Episode 317: Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:21):
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Speaker 3 (01:00):
Support for our Hear of Sherlock Everywhere comes from MX Publishing,
with the largest catalog of new Sherlock Holmes books in
the world. New novels, biographies, graphic novels, and short story
collections about Sherlock Holmes. Find them at MX publishing dot com.

Speaker 4 (01:18):
And listeners like you who support us on Patreon or
substack sign up for exclusive benefits at Patreon dot com,
slash I Hear of Sherlock or I Hear of Sherlock
dot substack dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
You're gearing up for a big book tour.

Speaker 5 (01:36):
Uh Yes, August twenty six Sherlock Holmes and the real
thing comes out.

Speaker 6 (01:42):
And then I'm on the road for a month yep.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
For eleven states. You're going to eleven states. You're spending
a whole month on the road.

Speaker 6 (01:50):
I'm in quite a state myself.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
Are you a good traveler? You can't possibly take a
lot of luggage with you when you travel, do.

Speaker 6 (01:59):
You, aside from the steamer trunks?

Speaker 5 (02:02):
No?

Speaker 3 (02:06):
I Hear Sherlock Everywhere, Episode three hundred and seventeen, Sherlock
Holmes and the Real Thing. I heard of Sherlocke very
well since Junie gave as drong Man. In a world
where it's always eighteen ninety five. It's I Hear of

(02:27):
Sherlock Everywhere. A podcast for devotees of mister Sherlock Holmes,
the world's first unofficial consulting detective. I've heard of you before,
Oh Holmes, the Medland Holmes, the Busybody Homes, the Scotland
Yard Jacket Office, the Game's afoot As we interview authors, editors, creators,

(02:51):
and other prominent Sherlockians on various aspects of the great
detective in popular culture.

Speaker 6 (03:00):
Go to Fess.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Sensational developments have been reported, So join your hosts Scott
Monty and Bert Wolder as they talk about what's new
in the world of Sherlock Holmes.

Speaker 5 (03:13):
You could have a time.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
I'm Mill Curtis. This is I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.
Now here are your hosts, Scott Marty and Bert Walder. Oh,
thank you as always, mister Bill Curtis. This is I
Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, The first podcast for Sherlock Holmes
devots where it's always eighteen ninety five. I'm Scott Monty,

(03:39):
I'm Bert Walder, and Bert I don't care what they say. You, you, sir,
are the real thing.

Speaker 4 (03:47):
Thank you very much, thank you very much. They tried
to replace my natural sugar with corn syrup, but I
said no.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
That would have left you very saccharin.

Speaker 4 (03:58):
Yes, want any of that?

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Well, I'm glad to have the real Burt. Well, will
the real Bertwolder please stand up? Remember that?

Speaker 4 (04:08):
To tell the truth, what an interesting show. Three people
would show up and then they would all say, you know,
my name is got Hanne Wilson.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
Oh, my name is Gohan Wilson.

Speaker 4 (04:18):
No, I'm got Hanne Wilson, and then the idiot pant,
well not the idiot panel. The panel would then try
to decide. But boy, can you imagine doing a show
like that today when somebody would take.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
Out their phone and say Dan Wilson is dead.

Speaker 4 (04:34):
Well, yes, they would say that too.

Speaker 6 (04:36):
That would be great.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
It would be like a weekend at Bernie's.

Speaker 6 (04:39):
It would be a five.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
Given Dan Wilson's sense of humor, he would love that.

Speaker 4 (04:44):
Well, maybe maybe I think you'd much prefer to be
still around. But however, it would be like a ninety
second be a TikTok game show. You can get Bud Collier.
Little known fact of course, that the fellow who used
to be the Master of Sarah Aimonies to tell the truth.
But Kyllier was Superman in the nineteen forties on the

(05:05):
radio program.

Speaker 6 (05:06):
Was he really?

Speaker 4 (05:07):
Oh yeah, that was his thing where you know Clark
Kent sort of talked like this, but then this looks.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
Like a job for Superman.

Speaker 4 (05:15):
You know, he would change his voice when he became Superman.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
Fantastic had a good day super Man. Well, we have
really as always when we have this interview subject on,
we have a great interview lined up for you today.
It is with none other than Nicholas Meyer, a prolific

(05:39):
and long term Sherlockian pastiche author is his latest book
is out Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing has to
do with art and forgery, and it actually involves a
really great discussion about the value of con whether it's

(06:00):
written content or visual content, particularly with respect to our
modern world and the advent of artificial intelligence. Just a
fascinating discussion with Nick and as always, he knows his
Sherlock Holm. So stay tuned for that momentarily. We also

(06:20):
have a review of upcoming events and the second half
of October I think it is of Sherlockian Society events,
so you want to stay tuned for that. And Madeline
Kennonez is back with her Chance of Listening segment where
she looks at a Sherlockian podcast and gives you a

(06:42):
little more information on it. And of course the canonical couplet,
where we give you two lines of poetry and ask
you to solve for which Sherlock Holm story it is
that we are talking about. And the winner of this
episode's couplet will receive a copy of Nick Myer's book

(07:03):
Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing. So great incentives there
to participate. And speaking of participation, we do have a
couple of ways that you can do that as far
as supporting the show. Perhaps you'd like to listen to
ad free versions of the show, or perhaps you'd like
to benefit from additional bonus content, whatever your drive is,

(07:26):
we do have options available on Patreon and on substack.
We have, for as little as a dollar a month
over on Patreon, the ability for you to sign up
there and listen to the show there and participate in
the community and over on substack for as little as
five dollars a month, and you can subscribe annually too.

