Icon #10 - Sherlock Holmes: ACAB Includes Sherlock (rebroadcast)

In this edition of the Iconograph, Jack and Miles are joined by writer/comedian Andrew Ti to discuss the 7% solution god:

Sherlock Holmes!

They'll explore his creation, his toxic fanbase, his less-than-great influence on modern policing and much more!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello the Internet, and welcome to this spinoff episode of
Early Zaeiitkeist, which we're calling the Iconograph. Instead of looking
at the Zeikest through current events on Monday mornings, we're
looking at the Zekeeist through the powerful pop culture hore crux.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
That are our iconics.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
We use these icons to create meaning, to build identity, uh,
to find the perfect way to end the phrase no shit, UH,
to learn that sometimes the hat has the flap in
the front, sometimes it has the flap in the back.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
But it takes a real.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Genius to be like, hey, porqueano thos doves flap in
the front and the back.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
We're talking about Sherlock Holmes, with apologies, Captain America, the
first superhero and still to this day, probably the most iconic.
I'm thrilled to be joined as always buy my co
host mister Miles.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Grot Oh Boy, Sherlock Holmes. Sure Lock.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
For whatever reason, my strong depiction idea of Sherlock Holmes
is a bassett hound.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
He's got you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Like because I feel like there was a picture of
a basket hound dressed to Sherlock Holmes that I've never
shaken from my brain.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
This is like feels like a poster. I would have
signed a doctor's office gruff, right, isn't that isn't?

Speaker 3 (01:17):
Oh yeah it was at McGruff rocking. Wasn't there a
McGruff with a sherlock at though?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
A deer stalker? I think? Yeah, I think did wear
a deer stalker? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Which a basket hound can stalk some deers.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
It all works out. Maybe this is my Berenstain bears
or something.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
Is it worse to know deer stalker or know that
a fedora is really a trill be?

Speaker 2 (01:39):
It's the same energy. I understand energy, but worse.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
I think deer stalker. I think that's all right. I'm
going to allow that one being It's not a fedora,
it's a trill be that sucks in a very special way.

Speaker 4 (01:55):
What it is is I'm not wearing a fedora. Actually,
what I'm wearing is a true thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yeah, there is a there is a story. The hound
of Baskerville's as brand. The editor pointed out in our
third seat one of our very favorite guests, a hilarious
and brilliant producer and TV writer. You know him from
the Jos. This racist podcast, The New Starter Track Podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
It's Andrew. What's what's that picture? Is not it?

Speaker 1 (02:26):
There are plenty of pictures of dogs. Sorry, super producer
casm put a picture and I know I know exactly
what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
That.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, No, Bassett basset hound is I think a basket
hound somehow, and also.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Has become just Sherlock Holmes dog for some reason. I
don't know why, but yeah, because they're load to the
ground and they keep it.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
He kind of has basset hound eyes too, He kind
of has those eyes.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
They love smoking cocaine and that's the.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
He did it the sophisticated way he did. He did
a four percent solution I think it is, or some
percent solution of cocaine that he injected into his arm
and was just like like really kind of very invigorating.

Speaker 4 (03:12):
The idea is just rush to my brain like a
like a loving depiction of how to inject cocaine. Right,
if I recall kind of vaguely, it's pretty.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Detailed pages of like and then the books hit right
as cocaine was becoming like this wonder drug. So it
wasn't illegal, like you could just go to the pharmacy
and be like give me the solution.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
And I'm going to carry another eight ball.

Speaker 4 (03:37):
Yeah, just just a small note on your intro, and
this is a self surfing note.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
I do think you mean the first superhero in the West.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
In the West, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I should I should
likely say that I want to get right into it
because there's a lot to cover. I think we generally
know the same shit about Sherlock, deer Stalker, big old pipe,
skinny jean, slickback hairtive reasoning. But with the help of
our researcher Jam McNabb on the ones and twos on

(04:06):
this one, I think we got some good shit. So
this is gonna be the fourth fictional icon we've covered
in this series, probably i'd say the second most iconic,
but behind Santa.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
A weird iconic hat can really do a lot.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
I will say, like Santa got the hat, Sherlock got
the hat, that is, but Santa took a very long,
weird time landing on his current form and popularity. I'd
say the same as kind of true of Miss Piggy.
I mean she took years and was like sort of
a background character for a number of years. Rkle probably
holds our record for fictional or not fictional, the fastest

(04:49):
overnight impact, Like he showed up as a background character.
In the next day, kids were like dressing as him
in the mall. Sherlock first arrived in novels in eighteen
eighty seven and eighteen ninety that were like called Penny dreadfuls.
They were you know, dime store paperbacks.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
That's what that means.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yeah, that's what Penny Dreadfuls were. They were well received,
but when his short stories hit in eighteen ninety one,
it was like Bieber going on Ellen. It was just
like fucking people went bunkers for this shift.

Speaker 4 (05:21):
Because like being part of a Penny Dreadful is like
guesting on a track. You're like, that's like one of
it's like a short story collection or no.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Right, So his short Penny Dreadful, Penny Dreadful, I thought
it was a roller derby person. I think I think
it was just like a paperback knowledge. So the short
stories appeared in The Strand, which was a magazine that
had just a bunch of stories in it, and like

(05:49):
when they came out, like when a new Sherlock would drop,
they would have to change the library hours because people
would just be.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
Like Harry Potter drop day kind of shit.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yes, yeah, but like every time just a short story
appeared in a magazine, the circulation for this magazine went crazy.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
The thing that is truly crazy.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
There's there's a bunch of stuff that's really weird about
Sherlock's iconography, but one thing that is just like overall, Wow,
he's not gone away, Like this is our oldest icon
besides Santa. But like, if you're even just like looking
at Santa in his current form, Sherlock in his current
form actually goes back further than Santa. And he's been

(06:38):
he is the most portrayed fictional human in film history.
He's been in two hundred and fifty four films. He's
neck and neck with Dracula for the most depicted character
of all time. But Dracula's got him barely edges him
out at two seventy two.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
Put in all kinds of shit that he doesn't prolong in. Right,
you can just say John a in.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
A comedy where you're like, oh, John Ham's in this
comedy too, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
I know, Robin Hood, you would think, but no, Robin Hood.
Sherlock has everybody except Drack. And we're going to talk
about Sherlock and Dracula, because they're linked in kind of
a weird way. But right from the start there's this
weird form of fandom where it's almost like fandom mixed
with like Talmudik scholarship on Sherlock, which if you've read

(07:27):
the stories, it's it's kind of like they're very just
basic page turnery, you know, like they're they're not these
like deep texts. They're kind of fun, shallow page turners.
But people start writing stories about Sherlock. People like publish
interviews with Sherlock Holmes, people are publishing biographies of Sherlock Holmes,

(07:52):
and it's like continued down to this day. Like a
two thousand and eight poll found that fifty eight percent
of British people believe Sherlock Holmes was a real guy.
Like there're Sherlock truthers.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Motherfuckers took over the planet. Yeah, and they achieved in
Santa Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
So there was like a mixture at the time of
people who actually believed he existed, and then there were
people who were like ironically believing that he existed and
he got some lucky breaks. I'm talking about him, like
he's a real person. For the purposes of this podcast, because.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
I am a.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Sherlock Truther, but like one of So there was this
eighteen ninety one story in the Journal. The speaker called
the story was my Evening with Sherlock Holmes, and it
was an interview with Holmes and Conan Doyle that was
written by an anonymous writer, and the writer actually ended
up being JM. Barry, the guy who would go on

(08:50):
to write Peter Pan. So like there were good writers
who were like there were really like eventually accomplished writers
by in hard and like sort of propelling his image
and this character on in a way that you know,

(09:10):
probably benefited him quite a bit. Arthur Conan Doyle and
his publishers received letters from people looking for him.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
The Arthur Conan.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Doyle was like, immediately like gifting the curse, He was like,
what the fuck? He had reportedly despaired that people thought
his fictional character was real. People would have asked me,
People would be like, hey, could you put me in
touch with she Lock bro I think my wife's cheating.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
I think my wife's cheating on me was Sherlock Holmes. Dude,
you think you can help me?

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Is it? Because so I want to talk about this.

