CHRIS REDMOND
...the man behind THE SITE
(artwork by Dorr Steele for
Collier's Magazine/1930's)
by Jim Hawkins for the Nashville Scholars
Presenting Mr. Redmond's New Site:
THE SHERLOCKIAN.NET
MAY 1997
Continuing our quest to present noted Sherlockian scholars to Holmes and Doyle fans
around the world via our website and newsletter, Jim Hawkins interviewed Chris Redmond -- author, lecturer, and Director of Internal Communications, Office of Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Redmond: The Sherlockian Holmepage was considerably smaller when I first created it on November 22, 1994. It had just half a dozen links then, along with a few words about my own books, a description of the Hounds of the Internet, and information about how to find Sherlocktron, which at that time was a dial-up BBS.
I created it mostly as a place to experiment with Web design, to develop and practice my skills. I was getting involved with Web pages also as a part of my job for the University of Waterloo, and I told myself that a Sherlock Holmes site would give me somewhere to play and learn without risking the university's reputation.
Anybody who wants to see what my Waterloo Web pages look like can find them from the Holmepage by clicking on my name. Since 1994, the Sherlockian Holmepage has grown steadily, not mostly because of any creative work on my part, but mostly because as I hear about new Sherlockian resources on the Web, I add listings for them.
Early this year I reorganized the page, got rid of some of the junky
graphics I had been accumulating, and added some information about copyright,
the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, and so on. But the page is still primarily
a hub, a place from which to find Sherlockian sites across the Web.
Redmond: I'm delighted to be able to clear up this misconception. In fact my father became a Sherlockian through my influence, rather than the other way round. Of course he had read Sherlock Holmes himself as a boy, and owned copies (which had been his father's before him) of the classic, greenish-brown CONAN DOYLE'S BEST BOOKS in three volumes that were so many North American kids' introduction to Holmes. He had also picked up a copy of T. S. Blakeney's SHERLOCK HOLMES: FACT OR FICTION? somewhere along the way.
But I was the one who, at the age of twelve or thirteen, fell passionately
in love with all things Sherlockian, entering a subscription to the BAKER
STREET JOURNAL and getting in touch with the Sherlockian society nearest
to where we were living at the time, namely the Great Alkali Plainsmen
of Greater Kansas City, which had just been founded. He was pulled
along mostly in order to keep an eye on what on earth I was doing. Before
long he was seriously involved himself, and while I was going through
the turmoils of adolescence he pulled ahead of me in Sherlockian achievement.
Redmond: I don't really have a favourite story -- I sometimes mention "The Red-Headed League", but only because I feel a sort of obligation to wave the banner of red hair. I have a special liking for the stories in THE CASE-BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, partly out
of perversity (because most Sherlockians seem to think they're inferior) but also because I respect their complexity, their dark side, growing as they do out of the exotic soil of the 1920s --
a very different era from the 1890s.
As for a canonical name: In the Baker Street Irregulars my investiture
is "Billy", because most of my Sherlockian achievements, at the time I
was accepted into the BSI, were in connection with the Baker Street Pageboys,
a now-defunct society of young Sherlockians. I kept that same name in
connection with the Hounds of the Internet, although in a context
like that I think cognomens are a trifle silly.
Redmond: My home society is the Bootmakers of Toronto, which is both the local society for Toronto (I live about 70 miles outside the city) and the Canadian national society. It's one of the largest and most active Sherlockian groups in the world, and although I'm no longer as active in it as I was, I did edit its magazine, CANADIAN HOLMES, for twelve years. This summer an anthology of material from CH, which I edited, is being published by Calabash Press.
Whether there are differences between American and Canadian Sherlockians
is a big question, which I used to write about regularly in CH. It seems
to me that, on average, Canadian Sherlockians are a bit less bibulous
than Americans, a bit less fanatic about collecting, a bit less political
and querulous. That could be an illusion, caused by a comparison of the
large number of Canadian Sherlockians I know with the smaller, self-selected
group of American Sherlockians who take things seriously enough to travel
to conventions and so on. It could also be a reflection of the larger
differences between American and Canadian society in general!