(07:48):
That'll bring down the cost by at least ten percent.
You'll have the option there, so check it out and
see what works for you.

Speaker 4 (07:57):
And what if I wanted to be a founding member.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
Oh, I'm so glad you asked that we do have
the ability if you'd like to become a founding member
of I hear of Sherlock everywhere on substack. That costs
two hundred and twenty one dollars and gives you all
of those benefits, plus we get to shout out your
name as a way of thanking you. And in this case,

(08:24):
Lisa Bevilaqua recently joined us as a founding member over
on substack. So Lisa, thank you so much for your
generosity there. I know it's lovely to see you every
year at the Speckled Band dinner and Friends of Ernie Adler,
and we encourage other people to join Lisa like that.
But of course it's not just on substack. People can

(08:47):
walk up to you and just hand you a check, right, Well,
that's right.

Speaker 6 (08:51):
You know.

Speaker 4 (08:52):
You can avoid friends, you can avoid all of that
you know, typing and searching and putting in numbers and
all of that irritating stuff. Just find me and give
me a check made out here of Sherlock everywhere for
two hundred and twenty one dollars, and you will become

(09:12):
a founding member. And that means, of course, you get
the key to the locker where we keep all the
episodes and the jacket, and our thanks and a regular
call out not just on this show, but every night
before we go to sleep, saying your name in deep gratitude.
And today I'm happy to add Charles Blankstein to the

(09:34):
list of our founding members. And when I told Charles
Charlie that there was such a thing as this founding
member arrangement, he said he didn't realize the program had
been lost. But we know better, and now thanks to
Lisa and Charles and Charlie, we are found.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
So there you are well. The learned Societies are in
class again. It is now gosh, we are up to
what the second half of October. We use Ron Fish's
very handy and useful Sherlockian Calendar, which you can find

(10:17):
at sherlockianclendar dot com, as the guide to our discussions
here and you can find out more about any of
these particular events by either emailing or clicking on the
links of the contact person that Ron lists on the
Sherlockian calendar. And if you have items that you'd like

(10:39):
to add to the calendar, you just email Ron. His
contact information is available right there on the site. So
as we head into the second half of October, starting
with the seventeenth Bird.

Speaker 4 (10:55):
Well before we do that, don't you want to give
a shout out to something in September?

Speaker 3 (11:00):
Absolutely right, I thought you might.

Speaker 4 (11:02):
I mean, this is something that involves a friend of ours.
This is and absolutely fabulous BBC. You've heard of them,
BBC they have a World Book Club And on the
sixth of September, Friends, in just a few days, there's
going to be a program on Radio four and it'll
be rebroadcast a large number of times, and of course

(11:24):
you can listen to this online about the Hound of
the Baskervilles, and it features Harriet Gilbert, who is the
continuing host of the World Book Club, but she's joined
by the crime writer Val McDermot and our friend Mark Jones,
doctor Mark Jones, who's a co presenter of the doings
of Doyle Podcast and editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal,

(11:49):
and they're going to be talking about the Hound of
the Baskervilles and Holmes's influence on crime and detective fiction.
And that was recorded during the Edinburgh So this is
going to be a real treat and we wanted you
to know about it.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Yeah, that's a great call. We will have a link
specifically to that program in the show notes, so you
can check that out as well. So turning to turning
the page of the calendar to October. On the seventeenth
of October and Saint Charles, Missouri, or as the locals
call it, Missouri, the Harpooners of the c Unicorn have

(12:26):
a meeting. You can check them out at Harpooners dot
WordPress dot com and Jonathan Basford is your contact there.

Speaker 4 (12:34):
Yes, And then on the eighteenth, I've got to tell
you that on the eighteenth in Providence, Rhode Island, my
Sherlock Holme Society, the Cornishars are going to be having
a luncheon. On the calendar, it's his Fall dinner meeting.
But I'm going to be correcting that and I'm the
contact for that, and we are going to be gathering
the Cornishars to salute the case of the Engineer's Thumb.

(12:59):
And we have a very very exciting leon Sterndale invited
speaker and we're going to be at Fleming's Steakhouse. So
if you're in the Providence, Rhode Island area on Saturday,
October eighteenth, let me know. I'll give you an invite.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
Wow, I didn't know doctor leon Sterndale was still inviting people.

Speaker 4 (13:19):
He's accepting new patients.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yes, very good.