Speaker 4 (09:45):
Yeah, he gave him like a real ass address, right,
he gave him a real address.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
That is one of the theories that he gave him
a real address that actually didn't exist for like a
decade or so. It was like the numbers didn't go
up that high, but eventually they that high and so
and when that became a real like an actual real address,
it was just like flooded with mail eight.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Nine.

Speaker 4 (10:11):
Yeah, randomly, just the one of the few times I
went to I've been to London, like as a kid.
I just walked by whatever three two one Baker Street
or whatever the fuck it is. I was like, oh, yeah,
Sherlock's house.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah yeah, So this is where I want to talk
about the idea of Sherlock as superhero and like he
I think he embodies this superpower that's maybe the most
intriguing superpower because it seems like it could actually exist,
which is the ability to use logic and reason to

(10:46):
know a definitive truth about something or about everything in
his case, and like he can look at your coat
sleeves and know what you do for a living, and
then from that can solve the mystery of like who
stole your wallet and you know, like a superhero who
can fly is intriguing, but most sane people don't believe

(11:07):
they can actually fly. But with Sherlockian deductive reasoning, which
he doesn't actually deduce things, well we'll talk more about
that later, but it's almost like the saner you are,
the more you want to believe that sane rationality can
defeat the chaos of reality. And then it's I also
think like that like appeals to everybody's you know, idea

(11:30):
of like themselves and like I could probably figure this
shit out. But it also I mean it's kind of
the entire promise of literature and writing, which was just
kind of becoming democratically available at this time, like to
be able to use words and thinking to make sense
of the world and like tell a singular truth and
so that then leads like the Jam Barry thing.

Speaker 4 (11:53):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
There's also like so many famous fans who like T. S. Eliott,
Isaac Asimov, Neil Gaiman are all like part of this
Sherlock Holmes society, which was just like a group of
weird little guys who would like hang out and study
what they call it, they called Sherlock Holmes's stories, the
Sacred texts, which is again, if you read these things,

(12:17):
it's wild.

Speaker 4 (12:18):
Can I ask a question, I haven't probably read an
actual Sherlock Holmes book for probably closer to decades. Now,
does he do the thing that the Benedict Cumberbatch one does,
which is like walk through the deduction steps?

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yes he does.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah, yeah, So the structure is really ingenious where he
first solves a little mystery where like the person comes
in and he's like, oh, I see you've lost your
pocket watch and that you're you know, I can tell
that you're a typist and you're left handed and near sighted,

(12:54):
and they're like, what the fuck? And he'll explain how
he got there real quick. And that is actually based
on Sir Arthur Conan. Doyle was a doctor who studied
under this guy who could kind of he like taught
this class in medical school where he was just like
what would kind of cold read people and be like

(13:16):
this is how I know this guy is an alcoholic,
Like he came in, his nose is bright red, Jim
Blossom face, he's drinking now literally one of the things.
And then I saw and then I saw the bottle
peeking out of his pocket, like damn, Surelock.

Speaker 4 (13:35):
Ship, Yeah, but I think that's a little bit like
you know that the other way of looking at this
is like you know, your Barie Weiss's and Joe Rogans
of today. It's a thing that makes dumb people think
they're smart exactly like oh my god, I could yeah,
I could psychic essentially.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
So this is the big problem with Sherlock Holmes like that. So, uh,
just going back to like the power analogy. When Superman
first came out, there was this rash of children jumping
off their roofs like for after like seeing Superman, and
I think the same thing has happened on a massive
scale with Sherlock Holmes. But the problem is that the

(14:16):
people who believed that they could do the superpower were cops,
and like we have just a whole century of cops
who thought they could like use deductive reasoning to solve
crimes and could not. So just back to the like
kind of border between like this guy being a real

(14:38):
person and not a real person, first of all, Like
do we have an example of that anywhere else other
than like you know Santo where that's the whole game,
But like, is there another fictional character where people like
sixty percent of people into those they like years after
still like I believe, man.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
I still I believe in it is Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah,
I mean not like not religious numbers.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, Brian the editor points to Bigfoot, which is another
like but that one is explicitly that's the point of
that character is like that they're hiding him from you.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
So I mean so there's like the people who like
kind of like.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Someone like someone from like one of those tall tales,
like Paul a Ghost Bill. Yeah, it's kind of like that.
Yeah Washington, Am I right? I mean there probably is some.

Speaker 4 (15:38):
Version of like George Washington Cherry tree Ship or like
Benjamin sanitized versions.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
Paul Revere is a good one from briand the editor.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
So at the there's like at the street level, like
the people who are just like, God, damn, I need
to find find out where this watch went. Let let
me write to Sherlock. But then Sherlock Holme, I kind
of like that. And then there's more ironic believers, like
the people the you know, t s Eliot and stuff.
They would call it the game, which was they would

(16:13):
like all get together and treat Holmes as a historical
character whose exploits were chronicled by his trustee companion, doctor
John Watson, and they would be like, this is you know,
sir Arthur Conan Doyle was actually Watson, and you know
they came up with all these theories that they didn't
actually believe in, but they like had fun doing it.

(16:35):
I read an account of like one of these meetings
where like it was just an excuse for like people
to get drunk together and like being weird.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Creeps like YouTube.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yet they played a game called Sardines, which was just
hide and seek, but when you find the person who's hiding,
you have to hide with them, and then like soon
there's only one person seeking and there's like thirty people
in one closet, and they were like they seemed to
really enjoy it, especially when women were involved. Oh Jesus Christ.

(17:05):
But so the whole treating him like a real person
begins with this Oxford divinity professor Ronald Knox who analyzed
and scrutinized the home stories as if they were real.
Which is interesting that it was a divinity professor because again,
the way fans interact with this character has more in
common with like the study of biblical literature. Out to

(17:26):
that point than how people reacted with fiction. His satire
was intended as a way to satirize the modern scrutiny
of the Old Testament by German scholars like Albert Schweitzer,
which while that was the intent, it became a massive movement,
not because people liked how hard it owned Albert Schweitzer,
but because they, you know, they wanted to believe. Like

(17:48):
Mulder and Scully, I'm going to throw this out there.
I don't think satire has ever worked even once. It
was just like damn dog, that would be so tough.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
Yeah, oh look at me being crazy.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
Yeah, man, But yeah, there's the Charlock Holmes Society in
England or America. And then the other version is the
Baker Street Irregulars. And again, like ts Eliott, the author
of The Wasteland, I just want to stop down and
read right, like this is somebody who's like writing famous

(18:24):
epic poems and he is devoted to like these books
that are like bordering on like young adults.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
He's like the guy that like like as soon as
they allowed it, and I think it was in the
UK he like wrote down his actual religion was like
the force or whatever.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
The fun yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, I just
I went back and read through a couple of the
most famous stories and they're they're just like very effective
page turners, which again, like I just I do find
that to be one of the most interesting contradictions. They're
like fun, but what the fuck, Like, what the fuck people?

(19:03):
That's the mystery I kind of want to solve here.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
I mean, it's just.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
Because comparatively, like the kinds of stories that were coming
out at the time were just not doing anything like this.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, I definitely think that that's what. There's one that's
called like the Society of redhead Men or something like that,
and it's this like very odd mystery where this guy
like gets a job where they're just like, you're redheaded.
So you come to this room and you copy down
the Encyclopedia Britannica and you know, and then we pay
you a really good wage. You just have to be

(19:33):
there for four hours a day. And it's just like immediately,
if you've like seen any mysteries or read any mysteries,
you're immediately like, oh, well, they're doing that to get
him out of the place where he is, because they're
they're like either robbing him or they have something and
like that's that's exactly what it is. But it's just
they invented it wasn't a new trick what like they

(19:56):
were the best to add it, and everything else has
been like kind of build on top of that. So
like the thing we talked about with the flint effect,
where like culture gets built on top of culture. So
like John Belushi is not that funny to me because
I have I grew up on Sari, which was like
the metabolized version of that. Like I feel like there's

(20:16):
there's some of that, but like he's still so fucking famous.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
What were the other Penny dreadfuls? They were like Tarzan
and like.

Speaker 1 (20:25):
So yeah there's I mean yeah, and there were other
mysteries too, like and kind of ones from better writers
like Edgar Allan Poe wrote one before him with this
guy Dupin and yeah, just terrible see August Dupin.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Which.

