent to the whole group. Private E-mail between Sherlockians is largely replacing the typed letters that used to be the standard means of keeping in touch.

  There are other E-mail lists, one or two of them started by people who got fed up with something or other on the Hounds and decided to create their own. There is also a Conan Doyle list that maintains a less frivolous tone. Sherlockians can communicate over the Internet in other ways: on “bulletin boards,” for example, or instant messaging, or so-called “chatrooms.” There is at least one group on the Yahoo bulletin board system, and a Sherlockian “talkroom” on the A&E Network Web site from the days when it broadcasted episodes of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes.

  It would be easy to extract the worthwhile postings from the torrent of material and collect it on CD-ROM for later use, or print it out to be copied. Indeed, the archives of the Hounds of the Internet are available and can be searched by keyword, an underexploited resource. A collection of the best of the Hounds postings, with some editorial judgment applied, would soon look very much like a Sherlockian magazine or scholarly journal, of the kind that already exists in purely print form.

  But there is one difficulty: Electronic communication is not congenial to extended thought, elaborate argument, and deep ideas. Readers have a limited attention span when looking at a screen—and it’s so easy to dash off a few quick words that it becomes a struggle to think and polish and revise, rather than leap into worldwide communication with a wisecrack. Books about Internet communication advise a special style of writing: keep sentences short, paragraphs short, articles short; use lists and bullets, and words that get people personally involved—good advice any time, but doubly so when readers are in an uncomfortable position in front of bright glaring screens. Note what happens when you encounter text on the Internet more than a couple of screens long: you print it out, and set it aside to read on paper when you have time (if you ever do).

  Accumulate enough printed pieces, and you begin to have a collection. List all you collect, things that don’t interest you as well as things that do, and it becomes hard to resist the word “library” to describe what’s available over the Internet. Traditionally a library is a collection of books. The University of Minnesota Library’s vast Sherlock Holmes collections extend to other kinds of material as well, such as journals and manuscripts. Now imagine a collection of electronic documents, housed not in a building but under the metaphorical roof of a Web site or database.

  One great thinker about libraries was S. R. Ranganathan, who in the 1920s offered “five laws of library science.” The first says simply: “Books are for use.” Books have to be available, not locked up where nobody can get at them. It also follows that they have to be cataloged in some way so they can be found. The same is true of electronic texts, of course.

  Ranganathan’s second law says beautifully: “Every reader his book.” If I want The Valley of Fear, then The Sign of the Four will not do; and if I want a volume that will tell me what was the phase of the moon the night when “The Abbey Grange” took place, I need Whitaker’s Almanack for 1897, not 1896 or 1898. Similarly, if only one Web site indexes Sherlockian imitations according to the characters in them, that’s the electronic help I need when I want to track down Winston Churchill’s supposed encounters with Sherlock Holmes, and I want no substitutes.

  Ranganathan’s third law is the converse of that one: “Every book its reader.” Every conceivable book, or information in any form, will be useful to somebody sooner or later. So we cherish the enormous collections at Minnesota and at the Toronto Reference Library. But we recognize that a library is not merely its massive collection of material. A library also provides tools for finding the right book—or right page—from thousands and millions of choices, with helpful professionals to guide users when they need guiding.

  Most of us grew up using card catalogs, the Reader’s Guide, and similar printed tools. Sherlockians are accustomed to working with Ronald De Waal’s bibliographies and the notes in the Annotated Sherlock Holmes and Oxford Sherlock Holmes editions. Faced with a proliferating universe of electronic information, though, we may be somewhat at a loss. Beginning Web users quickly learn about two or three search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, and are lucky if they learn enough about query language to get the most out of them, let alone become familiar with many other tools for exploiting the Internet. One of the biggest challenges librarians face is to persuade potential users that they have help to offer in electronic research as well as in the use of old-fashioned printed resources.