Speaker 6 (13:22):
He is well.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
Also on the eighteenth, if you can't get anywhere and
you do have a computer, there's a virtual meeting, a
study group that the Norwegian Explorers is hosting. You find
more information out at Norwegianexplorers dot org.

Speaker 4 (13:40):
And it's such a popular day because in Nashville, Tennessee,
also on October eighteenth, the Nashville Scholars of the Three
Pipe Problem are also having a luncheon meeting. Jeff Stewart
is the contact there, and find out more at Nashville
Scholars dot com.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Now we've got a three fur On the following day,
October nineteenth, let's go across the country, starting in the
northeast in Keene, New Hampshire. The Manattnock Sherlockians are having
a meeting and our friend Anna Barons is their contact.
And then over in the Midwest in Madison, Wisconsin, the

(14:17):
Notorious Canary Trainers are holding their meeting and find out
more about them at the Comics Worth Reading website slash
Canary Trainers. And finally out in Seattle, Washington, David Hougan
is your contact with the Sound of the Baskervilles as
they are hosting a meeting on that Sunday, October nineteenth.

Speaker 4 (14:41):
And Monday October twentieth, Columbia, Maryland, our friend Matt Hall
will be having a dinner meeting an actual in person
dinner meeting of Watson's Tin Box of Ellicott City, and
find out more from Matt or Watson's tin Box dot
org all right.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
On October twenty first, the Sherlock Holme Society of Cape
Fear is having a virtual meeting. You can find out
more about that and sign up at Sherlock Holmesociety dot
com and.

Speaker 4 (15:13):
The Afghan Perceivers on October twenty three a virtual meeting.
Brian Wilson is your contact for that at Tulsa Dash
Sherlock dot org.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
Right, and then the let's see, we're up to.

Speaker 4 (15:32):
Two more on the twenty third.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
Yeah, oh my gosh, look at this. There's a backup
of meetings. It's a three car pile up. The Handsome
Wheels Dinner Meeting Columbia, South Carolina Handsome Wheels dot com.
And oh, maybe you could tell us more about this
Bert the Five Orange Pips. This is an invitation only
dinner on the twenty third.

Speaker 4 (15:56):
Well, yes, and it's an invitation only dinner, and we
wish them well and will not tell will not give
you a contact for that, because you can't go unless
you're unless you're invited.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yeah, if you don't know about it, you're not invited.

Speaker 5 (16:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (16:13):
If it's a.

Speaker 4 (16:13):
Mystery to you, then keep it that buddy. But the
next day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the twenty fourth of October,
the Fall Dinner Meeting of the Sons of the Copper Beaches.
This is also invitation only. But Mary al Caro is
now doing a terrific job with leading and expanding the

(16:35):
Sons of the Copper Beaches, so you can at least
get yourself on perhaps a waiting list by pinging her
a note. But it's the Sons of the Copper Beaches
in Philadelphia on October twenty.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
Fourth, excellent on the twenty fifth, that's a Saturday. In Skokie, Illinois,
the Criterion Bar Association is holding a lunch meeting and Franklin,
Sexina is your contact.

Speaker 4 (16:58):
There and the boot Make of Toronto are tightening their
laces on a virtual meeting on the twenty fifth of October.
Thelma Beam is your contact or you can find out
more at Toronto Bootmakers dot com.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
And in Indianapolis, the Illustrious Clients are holding their dinner
meeting on October twenty fifth. You can find out more
on their Facebook page, Facebook dot com Slash Illustrious Clients.
You can also get yourself on their mailing list. And finally,
there's been a date change with respect to the Amateur

(17:36):
Mendicant Society. We are listed in the calendar as a
meeting on Saturday, October twenty fifth. I had an executive
committee meeting this week and we planned it all out,
and I came home and reported to my wife the
wonderful news, and she informed me that we would be

(17:57):
out of town that day. The Amateur Medicant Society is
being held the next day. Sunday, October twenty sixth, it'll
be a luncheon meeting at Rockies in Northville, Miss Miss Northville, Michigan,
and you can find out more about us at Amateur

(18:18):
Mendicant Society dot org.

Speaker 6 (18:21):
There you go.

Speaker 3 (18:22):
Proof Well, that wraps it up for the second half
of October for this Learned Society segment. If you would
like to have your group mentioned, just get in touch
with Ron at sherlockin Calendar dot com. Our friends at

(18:47):
MX Publishing are always coming out with new books, and
of course we have talked your ear off all about
the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories and its
final volumes. But what we'd like to talk to you
about now are four new books in twenty twenty five,
the Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of the Black Pharaoh
by J. M. Reinbold, Sherlock Holmes Takes the Case eight

(19:11):
Tales of Mystery and Intrigue by David McGregor, to twenty
one b On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Mark d
Ellis and The Hidden Enquiries of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Hall.
All four of these books are exciting adventures in the

(19:33):
pastiche style, taking you through various locations and various time
settings in the Sherlockian universe. Pick any one of them,
pick all four, It doesn't matter. You're going to have
a good time as you read some of these new
books that are available from MX Publishing, and just as
a reminder, MX offers audible books as well as paperback