Speaker 4 (20:45):
It's just the evidence that you gotta you got to
inject cocaine because smoking law.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, right, exactly, I think opium or whatever.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
At all times, I feel like it was kind of nodding, shit, dude,
I want to start far Yeah, and I'm reading at
Sherlock Holmes Penny dreadful. So Sherlock has one of the
earlier or maybe the earliest version of the toxic fandom
that we experienced today. So Arthur Conan Doyle secretly hated Holmes,

(21:19):
resented the fact that he was so popular because he
considered himself a more serious minded writer of historical fiction,
and like that shit didn't sell as well, and like
he was, like, this is taking over my life, and
so he decided to kill off Holmes in eighteen ninety three,
like a few years after, like this whole craze starts
in the short story The Final Problem, because he felt

(21:42):
that his literary reputation was at stake. London is said
to have experienced its sunniest winter in eighteen ninety two
thanks to the London fog being temporarily blown away by
the wind created by the sheer number of vigorous jack
offhand motions from people here in Doyle worry about his
literary red mutation, but it is it's also an interesting,

(22:04):
like story, his writing of it, and that like he
could write this shit in his sleep. He would like
write these stories in a day and then like you know,
spend the summer straining over this like historical fiction. And
I do think that's like an interesting kind of insight
into the creative process that like, you know, some things

(22:25):
that just like come naturally to you and you're just like, well,
that's that clearly sucks, and it's like, no, that's like
you hear this a lot of music where people write
their hits like as a joke. You know, they're like, yeah,
this is this is the dumbest version of what this
record company's asking for from us, and then it's like, oh,

(22:46):
that that ended up being our number one hit.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
Right the tub something phenomenon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
We are saying album Eleanor by the Turtles Stuck in
the Middle with you was those guys making fun of
Bob Dylan.

Speaker 4 (23:01):
The kind of have to imagine anyone who's ever written
a Law and Order episode is a little like, yeah,
I don't know if this is Mike.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Writing it with one hand while making the jackoff Ham
motion with the other. But it's also like people love
fucking Law and Order. It's great. It's yeah, exactly, you
know copaganda. Yeah, so you know, at the end.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Of this Sherlock Holmes story, the final problem Charlock Holmes
falls to his death while battling Professor Moriarty at the
Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Pretty definitive, like it's like, oh yeah,
he's big time.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
It did not go over well.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
There was a huge public backlash. Twenty thousand people canceled
their subscription to the Strand magazine. People formed Let's Keep
Holmes Alive clubs when he was killed off in the story.
Newspapers including the Boston Post, published obituaries for him.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
According to Wikipedia, the strong negative response from readers was
unlike any previous public reaction to a fictional event. And
it doesn't say citation needed next to that.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, so it's a fact.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
A fact, brother, But people wore black armbands to mourn
him allegedly. Uh and yeah, Like previous to this, people
just accepted what happened in books. But this time, because
there was this weird relationship with him where they wanted
him to be real, everyone like fucking freaked out demanded

(24:34):
he come back. Kind of anticipating the Snyder cut bros.
Kind of anticipating the controversy around the first design of
Sonic that looked like total shit. Yeah, but this was
more of a Sonic situation in that they were right,
and the creators caved and made the right decision, and

(24:56):
after years of public pressure, he wrote another home centric book,
The Hounds of Baskerville's.

Speaker 5 (25:03):
But that was the I think that's the only one
I've read that's the comeback, right, and it was he
was still not willing to like bring him back from
the dead, so he just made it a prequel.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
Oh, just put a little trampoline at the bottom of
the right yet.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah, but he writes him back into this story. He
was like writing it as a non home story and
then needed a strong protagonist and was like, what if
I put Sherlock Holmes in this?

Speaker 2 (25:36):
People were like yeah, man.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah, And then he was like, okay, you owe me
twice as much money. They were like sure, like whatever
you want. There's like so many instances of him writing
these books where he's like and I'm going to ask
for this insane amount of money and like, obviously they're
not going to give me that, and like by the
time like he sits down from sending the letter off,

(26:01):
like they're like, here's the money, just like give us
the fucking book. He's kind of getting hosed. Like in
the early days because he doesn't realize like how fucking
popular it is because he doesn't want to because he
doesn't want it to be like as popular.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
It's like a man in need of an agent.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
See I know, right, we're going to get to a
literary agent at this time in a second. But he
is eventually convinced to bring Holmes back to life for
good by an American publisher who offered him forty five
thousand dollars for a new batchel of stories.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
And he was like, okay, all right, yeah great, I
love that. Yeah, in like the nineteen hundred Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
He yeah, he survived the battle with Moriarty and pretended
to be dead for like eight years for some reason.

Speaker 4 (26:49):
You is there any like like theorizing or speculation on
I mean, because we're there like arch nemesies in the
same way.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
I feel like maybe that's that's fels like sort of
modern in that.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah, the Moriarty thing, because yeah, there's like these characters
there's aye, yeah, I don't I don't know who Tarzan
was fighting, but not like seems like you want this
episode to be about Tarzan and.

Speaker 4 (27:14):
Yeah, I'm sorry, or who the fuck was Conan the
Barbarian was just generally like fighting.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Yeah, I'm just saying like like like does Moriarty scan
for you guys? Like I know I knew him from
the Benedict Cumberbatch one, but I didn't really know him
before that. It wasn't like a Lex Luthor the Joker
thing where it's like it's supposed to be. Yeah, I
think it, and probably with a bunch of people who

(27:41):
are more familiar with Sherlock Holmes it is. But for
me it's just like it does feel like there's you know,
the books are written in a smart way where the
stories are written in a smart way where it's like
and this is, of course the second most dangerous man
in London, and like it's they're not like spending a
lot of time on the low or he's just telling
you like this is this is something I've been pursuing

(28:04):
for decades. Incidentally, the plot for the story where he
comes back from life was written by Jean Lecky, who
was a young woman that Conan Doyle was having an
affair with while his wife was dying of tuberculosis.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Oh I love what a modern story. Yeah, that's the
most London ship I've ever heard and it's got a
tuberculosis in it, so yes, right? Was she was?

Speaker 3 (28:28):
She was she like an aspiring writing novelist or this
also sounds so Hollywood too, I know it's like, yeah,
my assistant, like I was having this Dudents having an
affair of his assistant and actually gave her a spot
in the writer's room.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
He's a He eventually did the right thing and married her,
so you know, dying. Yeah, yeah, it.

Speaker 4 (28:49):
Does feel like like, I mean, right, that's That's the
the way people have dealt with this malaise in contemporary
times is just hiring people to write the book you
don't want to write and continuing to collect the line
and share the money, right, which is the move?

Speaker 2 (29:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, for him, it was like he just like wrote
them fast and begrudgingly, and people were like, you're a king,
You're the king.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Man, the king Man.

Speaker 4 (29:16):
For the new season of Sherlock, Penny Dreadful. Yeah exactly.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
Hey, guess what, Gene, you know something about me? I
fucked the way I write fast and what.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
Was said begrudgingly. We covered the Dupin thing.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
It is.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
Dupin was the Edgar character who smoke the pipe and
followed was followed around by his roommate, who also narrates
the story. So there's kind of a lot of him
in there. And you can tell that Arthur Conan doy
knew it because this is a quote from the very
first Sherlock Holmes novel. Watson says, it's simple enough as

(30:07):
you explain it, I said, smiling, you remind me of
Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such
individuals did exist outside of stories. Sherlock Holmes rose and
lit his pipe. No doubt, you think that you are
complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin.

Speaker 2 (30:21):
He observed.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow,
breaking in on his friend's thoughts with a Poe remark
after a quarter of an hour's silence, is really very
showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt,
but he was by no means such a phenomenon as
Poe appeared to imagine.