  Those old-fashioned resources had to be cataloged and indexed before they could be found through the card catalog and Reader’s Guide. A library of even a few thousand books is just about useless unless it’s cataloged, and the incredible riches of a major research library are little better than rubbish unless they have been past a librarian’s scrutiny. The same is true for CD-ROMs and Web sites. A search engine may add a site to its huge database as the result of a chance visit by a piece of software called a spider, but information collected by spiders is nowhere near as useful as information classified by human experts. (Ask Google about “The Yellow Face,” and it will come back with several Web sites about a yellow-faced parrot. Ask for “The Priory School,” and it will offer information about modern-day schools in Britain, Jamaica, and the United States.) Some libraries have begun cataloging Web sites almost exactly as they catalog books: title, author, su
bject, and so on, in an electronic file, the modern equivalent of a card catalog. (A proper catalog record for a Web site needs to include the date when it was listed as well, because a site can change in small ways day by day or even hour by hour, and sometimes in big ways as well. One Sherlockian site, changing owners, was suddenly reborn as a seller of pornographic videotapes.)

  These resources have brought an amazing democratization to the Sherlockian world. There are still rare books that collectors long to own, and resources that cannot be found electronically—but the most naive beginner has access now to more Sherlockian information than John Bennett Shaw himself, unchallenged as the greatest of collectors, had thirty years ago. And because Internet access is cheap, a poor Sherlockian scholar is more nearly on an equal footing with a rich Sherlockian than ever before. This new world puts new emphasis on ideas, now that everyone has access to facts. It is no accident that two kinds of conversation are characteristic of the Hounds of the Internet. One is the request for very obscure information, which someone almost always instantly can and does provide. The other is the imaginative, carefully elaborated analysis of a Sherlock Holmes story, demonstrating for example that Holmes got the solution of the mystery wrong, or that Watson isn’t telling the whole story. Ingenious thinkers are free from any handicaps of location or wealth or even species. On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog, as long as you don’t bark in the nighttime.

  It’s hard to realize that eight years ago hardly anyone had surfed the Web; now we turn to our browsers routinely, and take what we find very much for granted. It’s easy to forget that “Web page” is a metaphor, and, unlike printed pages, can be of any size, can contain multiple media, and can be changed by the owner without warning. Still, these analogies to pages make up analogies to books, and it can be useful to think of Web sites as the electronic equivalent of books. A future list of Sherlockian “books” might well include such Web sites as Hounds of the Internet and my own Sherlockian.net.

  Sherlockian.net reached just about two hundred pages this year. When I created the site in 1994, I called it the Sherlockian Holme-page, and it was nothing more than a list of links to what little Sherlockian and Victorian material existed on the brand-new Worldwide Web at that time. It grew bit by bit, until two years ago when I realized that it needed some work. I broke it into multiple pages, gave it a new graphic design, acquired a domain name for it (www.sherlockian.net), and began to add new material. Now the site includes substantial blocks of text, as well as links with the occasional sentence of background information. I persuaded Rosemary Michaud, who had been leading the weekly Hounds of the Internet discussions, to let me include her sixty brief essays introducing the original stories. Other kinds of information followed, and several Sherlockians made articles or stories available.

  Sherlockian.net now reaches off in many directions, from pastiche to erotica to advice on how to write term papers about Sherlock Holmes. But the site’s backbone is its pages of reference information, and I plan to strengthen that backbone—not to include everything, but to provide a starting point for things Sherlockian that the user can rely on. It’s turning into the online equivalent of my printed book A Sherlock Holmes Handbook, now unfortunately out of print, the one volume that a new Sherlockian should turn to first.

  But it’s an “equivalent” of that book, not identical. There are limits to how much anyone is prepared to read from a screen, and, even more important, the technology of the Web gives the user the expectation that he or she can jump from one spot to another, using hyperlinks to pursue a specific idea or fragment of information. A Web page that doesn’t will either drive users away or bore them to sleep.

  It seems that Web pages are a whole new genre of publication, not the same as books, journals, or television programs, not the same as anything we have seen before. Web pages have rewritten most of the rules of communication, or at least presented us with new rules in parallel with the old ones. This change is disorienting, and among its many effects is resentment on the part of people who maintain that all knowledge exists on the printed page. I have some sympathy with that. At least I agree that a vast amount of knowledge exists only in print and is unlikely to be moved to any other medium in our lifetime. Still, that doesn’t diminish the value of electronic communication, especially if we use it imaginatively.