(19:57):
and hardbout and ebooks, So pick your format and get
these books in whichever you choose. All available at MX
publishing dot com. Nicholas Meyer is an award winning author, screenwriter,

(20:24):
and director whose career spans over five decades across film,
publishing and television. He's best known for The Seven Percent Solution,
a groundbreaking nineteen seventy four Sherlock Holmes novel that's spent
forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It
also went on to earn a British Gold Dagger from
the British Crime Writers Association and an Oscar nomination for

(20:47):
its film adaptation. Meyer's directing debut Time After Time led
to acclaimed work on Star Trek two, The Wrath of Khan,
as well as Star Trek six, The Undiscovered Country and
The Day After a television film from nineteen eighty three
that's the most watched TV movie in history. Screenwriting credits

(21:09):
include Somersby, Fatal Attraction, and Prince of Egypt. Additional work
includes a two part mini series Houdini, based on a
biography written by his father. He's the co creator of
the Netflix series Medici Masters of Florence. His other books
include Target Practice, which was nominated for an Edgar Award,

(21:29):
and an autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Homing Pigeon, published
in nineteen eighty one. His memoir The View from the Bridge,
Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood was
published in two thousand nine. His seventh Sherlock Holmes novel,
Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing, was published in August
by Mysterious Press. Born and raised in New York City,

(21:53):
Meyer graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree
in theater and filmmaking. He received his b i investiture
a fine Morocco case in two thousand and four. Nicholas Meyer,
welcome back to I hear of Sherlock everywhere.

Speaker 6 (22:11):
Thank you, it's a pleasure to be back.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
You are one of our our handful of multiple episode appearances.
This is number five for you. Now, I think that
enters you into some classification for oh, I don't know,
probably a metal holder or Whatnotron the man, the.

Speaker 6 (22:29):
Man who came to dinner and wouldn't leave.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Yes, we'll still feed you. Don't worry. Well, you know
we've already talked about how you got your start with
Sherlock Holmes and previous episodes. We don't want to retread that.
But why don't we Why don't we start with this
since it ties in directly to the topic of this
particular novel, Sherlock Holmes. And the real thing is, when

(22:53):
did you first realize that you are a forger of sorts?

Speaker 5 (23:00):
Well, I realized that when I in nineteen early nineteen
seventy five or late nineteen seventy four, when my novel
The Seven Percent Solution was a best selling novel. That's

(23:21):
when there were such things I guess as best selling novels.
And my publisher sent me on a book tour and
I landed in Pittsburgh in a thunderstorm, and a reporter
about my own age, which is to say, pretty young,
was sent to the airport to interview the best selling author.
And I think he felt this assignment was unworthy of him,

(23:48):
and he demonstrated this with his opening question, which was
how does it feel to be a successful forger? That
was his question, and I guess I had never quite
thought of myself in those terms, so I was a

(24:08):
little startled, and I said, well, it doesn't say by
Nicholas Myer, it s as edited by Nicholas. I thought
that would get me off the hook. And I don't
know what happened after that, but I do have a
fairly vivid memory of trying to fall asleep in a

(24:29):
strange hotel room in Pittsburgh and being sort of troubled
by this accusation. I guess I thought everybody would understand
that I was playing a game.

Speaker 6 (24:47):
And that I wasn't really you know.

Speaker 5 (24:50):
But somebody did ask me at one point, when did
Sherlock Holmes die? So I realized that a lot of
people the answer, incidentally is never.

Speaker 6 (25:01):
And I.

Speaker 5 (25:03):
Got interested in forgery as a result of this conversation,
and I started reading about it and collecting books about it,
and I actually at one point I was living in
London and the British Museum put on an exhibition called

(25:24):
fake question Mark question Mark question mark, and it was
three rooms. Wasn't a huge exhibition, solely devoted to various
kinds of forgery and curious things like fish with fur

(25:45):
and I remember they had a fish with fur. And
forgery turns out to be a very interesting topic because
it poses a lot of questions. It poses ethical questions,
it poses legal questions, it poses esthetic questions, it poses

(26:06):
cultural questions. What's the difference, for example, between a forgery
and a copy. The answer is something you can't see
the intention. A copy labels itself a copy. I'm a copy,
I'm for sale in a museum store. But a forgery

(26:28):
attempts to deceive you into believing that whatever it is,
whether it's a banknote or a work of art or
a I don't know a piece of music, that it's
the real thing, that it's authentic, and somehow to profit
by that deception. And so it became a rabbit hole

(26:53):
that I started wandering around in forgeries versus copies. And
what's the There's also something called in the French call
it a la magnet de, which is to say, in
the style of it's not a literal imitation, but it's
in the manner of a la maniel de And what

(27:16):
is that meant to do other than sort of circumvent.
And what's the difference between a forgery and somebody who plagiarizes,
Because they're closely related, but they're sort of opposites. For example,
a forger tries to pretend that that his work is real.