Speaker 4 (30:42):
Oh, when I got the blunderbuss, I know shop.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Hold on, yeah, three minute reload time.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
He did later acknowledge that he owed Poe a debt
and was like, yeah, I guess I'm really rich. Now,
so I can admit that I writ him off. Meg
ground Poe was a great writer in the Master of All.
The other inspiration was this medical professor, doctor Joseph Bell,
who Holmes his observational style was pulled straight from him,
who trained himself to identify accents of patients and studied

(31:15):
people's hands because callouses or other marks could help him
determine their occupation. Other clues included suntans and whether or
not a man removed his hat at the doctor's approach.
He called this the method, and Doyle saw this while
being like a mediocre medical student and his assistant.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
I mean, I guess it's impressive, I guess to them, right,
But for us, I'm like, that's only because there was
like fifteen fucking.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Jobs back there, right yeah, yeah? And you are you
a drunk? Are you a blacksmith? Do you are you
running from your dad? To you again? You know? You
a doctor? It's like how drunk was a w two profession?

Speaker 1 (31:54):
I could tell that this guy's the town drunk because
he's wearing a barrel, ringing a bell and screen. I mean,
incomprehensible nonsense. Yeah, so I will say that these are
the other than his cocaine use. My favorite parts of
Sherlock Holmes stories are his cold reading of people because

(32:17):
you just like you know, He's just like, I can
tell you rode your bike here by the way the
rubber is pushed forward on the soles of your shoes,
which is like impossible, but like you get the immediate
you know. One of them that I remember is like,
you're a laborer. I can tell by the way your
right hand is bigger than your left from like working
the muscles in it, which I could propose another explanation

(32:37):
for that, but in the story as I read it,
it actually like that part doesn't. I can tell you're
a Gooners on North London. Gooner London is red. But
like the cold reading doesn't often come that much in
like the cases are like plotted in a way that's

(33:00):
like kind of I guess the plotting of the cases
is the thing that, like so much of the rest
of mystery fiction has been built on top of.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
But right it's like procedural structure, kind of nailed.

Speaker 4 (33:12):
It's like you go in, you're introduced to the case,
you investigate, there's one red herring, there's a twist, and
then you're off to the races.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
To the end, and it's like yeah, yeah, yeah, and
it's like the cold read is proven right immediately, so
you don't really have time to like think that much
about it.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
The person's just like, by god, he's right. How did
you know that's the barrel that you're wearing, sir?

Speaker 1 (33:36):
You're actively pissing the barrel that you're wearing. It's also
it's hard not to mention that there's an unproven, yet
pervasive Internet rumor that doctor Bell the original Sherlock Holmes
or the doctor that Sherlock Holmes was based on. There's
a persistent rumor that he was related to Glenn Bell,
founder of Taco Bell.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
No fucking way.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
It's a rumor that we weren't able to substantiate. But
I can't not bring it up for.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
The conspiracy theorist. What's the tenuous connection that they even
they got the same last name.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
Oh, it's purely just that. It's not even like i'd
argue with that. Somebody went to America maybe or.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Glenn William Bell was a direct descendant of Joseph Bell,
a medical genius who lived in the early eighteen hundreds
and is remembered as the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's famous character Sherlock Holmes that came from I remember
the Inland Empire on Facebook.

Speaker 4 (34:32):
Yeah, yes, you know, all right, this has got to
be the basis for like a TV show called like
the Guacamolele Mysteries and right right, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
It has to be.

Speaker 4 (34:42):
In contemporary times, someone wakes up with the memories of
both the founder of Taco Bell and.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
I mean, hey, you're the writer, man, this is we're
all the writer today.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
All right, let's get to his cocaine use. Okay, thank god,
we don't want to spend twenty five minutes.

Speaker 4 (35:00):
So I remember they spent a lot of time talking
about his violin strings.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Now that we're talking about it, right, yeah, he did
play the violin violent.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
I feel like if we're ranking the most iconic parts
of him, it is the deer stalker, the pipe, and
then magnifying glass then yeah, then violin.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
Violin only because they didn't want us the versions that
we were given. They really didn't want us to concentrate
on the cocaine. But the cocaine, the hun is awfully hot.
Cocaine should be between hat and pipe. In my opinion,
that should be number one on the list.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
To Sherlock, it was by cocaine number one. Yeah yeah
in my hat. Let me get my other shit on
right first.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
It's in the second Holmes novel, The Sign of Four.
The detective tells Watson that he enjoys a seven percent
solution because he finds it so transcendentally stimulating and clarifying
to the mind, and he offers some cocaine to Watson.
She finds him with a needle in a arm. He's like, yeah, fuck, bro,
he's Watson's not into it.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
Oh, it's just cocaine. Okay, that's fine, Oh exactly. Oh
seven percent. Oh well then shit, yeah, let me tie
off as well.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
It's like the equivalent of a Marlborough light is merely
a seven percent solution of cocaine. But this was so
it started as like a miracle drug because they didn't
have anesthetic that wouldn't put you to sleep in a
way that you might not wake up from at the time,
and so they were like, this one is good because
the person stays awake. Well shit, actually they seem like

(36:37):
wide awake, easy, and so at this time they were
weren't just thrown in stories. There's an eighteen ninety six
recipe for homemade cold cure that consisted of ground coffee, menthol,
powdered sugar, and cocaine.

Speaker 4 (36:55):
I can't have that much sugar, man, Come on, yea, yeah,
that's easy.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Do a bummer, do a bump, eat a powder donut,
have a coffee, smoke a fucking menthol.

Speaker 4 (37:05):
Yeah, just never stop shitting.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
I guess he eventually kicks the cocaine habit. You see
it in the original stories.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
But like, is there an intervention episode? Well, like Watson's
kind of a fucking bummer and He's like immediately like
that stuff will kill you. Man. Ah fuck oh, I
say the fuck out of here.

Speaker 4 (37:30):
Yeah, So what you're what I'm hearing is there's a
gap in the cannon for Sherlock is in rehab the
most annoying person in rehab.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
Actually that's been written. Every every part of every possible
part of his life has been fleshed out. Where's a
nineteen seventy six film, The Seven Percent Solution, based on
the novel of the same name. In it, homes gets
a little help from Sigmund Freud in getting.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
Off of cocaine. Can't stop.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
He's otherfuckers cannot stop talking and thinking about Sherlock Holmes.
It's so wid like they have a fucking little church
that is just like putting pressure. Like it's like the
scientology approach where they have like all these famous writers
and thinkers who just spending time thinking about Sherlock Holmes
and like whether he was a real god or not.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Seven percent solution sounds like some story about like Reinhardt
Heydrich getting here. I know.

Speaker 1 (38:28):
But the other thing that I thought was notable from
these stories is like he's just it is kind of
law and order ish and that he's just like grabbing
shit from the headlines, like from around the world. So
like cocaine is one of those things because it's just
like this thing that everybody's doing or trying or taking out.
There's a lot of stories about like the wars, like

(38:51):
the evils of Empire coming home to roost, like people
who are injured in foreign wars, or like get like
fucked up in four More the KKK an appearance in
one which side they're the bad guys. So it's actually
because he's fiddling with them. He treats them like hydra

(39:13):
like they have their own like superpower essentially, where like
they keep killing people. In the story the Four Orange Pips,
people keep like dying mysteriously, and the KKK is able
to like always make it look like an accident. And
then like at the end, he's like chasing them, trying
to get them in London, and then like their boat
is seen shipwrecked at sea, and it's like the KKK

(39:35):
there they have an amazing superpower of like being able
to make deaths look like accidents.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
All these people of color committed suicide by hanging. Like
what the are they trying to say?

Speaker 4 (39:49):
You just you just need a hook, I guess, but yeah,
sort of opposite.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Yeah, yeah, he's just pulling ship from the headlines and
just putting them into these like very broad like good
versus evil.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
So he's like, KKK is this evil organization and woa
whoa whoa don't get political. Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, Hey,
get back to the cocaine jokes man.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
I think I think the KKA for a long time
like benefited from people just being like wha fuck man.
They are like so evil and like scary looking, and
that they like when you look at the actual documents
of the time, they're just like the biggest group of
like bundling, yeah, dipshit, like tripping over their own dicks

(40:32):
out of a sense of inferiority.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
That's every fascist of all time. Yeah, exactly. The fact
that we keep getting conquered by them is sort of
on us.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
It is pretty frustrating. His first novel was about Mormonism,
like the Mormon like that he didn't really know what
he was doing yet. In the first novel, it's called
a Study in Scarlet, which is a great title, but
the book is just like one half Sherlock Holmes's mystery,
and then the second half he just like slashes back
to the crime happening in Utah, and like Brigham Young

(41:02):
just like is a.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
Character who like comes in yeah yeah, yeah. So this
is fan fixed straight up. This is just like okay, okay,
who do we got who's in the news?

Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah yeah, it's like kind of news fan fix. So,
I mean maybe that's also what contributed to people think
he was real, is though, like he was throwing in
details of reality in a way that might have.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
But it's also it's just law and order too, just
ripped from the headlines, Well it's a law order free
like people suing you. Yeah yeah, but more in the
sense of like that's the thing where people are like,
I kind of this this is happening sort of ambiently
in the culture right now.

Speaker 4 (41:39):
This is even more interesting because of the depictions all
the law and order cast. Probably enough people believe they're
real people.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
That's true. Yeah, yeah, right, and be like I want
him lawyer, Like what is Marishka Targetay? What the fuck
did you just say to me?

Speaker 1 (41:56):
But speaking of ambiently in the culture, just a couple
of de tales of like what was going on in
the literary world at this time. So, after this first book,
which kind of sucks, is like half flashback to Utah,
place he's never been clearly like just written about this
church that he like doesn't understand at all. He's invited
to this dinner with a publisher and it's him and

(42:19):
Oscar Wilde and like a couple other writers and they're like, hey,
we found this like loophole where due to like publishing rights,
like we want to start publishing novels as like magazines
as basically the penny dreadful thing. And so they both
get assigned a novel, and Doyle turns around the second
Sherlock Holmes book, the first good one, the one where

(42:40):
it's introduced that he does cocaine, and Oscar Wilds turns
around the picture of Dorian Gray.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Wow. Yeah, in the same dinner. Damn.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
It feels like there's just something in the water at
this time, and it was Collar collaring cocaine. But I
want to circle back to the Dracula thing, because again,
these are the two fictional characters that have been portrayed
the most in the history of like film, like you know,

(43:12):
American film. But like these characters that are, as far
as I'm concerned, old, they're old as fuck.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:19):
So there's this book Holmes to Sherlock, terrible name, but
it's a good book where it's just tells the story
about the creation of Sherlock Holmes, like by all the
different people involved, like publishers, illustrators, Conan Doyle. There's like
an illustrator who gives us the cap. There's an actor
who gives us the pipe. A play years later gives

(43:41):
us Elementary, my dear Watson. But there's this moment around
the time that Doyle is like trying to keep Sherlock Dead,
where he is writing to this other author's manager, and
they like mentioned that this manager is also like trying
to get his own literary career off the ground and
had just published a book. And that manager's name is

(44:01):
fucking Bram Stoker. Oh the book he had just written
was Dracula. So like they Doyle was like, oh, by
the way, I read your book, fucking rips.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Good job.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
Good But like that made me like realize how weird
it is that like these two characters who go on
to be the most popular and successful fictional characters of
the twentieth century are invented at the same time, like
in the same place, basically like coming out of the
same same scene, which wouldn't be that weird if they
were like similar, but like they couldn't be more different

(44:36):
from each other, like their one creates like horror, and
like is like they just they're.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
Totally bunch the hockeys. I don't care about thank you.
I didn't even know Bram Stoker was irish.

Speaker 6 (44:48):
I was like Abraham Stoker, Yeah, I guess, I guess
it's incidence that cocaine was legal these days.

Speaker 1 (45:00):
Yeah, cocaine was just made legal and all of a sudden,
they were like, holy shit, I love.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
These fucking stories, dude. The one guy where the party
never ends Dracula.

Speaker 4 (45:09):
Yeah, I mean the the idea that like he wrote
a novel and however quick amount of time is like okay, yeah,
checks out.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
But there's this theory of history called like the axial
age that points out that basically, like Confucius and China,
the Buddha in India, all the famous philosopher like Plato
and Homer and like all these people, and then like
a bunch of the prophets in the Old Testament all

(45:42):
existed in the same century.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Like they just on in different parts of the world.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
But it was basically like all these people who like
created these forms of thinking, like we're all operating at
the same time essentially, and like different places.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
And it's just like I don't know.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
I think because of the way we understand history, we
like think of it as like individual characters operating, you know,
because we like understand things through story, and so we
view it as like interweaving stories. But like I feel
like there's also it's like harder to research and even
like speculated about because of the shape of like our

(46:25):
brains and how we like understand things through stories, but
like there's something to an understanding of things as like
that that was just the firmament of the time.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah, yeah, well, you know.

Speaker 4 (46:37):
Or it could just be like you know, presumably the
ratio of good brains doesn't change that much on Earth.
But I mean, it could just be like they were,
they preceded like an era of stability and prosperity within
which within which time their stories were lionized and perpetuated.

(46:57):
Whereas you know, Foda zero points zero just died in
a ditch.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
Yeah, exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
That's like it's we tend to like prefer the great
Man theory of history, but it's like a lot of
times it's just like a certain confluence of like time
and history and like culture dreaming up these things because
the moment is right, like human culture has been baked
to the point where this is a thing that they're
ready to happen, Like I feel like characters come out

(47:27):
of the oven.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
Because we also need that because the alternative is thinking
that the universe is random and that's too scary, so
you need it to be These men were great because
their actions made a difference in their fate.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, so we believe that Edison.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
We believe Edison invented the light bulb because even and
like ignore the fact that like three people invented the
light bulb at the same time in different places around
the world, and you know, because we just want it
to be like thing that we have control over.

Speaker 4 (47:57):
Elon Musk is the most epic bacan person who has
ever existed.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Yeah, we just needed to believe that. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
All right.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
I want to get to Sherlock Holmes's influence on criminology
and how we understand crime, because it's not so good.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
His greatest contribution is this maybe his most potent contribution.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
It could be so.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
First of all, like they advertised his first novel as
something detectives should all read, right, and people also like
why when they tell the story of this a lot
of the times they'll overstate, like how much like I
think English crime fighting was very much in the dark ages,

(48:42):
and like again he's jumping on things that are like
new in that world, like fingerprints and stuff like that.
But just to be clear, The first forensic manual, titled
The Washing Away of Wrongs, was published in China in
twelve forty seven, and in Germany in fifteen oh seven
there was a requirement to present and deserve medical evidence
in murder cases. It was just like they were just

(49:04):
kind of getting around to it. In England five decades
before Holmes debut the first English guideline, The King's College
Manual Principles of Forensic Medicine, were published in eighteen forty four.
But he like it wasn't it wasn't widely known or popular,
so he was just again good at seeing what was
happening in the world and weaving it into a compelling

(49:24):
story where it was like very basic good versus evil,
truth versus chaos.

Speaker 4 (49:28):
Well, it's also i mean, like the same reason a
lot of copaganda is at and medical dramas are popular
is that it's very comforting to people to think that
these people are both smart and good and right yeah right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
Yeah, and like and justice prevails on some level.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
Yeah, And otherwise you couldn't deal with society if you
didn't think that.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
Jam pointed out that like a lot of the things
that we think of as evidence have been already disproven.
There's this a criminology journal in the eighties that wrote
an article called Sherlock Holmes started it all about like
the like celebrating forensics and then goes on to describe

(50:12):
how a suspect's tooth marks were as valid as a fingerprint,
And in twenty ten's Sherlock Centric Elementary episode, he's testing
for bite marks and implying that they're as good as
DNA evidence. Bite marks are holy holly subjected.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Well, Sherlock did start it all in that modern policing
is entirely based off of like pseudoscience, that's post hawk
reasoning or whatever they want to decide of.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
So they did this test where they discovered that bites
produced twenty three entirely different marks, each one bearing little
resemblance to the rest. When they did, like tried used
twenty three, they did twenty three bites with the same mouth,
and then they had they also like asked somebody to
identify bitemarks from the same thing, and of the one

(51:04):
hundred cases they examined, the analysis reached unanimous agreement on
four four of a hundred.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Great hit rate.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
Yeah yeah, yeah, people should lose their freedom over that. Yes,
Bye marks still being used today. And so it's like
we talk about the CSI bias where like shows that are like, well,
you know, it bleeds into like how juris think about things.
They're like, well, there should be this sort of evidence,