Redmond: The "goal", mostly, was to write a book about Sherlock Holmes. It was my first full-length book and I didn't know as much about writing books then as I do now (which may still not be saying very much). Among its defects is a rather stilted and precious writing style, and a tendency to throw everything, absolutely everything, into the book. If I'd cut out the verbiage and some of the inessential ideas, it could have been 25 per cent shorter, printed in larger type, and a lot more readable.
Beyond that, however, the intention was to point out many examples of the presence of sex (and sexual love) in the Sherlock Holmes stories. There were plenty of prurient jokes in the Sherlockian scholarship of the earlier decades -- that'll happen in an almost entirely male environment -- but mostly people had not taken the subject seriously. I set out to demonstrate that Canonical characters had active sex lives, that Arthur Conan Doyle's own love life was bound to have had an influence on his writings, and that readers' responses to the stories depend partly on their sexual motifs, even when those motifs are sometimes hidden.
In a loose, undisciplined way, I'm a Freudian in my approach to reading
literature, an attitude that some Sherlockians think (or claim to think)
is all nonsense. I had written an article in 1981 calling for "more adult
entertainment" in Sherlockian scholarship, before I knew that I was going
to write IN BED. So part of the book's intention was to meet my
own demand! In the years since it appeared, quite a number of Sherlockians
have taken me up on that proposal, some with really good articles and
others with tongue-in-cheek stuff that's even more amusing than the serious
scholarship about Sherlock Holmes and sex. Incidentally, it also gave
me an opportunity to make some points about the value of women taking
an active part in the Sherlockian world, which was really only starting
to happen in a major way around 1980.
Redmond: I suppose you could say it was "compiled" rather than "authored", although I'm not sure quite what the limits of the latter word are (if indeed it's a word at all). THE TIN DISPATCH-BOX is just a little reference work, a compilation of Sherlock Holmes's many "unpublished cases", with a few words of information about each of them. It was published in 1965 -- when I was only a teenager -- and somehow it was seen as a big contribution to the Sherlockian literature.
Of course the Sherlockian literature was much smaller then than it is
now. Tracy's ENCYCLOPAEDIA SHERLOCKIANA didn't yet exist, and even
THE ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES was two years in the future. So reference
works of any kind were welcomed. My little brochure sold for a dollar,
and before long it turned up on John Bennett Shaw's list of the
100 essential Sherlockian books.
Redmond: I have no plans, beyond the expectation that I'll continue to produce my occasional WATERLOO SHERLOCKIAN LETTER, but I have no doubt that I'll find things to write as time goes on. IN BED is out of print now, and it's been suggested that I should bring it up to date in some way for a new edition; that could happen in 1998. That's going to be a difficult job, though. It would be much easier to bring A SHERLOCK HOLMES HANDBOOK up to date, but that won't be necessary until more people buy the first edition!
Redmond: Right now, people are duplicating each other's efforts with enthusiasm. There are about four sites that have turned up so far in 1997 with the complete text of the Canon, for instance. I don't know where people are getting the machine-readable text -- whether they're stealing it from one another, or independently copying it from a CD-ROM onto the Web. And so I don't know whether it's a good text, a sloppy crib from the Doubleday text (which is itself pretty sloppy), or what.
A site with a judiciously edited text, preferably with footnotes and variorum readings, would be very valuable. Similarly, it seems that every few days another Sherlockian with a new computer comes out with a flashy site that includes a few graphics and the same dozen or so links to major sites such as Sherlocktron and 221B Baker Street. Some of them are graphically very nice, and I'm envious of that, but there isn't much content there.
One thing the Web needs is a repository of Sherlockian writing of various
kinds; but there's no economic incentive for anyone to do that, and in
fact it would be a huge chore to create and an even bigger burden to maintain.
I would love to persuade the people behind the Gaslight mailing list to
find a way to put their corpus of material onto the Web. There's also
a lack of good Arthur Conan Doyle material on the Web. That may be remedied
when -- as is rumoured -- the ACD Society creates a web site within the
next few months.
NOTE: If you had been a true Sherlockian, you would have found the hidden click to CAR's photo. The Clue is "the man BEHIND the site". Care to see if you can find it now?