(27:44):
I've copied a painting and I've made it so good
that you'll think it's the real thing. A plagiarist tries
to make you think that someone else's work is his.
It's the exact opposite. But they're both forms of deception.

(28:05):
So it's an interesting rabbit hole to start down because
it goes to all kinds of crazy places. Let's say
you have two paintings of the same smiling woman. One
painting was made by Leonardo da Vinci and the other

(28:26):
was made by me. And let's say it's a hypothetical
case that you can't tell the difference by no means, technical, technological,
no means can you tell the difference? Why is one
more valuable worth more than another? If you can't tell

(28:47):
the difference, what is the difference? And the most interesting
answer I ever heard to that is that one could
not have existed without the other. It's almost a hypothetical answer.
So forgery is, you know, And I was collecting all

(29:08):
this stuff for years, and when my publisher asked for
another Sherlock Holmes story, I thought, well, since you've spent
a lifetime fooling around with this stuff, maybe you can
write a book about it. And that's what became Sherlock
Holmes and the Real Thing.

Speaker 4 (29:27):
Well that's great because, you know, it follows your other
books in that it taps into an area that you
have a deep personal interest in and some unique knowledge
and experience with, and one that you've thought about for
a good deal. And far from being a forgery, you know,
you are using the world of Sherlock Holmes and the

(29:49):
characters of Holmes and Watson and that milieu, you know,
to tell a new and very well plotted and very
effective story. But in this case, what's happening here is
that there are are a series of blizzards in eighteen
nineties London and an artist goes missing. So we should
tell our listeners a little bit because what's going on
here is that Holmes is Watson are sort of thrown

(30:13):
into this big business of art, which conveniently neither one
really seems to know much about it except homes of course,
acknowledges his ver Nay ancestry. Yes, so does what about
your knowledge of art?

Speaker 5 (30:30):
Are you?

Speaker 4 (30:30):
Are you yourself an art collector? That's what I was
curious about when I started to read this.

Speaker 5 (30:36):
Well, on a very small scale way, my girlfriend is
a big art expert, and she is something of a collector,
and she gives talks and teaches courses about art, and
she cultivates emerging artists and goes to play is where

(31:02):
art is taught, where people learn to become artists, and
teaches them something about the business of art, and artist
is a big business. It's in something of a slump
at the moment, which is kind of interesting.

Speaker 6 (31:17):
But there are.

Speaker 5 (31:20):
Paintings are and art is sometimes a way to move money.

Speaker 6 (31:24):
Sometimes it's a.

Speaker 5 (31:25):
Rather surprisingly complicated, not to say, sordid business. So yes,
I've I've learned a lot from hanging out with her.
And also I grew up in New York City. In
New York City is a place that is lousy with

(31:48):
museums and where you where you just you know, we
don't have the Louver, but we have the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, we have the Museum of Modern Art, We
have the Witness, We have the Frick, which has just
reopened after a complete renovation.

Speaker 6 (32:06):
Music it's terrific.

Speaker 5 (32:09):
I haven't been to the reopened version of it, but I'll, i'll,
we'll get to it. And the Cloisters in New York,
which is the Uptown branch of the Metropolitan Museum, which
is a whole medieval castle and series of monasteries that
have been brought over piece by piece in the nineteen

(32:30):
twenties I think by the Rockefellers and reassembled on the
tip of Manhattan. When I was a kid, it was
like going back in time to medieval times and you know,
wishing you could run around with a sword. So yeah,
I was exposed to a lot of this, and I
respond to it. Do I know a lot about it

(32:56):
only lately and recently, and from a lifetime of sort
of looking at it without really giving it a great
deal of.

Speaker 6 (33:08):
Thought, I guess, but learning a lot. I just learning
is learning.

Speaker 5 (33:14):
About stuff is fun when you're writing a book and
you need to learn about what you're writing about. At
least in my case, it's like suddenly going back to
school and you bone up on a whole bunch of
stuff that you didn't quite you sort of knew, or

(33:36):
you were sort of interested in. Suddenly it's like you're
in medical school. So yeah, there was a lot of
research involved in this, but also, to be fair, it
was a lifetime of thinking about forgery ever since that
silly conversation in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
Now, I don't want to rip a band aid off
a long closed wound, but part of that era, you
actually were involved in a bit of a legal spat
with a Srilockian scholar.

Speaker 6 (34:15):
What was that I was sued?

Speaker 5 (34:19):
I was sued by a professor at Yale who claimed
that I had plagiarized an article that he wrote about
Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, and cocaine. And this was mortifying

(34:41):
to me because this is the first successful thing I'd
ever done in my life, was published a novel that
became a bestseller, and now I was being accused of
being a plagiarist. And it was more vexing because I
had trouble to acknowledge his article in my knowledgements. At
the back of the book. I said, you know, I

(35:02):
read this thing, among many other things that inspired the book,
but I had to defend myself, and I learned something
about plagiarism and about copyright you. It turns out, fortunately
for me, that you can't copyright an idea. You can

(35:28):
only copyright the expression of an idea, which.