(51:33):
and like that sort of evidence is exactly right, And
I feel like that whole idea of we can definitively
prove things with these tactics kind of starts with Sherlock Holmes.
I will just just a couple of the methods that
he uses in his stories. He was a believer in physiognomy,

(51:54):
which us structure to assess character and mental capacity for knowledge. Yeah,
the discredited racist pseudoscience involving cranial measurements that was used
as a justification for slavery in the Adventure of the
Blue Carbuncle. This is again, this is the guy that
fucking ts Eliot was, like, let us go study the

(52:15):
sacred Text. Holmes observes that a man must be highly
intellectual because he wears a big hat. I have no
doubt that I am very stupid, but I must confess
that I am unable to follow you. For example, how
did you deduce that this man was an intellectual? For answer,
Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right
over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose.
It is a question of cubic capacity. A man with

(52:37):
so large a brand must have something in it. Swish
can't argue without bonds. Was a genius.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
I mean he just he literally sounds like a cop today.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
Yeah exactly, yes, like that's just so smug and so certain.
But using pseudoscience. I want to get to my favorite
example in a second. He but just other methods he used.
He solved cases using graphology, which is the debunked beliefs
that handwriting can determine age, gender, health, and even nationality.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Well, hmmm, I might, I'm not. I feel like a
lot of Japanese boomers have the same way they write English.
I gotta say, yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
My mom and her sisters, all right, exactly the same
education system.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Yeah, you get product of an education system.

Speaker 3 (53:26):
Yeah, you can kind of tell, because I'm like, man,
every it's funny man of the Japanese feel of a
certain age.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
They have the exact same path.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
I've been writing, and my dad's head writing is so
different because well yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. Not to say
that they'd be like they'd be like this guy's from Michigan.
Yeah right, yeah, yeah, it's that old Michigan chicken scratch
he's got.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
At one point, he's able to solve the case after
concluding that two sets of handwriting were made by blood relative.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Yeah, like these people are related.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
Oh yeah, that's so funny because I remember in junior
high being the way my friend wrote because I thought
it looked cooler too. Yeah, it is so funny how
those things, like when I used to do rather than
dot my eyes dress circles.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
I mean, it.

Speaker 4 (54:09):
Has like a the grain of truth is you are
taught to write, and if you have similar writing as someone,
there's something was in common at some point.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:19):
Yeah, but to be like this is a forty one
year old black as man, it's yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
Nearly a quarter of the twenty six hundred and one
people who have been exonerated since nineteen eighty nine were
wrongfully convicted based on false or misleading forensic evidence like
bite marks. Also what just another kind of example of
his deductive reasoning is that he explores the theory that
the moods of dogs could be passed down by the
moods of owners. So that's again, So I do just

(54:48):
want to stop here and talk about the detective Giuliano
Milini from the Amanda Knox documentary. Have you guys seen
the Amanda Knox documentary? His existence makes me very suspicious
that the history of crime and punishment is just littered
with complete idiots ruining the lives of innison people because
they read Sherlock Holmes and like believed it a little

(55:09):
too hard. So he's the main guy who's like driving
the prosecution of Amanda Knox. At one point, he deduces
that the killer must have been a woman because the
body is covered by a blanket, and only a woman
would have covered the body because I guess, like her
delicate nature would prevent her from wanting to look at
what she'd just done.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
Yeah, And like.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
I remember at the time being like that sort of
bullshit sounds familiar. And then later in the documentary they
show this like b roll of him and he's like
wearing a hunting jacket, smoking this big Sherlock Holmes pipe,
and I was like, ah, yes, yes, of course, But
I just I feel like the past one hundred and

(55:52):
fifty years and it's not like just Sherlock Holmes obviously,
like he gave rise to a lot of detective fiction
and even a story structure where it's like he discovered
an incredible like a thing that would be impossible for
him to know, and then he explains like exactly how
he did it, right, Like, I think the thing that's
seductive about Sherlock Holmes is the thing that is seducing

(56:15):
these dipshits.

Speaker 4 (56:16):
Yeah, it's also like it's dipshits will gravitate towards law
enforcement who are extra dipshitty, and like this makes them
feel like they can do a thing, which is you know,
the whole thesis.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
I guess, so what we've been talking about.

Speaker 4 (56:29):
But it's just like, yeah, like a real an actual
smart person, if j'lock Holmes were actually smart, you know
you pepper this with well, I suspect this. I don't
know for sure, but like it's the crew is confidence
that's like yeah, and then passed down.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
He just ends up becoming like a pickup artist for cops.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
Yeah, the way he can just look a to B
two C crime solved due fuck and the hat.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
He's a mystery artist and.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
People would consult Arthur Conan Doyle on real crimes, like
the police would occasionally be like, well, sir, you are
obviously our greatest mind. It should be noted that he
later became a major proponent of spiritualism, and he was
famously taken in by the Cotton Glee Fairies hoax, where
it was like somebody just did like, yeah, he made

(57:38):
the place. So he went to the Strand, the place
that published the Sherlock Holmes things, and was like, I
demand that you publish these photos. He's like, the recognition
of their existence will jolt to the material twentieth century
mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud and
will make it admit that there is a glamour and
a mystery to life.

Speaker 4 (57:59):
See, this is the building on culture thing, because at
least he knew to keep his mouth shut about trans
people more than the pervasive culture sprit.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
Yeah, and this was the hill that he died on
that he was wrong about. Was just yeah, like man
ghosts a real man there out here. He like, spiritualism
is the thing. Uh, thank you, superducer. Catherine, just put
the photograph in the chat. It's it's pretty pretty, uh

(58:30):
pretty convinsing to.

Speaker 3 (58:33):
You'd put your parent in a home if they fucking
sent you this picture earnestly now he'd like.

Speaker 4 (58:39):
Well it is like such a cute little art project,
but it is crazy to be like this is real
on I guess Victorian Facebook.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
His uh, his family like went on to really dive
into the spiritualism like that that was the main legacy.
Like his kids lived their lives like taking order is
from his ghost via medium, So like they would like
all go to a medium and be like, father, what
should we do? Like you'd tell them like when whether
they should have surgery or not, like when to get married.

(59:11):
And then like one of them was like marrying like
a Kardashian of the time, and she was like it
was crazy, Like his wife just was obviously just telling
them whatever she wanted. She was like, your father said
via the medium that you actually can't have that money
to buy a real god. Yeah yeah, But his sons
were just like rich fuck boys.

Speaker 3 (59:32):
Hell yeah, stupid asses, all of them.

Speaker 4 (59:37):
I mean, I think obviously the pervasive lesson in all
of this is money poisons your brain so quickly.

Speaker 1 (59:42):
Yeah right, like generational wealthy Yeah yes, but yeah, so
just the idea that they all wanted to believe in
his deduction, right, that which is a deductively valid argument
is one in which can't be the case that the
premises are true and the conclusion false, and Sherlock would

(01:00:06):
use a combination of induction and abduction and then infer
truths and make logical guesses. But this has subsequently been
dubbed the Homesian fallacy, which is a logical error of
basing a conclusion on the belief that you have eliminated
all of their possibilities. But everybody has said.

Speaker 4 (01:00:25):
Hey, this goes back to one of my first times
on But this is just a variant of the gish
gallupy galloper say enough bullshit, Yes that people can't really
follow or it takes too long to debunka and then.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
You're not galloping his way into literary history. In every
one of these stories, he's relate as well. He's, of course.

Speaker 2 (01:00:45):
Surelock, this was a hate crime. This person was lynched,
node was a suicide.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
This person was very mad at Christianity as they burnt
this cross on their own lawn. Unbelievable, unbelievable the things
that you see, Watson.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
But yeah, the explanation the human being doesn't exist. Who
could eliminate all possible alternatives that I'd say. This is
especially true of Holmes, who was weirdly specific in his knowledge.
I think scientists would call him spectrmy today, but for

(01:01:22):
a scientific term. But there's a part in one of
the stories where Watson is like, well, of course the
Earth revolves around the Sun. And he's like, not only
did I not know that, I'm also going to immediately
forget it because that information doesn't help me solve my crimes.