  Similar media transitions have happened before—most recently the arrival of cheap printing and photocopying in the 1960s. Many middle-aged people now remember the first time they used a Xerox machine. It was an extraordinary experience, and it gave new power to practically everybody. With the new technology, everyone could publish and distribute ideas—the results might not look as elegant as books and magazines from professional publishers, but they could appear. Every Sherlockian could start a newsletter, and for a time it seemed that every Sherlockian did, with or without anything to say. The proliferation of cheap publications helped fuel the Sherlockian boom of the 1970s, in which so many books were published and societies founded. Web sites have not so far fueled a comparable boom, but the potential is there. The ability of the Internet to link people with common interests, over long distances, seems to be leading to important social changes, discussed ad infinitum in every newsmagazine and television program.

  The Internet gives Sherlockians a universal reach. My Web site can be read by anyone who understands English, anywhere in the world that the wires reach, and any of those people can E-mail me with their comments or questions, or create their own sites with the capacity of responding to mine. There’s also another significant way in which the Web provides universal reach: on a Web page, I can use the simple computer code that creates a hyperlink, and direct my readers’ attention to sites created by other people, much more immediately than footnotes and other traditional devices.

  The concept of hyperlinking makes the Web powerful. Click on a word or phrase in a Web page and be transported to some other Web page with information applicable to your needs or desires. With the Web, at least in theory, no one need “make a long arm” for the encyclopedia, as Holmes once told Watson to do. The knowledge of the human race can be immediately available, and the only real limitation is temporary, the limit on how much information has been formatted and uploaded onto Web pages. The contents of Holmes’s commonplace books would have been immensely more useful to him if they had been stored in this format. And because it is searchable, Holmes would never have risked losing data through the notorious eccentricities of his filing system, such as classifying “venomous lizard or gila” under V.

  We do not yet have much Sherlockian hypertext, but chances are we soon will. A model is the Web files that Leslie Klinger has made available as he works on his (printed) Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, the successor of Baring-Gould’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Both sets of books—Baring-Gould’s two omnibus volumes from a generation ago, the four individual volumes of Klinger’s published so far—consist of the full text of the Sherlock Holmes tales with appended notes. The Web pages I refer to have turned Klinger’s notes into hyperlinks that could—if their creator had more time to work on them—lead to other pieces of online data, background knowledge, illustrations, and so on. All knowledge is connected, and there seems no field of study that a Sherlockian can not make relevant. So hyperlinks can go on forever.

  Unlike a spider’s web, the electronic Web does not have a single center. Practically any piece of it can be the center, with all other extant pages connected to it (more than a billion, with more being created every second). For a Sherlockian, it might seem logical to want a properly annotated text of the tales such as Klinger’s as the center. But there are large parts of Sherlockiana not directly related to the stories, such as pastiches, films, cartoons, societies, and so on. I like to think of my own site, Sherlockian.net, as being the center to which everything else is attached, but perhaps the ultimate center for the Sherlockian Web would be a properly annotated version of De Waal’s bibliography, The Universal Sherlock Holmes
. It does exist on the Internet, thanks to the University of Minnesota. But so far it is a bare text, without hyperlinks. The possibilities all lie ahead.

  There has been talk of creating a CD-ROM using hyperlinks to connect De Waal’s bibliography, the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, and other central Sherlockian works, such as Tracy’s Encyclopaedia. I do not know if someone will make the dream come true in our lifetime, and I certainly don’t know how well it will be done. The one prediction I can make is that there will continue to be other Sherlockian works to which it will need to be linked. The Baker Street Journal, fifty years of it, is now available on CD-ROM, as are Conan Doyle’s other works. Other CD-ROMs are certain to follow. The possibilities are endless, and any hyperlink that is even a possibility becomes a desire and then a need.

  However, I doubt that any hyperlinked Canon will eliminate traditional books and journals. It will change the way certain kinds of research are done, replacing page flipping with electronic searching, but the connections offered in any hypertext site are unlikely to be a match for the whimsical and creative connections made in the human user’s mind. Here is an unanswerable question: Will such a site look most like a book, a journal, or a library? Remember that a hyperlink does not have to be aimed at text. It can be aimed at a picture, a movie, a sound clip, or electronic mail to a live human being; a comprehensive Sherlockian hypertext site might resemble a society meeting more than print.

  That observation about the expanding scope of hypertext—not just hypertext but, increasingly, hyperlife—leads to a final thought. Could the Internet be a way to escape into the London of Holmes’s day? Sherlockians are talented escapists already, and as technology advances, we will be able to make the escape come almost literally true. I am thinking of the convergence of two computer technologies: databases and virtual reality.