Speaker 6 (35:34):
Is to say, the words.

Speaker 5 (35:37):
And I hadn't used any of this professor's words. I
had just made up my own story, partially inspired by
his idea. But he didn't write a novel, he didn't
write I didn't use any of his words. But it

(35:57):
was a little crash course in something or other.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Yeah, I can't help but be reminded of an iconic
letter that Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain sent to Helen
Keller in nineteen oh three. I think she had been
accused of plagiarism.

Speaker 6 (36:27):
And he in it.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
In part of it, he wrote, it takes one thousand
men to invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or
a phonograph or a telephone or any other important thing,
and the last man gets the credit, and we forget
the others. He added, his little might, that's all he did.
These object lessons should teach us that ninety nine parts

(36:49):
of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms.
Pure and simple, unless not to make us modest. But
nothing can do that. Then don't we unwittingly reproduce the
phrasing of a story as well as the story itself.
It can hardly happen to the extent of fifty words.
Except in the case of a child, its memory tablet

(37:11):
is not lumbered with impressions, and the actual language can
have graving room there and preserve the language a year
or two. But a grown person's memory tablet is a palimpsest,
with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase.
It must be a very rare thing that the whole

(37:32):
page gets so sharply printed on a man's mind by
a single reading that it will stay long enough to
turn up some other time, or be mistaken by him
more for his own. And he goes on and on.
But the idea here is that we are building on
ideas that have been around for a long time, and
there's very originality in the world except in how we

(37:54):
actually put it together.

Speaker 6 (37:56):
Well, it's.

Speaker 5 (37:58):
The way I said it, maybe a little more briefly,
is that all art is a history of cut and paste.

Speaker 6 (38:12):
I like that.

Speaker 5 (38:13):
The fact of the matter is that the and by
the way Michael Chabon and uh, you know said, all
fiction is fan fiction. You build on what's gone before.
The Odyssey is a fan boy sequel to the Iliad.

(38:34):
The Aeneid is a fanboy sequel to the Odyssey. It's
like the same character characters, and just we want to
see more of them, so somebody else comes along. And
how many different versions of Carmen are there. There's Carmen Jones,
there's a Russian, uh, Carmen that's all percussion, everybody.

Speaker 6 (38:59):
Romeo and Juliet.

Speaker 5 (39:01):
Interestingly enough, Romeo and Juliet I think comes from some
Italian play that Shakespeare stumbled onto as he did Hamlet.
These are these are not his plots. These are his plays,
adding on, building on, and so it's very hard to

(39:25):
you know, you know, whatever is original, what came first,
and we put a big premium on what comes first.
But it's very hard sometimes to get to that place
because you keep going back and back and back, and
you'll find earlier versions of things that other people have

(39:47):
added on to cut and pasted. And it's unfortunate that
that in the world where we I think correctly feel
that people should be able to monetize their creativity. That
if you write a book, you should get paid for
your book. If you write a piece of music, should

(40:07):
get paid for your piece of music. At the same time,
it's very hard to start from scratch without some version
of the cutting and the pasting.

Speaker 6 (40:23):
The problem.

Speaker 5 (40:23):
You know, we're all works of art. Here's another miscellaneous thought.
All works of art are inevitably, ineluctably products of the
times in which they were created. Mozart doesn't just sound
like Mozart. He sounds like late eighteenth century Middle European

(40:44):
orchestral music. Renoir doesn't just sound like sound. Renoir doesn't
just look like Renoir. He looks like late nineteenth century
French Impressionism. And by the way, this is all as
it should be. I bet if you could. I if

(41:06):
I showed you four movies that were all set in
seventeen seventy six, and one of them was made in
nineteen twenty four, and one of them is made in
nineteen seventy two, and one of them is made in
twenty fifteen, you'd be able to tell within five minutes
and five years when each of those movies were made,
because all the things that were there at the time

(41:29):
they were made were influencing what they look like, whether
it's the length of the woman's eyelashes, or what sentiments
were coming out of people's mouths, whether it was black
and white or color whatever. And where that really screws
up life is for forgers, because a forgery is also

(41:52):
the product of the time in which it was made,
and so years later it'll jump out at you this
is not this is not an original something. This is
from the van Miegren, the famous forger of Vermires, and

(42:14):
his Vermires were sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars
in the thirties or the late twenties, and today they're terrible.
You can they look like Art deco and you think,
how could anybody have been fooled by this?

Speaker 6 (42:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (42:33):
Well, and that's that's interesting because I think you in
the novel here you indicate pretty clearly that this that
a successful forgery operation typically is not done by a
single person. There is a network of people involved. I mean,

(42:56):
obviously the artist himself has to produce the work, but
then you've got you know, of gallery owner, and you've
got someone who is inspecting the painting to see if
it is you know, an authenticator and and there have
been instances where these individuals have been in cahoots.