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):
Oh yes, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:40):
He was just like, oh, I only care about the
things that help this plot, specifically for that's two hundred pages.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Yeah, I kind of remember that vibe.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
They did that briefly in the cumber Batch one. There's
like something he doesn't know, and the whole thing is
it is very like phrenology ask because it's like there's
just limited capacity of this dome.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
You know, I have big hat, big thinking, you know. Yeah,
there's this.

Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
One example in one of the like I only read
reread three but like they're just full of so much bullshit.
There's one part where he's like, well, it's as obvious
to me is the fact that your window is on
the right side of your room Watson. And Watson's like,
and he's like, well, of course I knew, Like basically

(01:02:30):
because you're the direction that you face when you shave
must be this way and because of the direction of
the sun at this time of year. And Watson's like, God, damn, man,
you're so smart, but that would like that it doesn't
even make if you think about it for a second,
Like you also have to know what direction his sink

(01:02:50):
is faced, Like what direction he's facing, Like.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Nah, no, you don't mirror. It's just smart sounding bullshit.

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
But like, I feel like, in the same way we
always talk about how easy it was to lie in
the pre internet age, Like you go back even fucking
a century from there and you're out here and be like, oh, yeah, dude,
I can tell your fucking bathrooms.

Speaker 2 (01:03:15):
Cut the thing over here.

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
They're like, oh my god, this guy's so confidently saying
this bullshit, yet we don't collectively have the savvy to
immediately identify it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
He's just like a very impressive con man.

Speaker 4 (01:03:26):
Yeah well, or I mean, it's just like these books
happen to capture the times he was right, sure, exactly, Okay,
that's that's the sherlock we don't have.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
It's the nine hundred and ninety nine, like thousand times
where he does that.

Speaker 3 (01:03:38):
Some people are like, nah, I just I don't think
so many that sounds like bullshit to me.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Are you okay, man, you're like track marks on your arm?
It's everything, all right?

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
Yeah, dude, sorry, I'm only I'm down to seven percent now.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
Yeah, so yeah, I'm weaning myself.

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
I allowed to have down to Well, how if you
boil it a little bit before you do. One thing
that I do think, you know, if we think of
like an icon's kind of reputation being a thing that

(01:04:15):
kind of comes down through like sort of a cultural
natural selection, one thing that I think was probably beneficial
is that right as he's being published, Jack the Jack
the Ripper crimes are happening, and so people are, yeah,
they want a superhero, Yeah, they want a superhero. It's
one of the most famous unsolved crimes is happening. So

(01:04:38):
it's like creating the need for Sherlock Holmes in reality.
So like, you know, just all all the things that
you know, he gets designed and then redesigned and made
like more and more iconic. He has the most famous
unsolved crime of maybe the century happen as he's becoming popular,

(01:05:00):
and so he has like and then he has like
whatever weird ingredients were in the firmament of like making
culture ready for timeless icons.

Speaker 4 (01:05:09):
Yeah, people just walked to I was actually thinking about
because I think my probably not my I don't know
if he's my favorite, but my most like watched Sherlock
Holmes variant is House. Yes, And if you think about House, really,
the fiction there is imagine your insurance approving four doctors working,

(01:05:31):
just fucking imagine that four doctors all the time, right, Yeah,
I mean all they're thinking about it was opioids, right
for doctor?

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
Yeah, Yeah, that's right. He did have a he did
have a pill problem, which was appropriate to his time,
you know, but doctor, Like the pitch for a House
was like, but what if Sherlock Holmes was a doctor,
which is like, well, the original Charlote Holmes was a
doctor I came from.

Speaker 3 (01:05:57):
Yeah, so you're just talking about medical diagnoses right now?

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
Yeah, whoa dude, what if he was like a doctor
and detective.

Speaker 3 (01:06:06):
Yeah, that's kind of the gig man, he's figuring out
what's wrong with you for good.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
There have been like a bunch of crossovers with like
weird Charlock Holmes in Dallas where somebody wrote a book
in which Sherlock Holmes was there.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
The JF.

Speaker 1 (01:06:22):
Which JFK sassinag is a great example of the false
notion that like, you know, you look at a thing
and you can figure out's like actually they so many people.
Everyone has looked at this thing and has gotten worse
at understanding what has happened.

Speaker 2 (01:06:37):
Like I feel like.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
The umbrella man would have really thrown Sherlock for a
loop from the guy who liked opened an umbrella on
a sunny day in Dallas right before he got his
head blown off.

Speaker 2 (01:06:48):
And I knew he must have been from an upper latitude,
perhaps Russian in nature, due to his need for shade
from the intense sun.

Speaker 4 (01:06:56):
It's fucking Dracula, dog, you would have died Cracula.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
And then he's also crossed over with Batman, which I
will say Batman is the other side of the coin,
like proving how hard it is to write this sort
of ship because Batman like is always like the world's
greatest detective and I've never once seen in a movie
or like in a comic book or anything did do
a good job. Like yeah, it really feels like a

(01:07:26):
self ascribed nickname.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Detective you got your self proclaimed you got your girl killed.
Broh shit, god damn it again.

Speaker 4 (01:07:41):
He also mostly is like, well, I'm a billionaire and
I built this thing that just tells me the answer.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
Right, right, right, yeah, you know most yeah, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
And then we of course come to uh sexuality in erotica,
which people have lot, so he is kind of asexual
throughout the stories and in most of the iterations, but
some people were detecting some sexual chemistry between him and Watson.

(01:08:13):
So there was a nineteen seventy one paperback. So Jay
mcnap went to our writer researcher went to this room
at the Toronto Public Library that is like the Sherlock
Holmes Room, and it has it's like set up to
look like Sherlock's study, and it just has like all
like just a room full of the sort of like
literature that we're talking about, not just Sherlock Holmes stories,

(01:08:36):
but like stories about Sherlock Holmes. And he found this one,
The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Where else are you
going to find sentences like my own erection was threatening
to rend the rugged tweet of my Breeches. Yeah, it
was actually credited to Jay Watson, but it was actual

(01:09:00):
written by a prolific erotic novelist.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
Larry Townsend, but queer Holmes Watson fanfic took off with
the Benedict Cumberbatch BBC Sherlock Show. Oh sure, oh after
that okay.

Speaker 1 (01:09:14):
Yeah, yeah, Bennett Cumberbatch that it's always like one of
them is tired. One comes back from work, the other's horny,
a lump appears in his trousers, and then they're at it.
It's usually me getting it. I'm biting Watson's dog tags.
He felt like he was like trying to make it
sound dismissive and then like kind of got carried away.

Speaker 3 (01:09:35):
Yeah, he's whispering in my ear. I'm winding that he's
always leaving dishes in the sink that he's not washing.

Speaker 4 (01:09:40):
It's just got that betteredic cumber Batch. One really leans
into Watson's war.

Speaker 1 (01:09:47):
Yeah, well, so the original Watson was like a war injured,
like former soldier had just returned from Afghanistan to show
how much things had changed.

Speaker 4 (01:09:56):
Yeah, well right, because that's what they do in the
show is still gets injured in Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
Yeah yeah, but I think that's a good place to
leave it. Guys.

Speaker 3 (01:10:07):
Uh, dude, I want to party with this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:10:11):
Seems like a good time. Yeah, I will say.

Speaker 4 (01:10:13):
No, it's like that Apple story about like this is
why you realize.

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):
This, Yeah, this is why you need to stop doing cocaine.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
This is why I sound like, Yeah, I just want
to see the guys shoot up cocaine and be like,
let's go fucking.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Solve a crime. Like what check out.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
I can tell from the way you're standing, like this
guy's these guys fucking nuts.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
Dude, let me video this ship. Yeah, he's like taking
apart and putting back together the CRS. Half the time
he's jacking off in that study.

Speaker 1 (01:10:49):
I don't I will say I do think a part
of the appeal is like how fucking cozy that study looks, though,
Like it looks so nice in there with that five
and like it just it has a little look about it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:03):
And the cocaine. Okay, cocaine feels warm. You're margling at
the marveling at the superpowers of the KKK. Yes, exactly
how did they do it? Watson? Damn andrew T, thank
you so much for joining us. Where can people find you?
Follow you? I don't know, man, don't follow me? Produce
how to find me.

Speaker 4 (01:11:22):
Yes, yeah, give your name the entrew Ty on social media.
But we've been enjoying this show Starter Trek on Suboptimal
Pods dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
Yeah, it's really fun. We've been watching Star Trek episodes.