Speaker 5 (43:19):
There's no there's no question that the that the art
business is a very corrupt business. It may in some
cases be accidentally corrupt. You somebody unknowingly sells something that
is uh not genuine. But a lot of the times

(43:41):
and you read about this. You read about art gallery
scandals all the time. And one of the one of
the biggest uh scandal art dealers was the biggest art
dealer of all was a man named Joseph Devine du
v E E. N.

Speaker 6 (44:02):
And Joseph Devine.

Speaker 5 (44:04):
Specialized in old Master paintings, you know Rembrandts and Rubens
and Caravaggio's and and even a da Vinci. At one
point he sold these paintings. And understandably, somebody who's a

(44:25):
rich person gonna lay out a lot of money for
a Caravaggio wants to know its history. And and he
had an authenticator, and his authenticator was a famous expert
on Renaissance paintings, a man named Bernard Berenson. And Bernard
Berenson who was an American but who largely lived in Europe,

(44:49):
and he lived in Florence. He had a villa, which
now I think belongs to Harvard University. I could be
mistaken itati I tatti, I think, or I I tatti
his villa where students go to study. And he was

(45:11):
a big authority on Renaissance painting. But it also is
true that he occasionally, and I don't know how occasionally,
would authenticate paintings for Joseph Duvin that either were not
genuine or had been workedne tarted up in Duvene's workshop,

(45:35):
and he would get a kickback for paintings that got
sold to various people that were, let's put it, less
than genuine. I'm sure there are two sides.

Speaker 6 (45:48):
To this story. But there's a whole book.

Speaker 5 (45:52):
I think it's called Artful partners by a man named
Colin Simpson, which is about the hidden partnership between duven
and his authenticator, Bernard Berenson. There's a lot of that
stuff that goes around, and there's a lot of here's
a question. I mean, if you go to a museum,

(46:13):
you admire a painting, you fall in love with it,
and you're moved by it, or a statue, or for
that matter, a piece of music or something, and then
you find out that it wasn't It wasn't painted by
Da Vinci. It was painted by Joe Schmoe. Does that

(46:34):
somehow invalidate the effect that the picture had on you?
How many paintings are hung in museums and houses around
the world that people respond.

Speaker 6 (46:49):
To, but we don't know.

Speaker 5 (46:52):
That they may not be real, they may be fakes,
they may be forgeries. And yet put it another way,
it now becomes possible to manufacture a diamond something called zirconium.
But you would have to be beyond an expert in

(47:15):
some of these cases, beyond an expert to tell that
this didn't come, you know, from a diamond mine, that
this wasn't fished out of a river in South Africa
or something you couldn't tell. But if some but if somebody,
you know, you admire this diamond, and you goes, guy,

(47:36):
you know, what a what a what a diamond? Or
somebody said to made West, goodness what diamonds? And she
said goodness had nothing to do with it, honey. If
you would, if if you love the diamond and you
believe it to be forged by nature as opposed to

(47:59):
created by man, does that make it less beautiful? Does
that make it it obviously in the real world, it
makes it less valuable if that's determined. But if it's
not determined, if you can't tell the difference, what is
the difference forgery is very complicated.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
Hmm.

Speaker 4 (48:22):
Well it's interesting too. You know, in your description of
Baronson and art authentication, I noticed in Sherlock Holmes and
the Real Thing, we have a character who's an art authenticator.
And when I thought about that character, you know, one
of the things you think about is that these people

(48:43):
who do the work of authentication try to become or
do become familiar with a language comprised of technique and
visual clues. You know, the scholarship is all about how
does this guy paint hands? And what are the little
details in this reflection? And tell me let let's look

(49:03):
at that brushstroke and this particular shadow. And there was
a fellow I think named Morelli, Giovanni Morelli, who put
me in mind of your character. And and then I
thought about the fact that, you know, there's a connection
here to Sherlock Holmes, who's also looking at the shapes
of ears and where on people's knees. And then there's

(49:24):
a connection to Freud, you know, and which is very
much up your street, and I was just curious, a
you know what you're what you're thinking was about where
the inspiration for your miss your senior Garabelli came from.
But also what you're thinking is about detection and homes
and about the larger psychological issues of.

Speaker 6 (49:43):
All of this. Well, this is all about.

Speaker 5 (49:51):
Not only this book, but about Freud, but about It's
all about some form of detection, the art of clues,
of deciphering clues, and not only and deciphering them is
the opposite word, the the correct word, because it's not
only about.

Speaker 6 (50:11):
Seeing what it is.