Speaker 4 (01:11:35):
My coast Towny Newsome was a writer on Starfleet Academy
so and an actor, and she was in.

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
Lower you got it, Yeah, the funniest. That was a
bad way of explaining who she is. Anyway, we never
brought up the fact that you're related to share Lock Holmes. Well,
I'm related to the Chinese Sherlock Holmes.

Speaker 4 (01:11:53):
Yeah, that's the only the only t slash D in
Chinese literary history is basically Chinese shirlock home homes Judge D.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
And he is very similar methods tog dynasty.

Speaker 4 (01:12:06):
Well yeah, his whole thing is he he does all
the deduction ship but because he is like an imperial magistrate,
most of the plots end with and then I had
the suspect torture that he confessed.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
More of a modern American Yeah, yeah, more accurate to
real policing. Yeah, yeah, nyp D. Yes, there it is. Okay,
miles where can people find you? At Miles of Gray?

Speaker 3 (01:12:32):
You know, do you know the other shows which I
got in Footy and I talk about soccer.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
There, which is also English, like Charlotte, There you go.

Speaker 3 (01:12:40):
And like Michael Carac Yeah, Michael Coric Yeah, he took
the free points on us.

Speaker 5 (01:12:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:46):
Bro, I'm going to be right back to tell you
the stuff that I forgot to mention in this conversation
the notebook dunk.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
I'll be back in a.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
Minute, all right. That was our conversation with Andrew T
about Sherlock Holmes on the Spectrum off his ass on cocaine.

(01:13:18):
Thanks to Miles and Andrew and to our researcher Jam McNabb.

Speaker 2 (01:13:22):
This is the No No, No notebook.

Speaker 1 (01:13:25):
Dun't, where I talk about the things that I forgot
to mention or wished I had more time to talk about.
One thing that I wish I had more time to
talk about is the axial age. That idea that I
mentioned that is implied by the axial age. I guess
that big developments in history are driven not by individual men,

(01:13:48):
but by these large movements that happened because the time
has just come, you know, the zeitgeist is ready for
that invention or our artistic movement or philosophical idea. The
book where Karl Jaspers introduces this idea is called The
Origin and Goal of History. Like world history is just

(01:14:12):
this one movement working toward a singular goal, even though
it feels completely disconnected. That's at least the thesis, or
a helpful way, he thinks for looking at history, the
world history, we're all working towards one goal in various
places without realizing it. There's a similar idea in Vonnegut's

(01:14:36):
The Sirens of Titan, but in that case the goal
is like being beamed into our head or some shit
I forget exactly. But anyways, the other place that that
idea had occurred to me, and when I first started
reading about the axial age again, was doing the research
for the Marilyn Monroe episode, and I was like thinking

(01:14:57):
about the fact that all these mysterious deaths happen and
in the US in the nineteen sixties while doing the
Marilyn Monroe episode, like she has this mysterious death than
the Kennedys, then Martin Luther King Junior, and Malcolm X.
I think I'm getting these out of order, Elvis John Lennon,
but it's just this rash of young, beautiful, important people

(01:15:20):
dying violently or mysteriously.

Speaker 2 (01:15:24):
That I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
In that case, it could just be the CIA killing
a bunch of people that they were scared of. But yeah,
I don't know they In this case, I do think
it was interesting because I was researching already and kept
seeing this idea that like Sherlock, Holmes and Dracula are
neck and neck and way out in front is the
two fictional characters that have been depicted the most in
the history of film, and they were invented by two

(01:15:49):
guys in the same year, in the same area, the
same town, and invented before film has even been invented.
And then they go on to don twentieth century cinema
just weird. Interesting. One more historical anecdote for the notebook
dump that I wanted to hit so I wanted to

(01:16:10):
make sure I wasn't being unfair to the legacy of Sherlock.
I had some anecdotal stuff about cops thinking they could
Sherlock their way into solving crimes, which is always dangerous
because cops are often the most confident about the stuff
they're wrong about. They're strong and wrong, and you generally

(01:16:32):
can't tell them shit, but I didn't have like a
direct link between Sherlock and modern cops. So I asked
JM mcknab our researcher to see what he could find.
First of all, he did great work on this doc.
And second of all, he did come back with first
that article on forensics that I think I mentioned in

(01:16:54):
the conversation that starts like I think the article starts
Sherlock started at all, and then go into like how
bite analysis and stuff like that is infallible, turns out
very fallible, highly subjective, terrible form of evidence. And then
he came back with the story that I'm about to
tell you about Sherlock and Conan Doyle being sort of

(01:17:17):
spiritual ancestors to what is essentially the main bad guy
in our.

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
Iconograph series so far, the FBI.

Speaker 1 (01:17:28):
I feel like, across all the different stories the FBI
keeps coming up, they hated and fucked with everyone from
Einstein to Marilyn Monroe as soon as those people had
a progressive idea essentially. So anyways, here's the story. Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, when he wasn't begrudgingly writing absolute classics

(01:17:52):
of the mystery genre, was out in the world, hanging
out with other famous people and chasing ghosts some fairies,
but hanging out with other famous people, and at some
point he meets this famous self promoting private detective William J. Burns,
and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle falls for Burns's bullshit hook

(01:18:16):
line and sinker so. Burns is a former member of
the Secret Service who left the Secret Service to start
his own detective agency. Made a name for himself after
being hired to solve the nineteen to ten Los Angeles
Times bombing, which was bombed due to the editor's anti
union agenda. Burns solved that case via blatantly illegal means

(01:18:41):
kidnapping one conspirator and keeping him in a Chicago house
for a week in order to extract a confession without
having to quote waste time in fighting habeas corpus proceedings,
and then he tracks down the other suspects to Indiana
and brings them to California without any legal authority, and
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, presumably buying into whatever smart police

(01:19:05):
work he's retconned onto that story instead of just being like, yeah,
so I kidnapped them and scared them until they told
me what I wanted to hear. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
is like, Wow, this is America's Sherlock Holmes. Burns is
also brought in to work on the Wall Street bombing
of nineteen twenty doesn't solve that, but what he does

(01:19:28):
is aggressively hype the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
called him the American Sherlock Holmes. Just aggressively self mythologizing
his own abilities writing crue crime stories based on his
cases for detective magazines, starring in a silent movie about
one case called the five Million Dollar Counterfeiting Plot, which

(01:19:50):
included a cameo from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. He
eventually becomes the head of the Bureau of Investigation in
nineteen twenty one, which is soon to be the FBI,
so he is like the proto JG.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
Hoover.

Speaker 1 (01:20:07):
Unfortunately for him, he is forced to resign in disgrace
in nineteen twenty four due to his role in the
Teapot Dome scandal, which was just basically the hard hearting
administration selling naval reserves to private oil companies. But Burns
literally had his agents following Democrats who tried to stop

(01:20:28):
them reading their mail listening to their phone calls in
order to try and dig up potential ammunition for smear campaign.
So yeah, basically, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle co signed a
guy who was essentially the proto Jaeger Hoover, who went
on to be the main antagonist of many of the

(01:20:49):
lives that we've been covering in our Iconograph series. By
the way, speaking of Conan Doyle befriending problematic American detectives,
he also met William Pickerton and was so impressed with
him that he turned to the final Holmes novel, The
Valley of Fear, into a pro Pinkerton anti union story
inspired by their infiltration of the Molly Maguire's So not

(01:21:13):
on the best side of history, but very entertaining. That's
gonna be it for Sherlock cool character indirectly responsible for
a lot of bad shit. If I missed anything on
this or any other icons that you think is interesting,
by all means, let me know in the discord or
on Twitter, and I'll mention it in these notebook dumps

(01:21:38):
in the future. Up next, we have an icon who
is no friend to the police. Hell he once pulled
up from the logo and shot two of them for
harassing a black man. Next week, Miles, Molly Lambert and
I take a look at Tupac Shakur. It's a very

(01:21:58):
long one, a lot of great shit in there, so
hopefully tune.

Speaker 2 (01:22:03):
Back in for that one.

Speaker 1 (01:22:04):
I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I'd
enjoyed researching it, and I'll talk y'all next week.

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
Bye bye,