Speaker 5 (50:13):
What is suggestive, as Holmes might say, it's suggestive but
ultimately managing to interpret what the clue could or does mean.
And the moment you get into interpretation, you enter a

(50:34):
very complicated area. People you people can misinterpret clues. There
are Sherlock Holmes cases in which he comes to a
conclusion based on all the clues, the facts, and he's
made up a theory that explains all these facts, and

(50:56):
it's turns out to be wrong. There's a different explanation
and that covers the same facts, the same clues. So
it's it's murky and experts um are frequently wrong. Experts
are often wrong. There's a there's a book somewhere, oh,

(51:18):
actually I have it within arms reach, and it's called
The Experts Speak, The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation by
Christopher Surf and Victor Navoski, and it's all about people
who are wrong. And even though they've they've they come

(51:43):
with a lot of letters after their name, and they're
supposed to know what they're talking about, and either knowingly
or let's give them the benefit of the doubt, unknowingly,
they make incredible mistakes. And as I say, when you
first look at, you know, a forgery that's contemporary, When

(52:05):
people in the twenties or thirties looked at Van Miegrin's
Vermire forgeries, they looked pretty good. But you know, forty
years later they look ridiculous. So experts are frequently wrong,
and as I say, giving them a ben of the doubt,

(52:26):
accidentally wrong. But they're not Experts are not always so expert.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
I have a question related to that as we look
at your series of books that you've edited about Sherlock Holmes,
and we know you started back in the early to
mid nineteen seventies and now we are in the mid

(52:58):
twenty twenties, how do you think your work in these
books specifically out the time? Do you think you were
able to retain Watson's style throughout.

Speaker 5 (53:15):
Or this is fascinating or at least fascinating to me,
because the answer is, of course, my forgeries jump out
now or will jump out now. As forgeries, they retain
glimpses of Doyle and glimpses of Watson, and glimpses of

(53:38):
homes and sort of their imitations. But inevitably, the sensibility
behind them is the sensibility of Nicholas Meyer in whatever
late twentieth or early twenty first century he was writing.
The concerns the biases I do. I did the best

(54:04):
I can I could. But inevitably, as time, you know,
no one I think in over the long haul is
going to confuse me with Arthur Conan Doyle having said
that they still may give the kind of pleasure that

(54:26):
is zirconium diamond might give as long as somebody didn't
tell you it's as zirconium diamond, it may be okay.

Speaker 4 (54:36):
Well, but what you're what you're well, you're being very
self deprecating a little bit here and Nick, I mean
you know, the fact is that along with time moving on, audience,
audience's expectations change. And what you've created in you know,
particularly his last book, Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing.
You know, you've given us some wonderful scenes and places,

(54:57):
some locations in the store that Conan Doyle never would
have taken his his readers too. He's not putting homes
in Watson in the Portobello Road, he's not visiting an
artist's studio. He's not going to the National Gallery. If
he did so, it would be in such a condensed
form like Nathan Garadev's house. And if he gave us
a painting, you know, it wouldn't be Olympia by Edward.

Speaker 6 (55:20):
Money, you know.

Speaker 4 (55:22):
And and he wouldn't have given us the Easter eggs,
you know for the Sherlock homespan. You've just given us
a lot of lovely Easter eggs, you know, like Charles
the First, you know, which prompts homes at one point
to mutter.

Speaker 7 (55:34):
Whose was it?

Speaker 5 (55:36):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (55:36):
And another that I particularly loved. You know, somewhere in
here you've got home saying Watson, come here, I want you,
which has got nothing to do with anything except Alexander
Graham Bell in the Telephone.

Speaker 6 (55:51):
Correct, Correct, I couldn't resist.

Speaker 4 (55:54):
Yeah, good, and it's and it's just a lot of fun.
So so your you know, your work is tuned to
the contemporary ear here.

Speaker 5 (56:05):
I think what I've learned after a long time, and
believe me, for me to learn anything, it does take
a long time, is that Holmes has become my avatar.
I can say what's on my mind through Homes in
my stories. I can, within the larger contours or limits

(56:32):
of his character, allow him to express thoughts, feelings, ideas
that are plausibly his, but more factually coming out of,
you know, my thinking and my feeling. I couldn't do

(56:56):
this if what came out of his mouth in Doyle
was so utterly foreign to me in terms of sentiments
or intellect or whatever. But there's enough wiggle room, as
I see him in Homes for me to be able

(57:18):
to express myself. I also think that that Sherlock Holmes
and the real thing which I people say never say never,
but I'm betting this is my last homes discovery discovered manuscript.

(57:40):
And I think that there was a reason why I
wanted to go back to London. I've had him in Paris,
I've had him in Russia, I've had him in I
don't know where. I've had him Egypt, in America. To
go back to London, to make a full circle with
a study in scarlet.

Speaker 6 (58:00):
It was something of a.

Speaker 5 (58:02):
Dare I say, sentimental journey involved in going full circle?

Speaker 3 (58:12):
Well, that makes sense, that makes sense. And you cut
me off at the past because my next question was
when can we expect the next one? But rather than
ask you that, let me ask you this, What else
is keeping you busy these days?

Speaker 6 (58:30):
Well, I'm working.

Speaker 5 (58:34):
This is a very strange time in the movie and
television businesses, I'm sure you know, between the strikes on
the one hand and the pandemic on the other hand,
and AI on the other hand. As Tevy would say,
I have no more hands, everything being a lot of buffeting.

(58:58):
So there are things that I'm working on. I can't
really talk about television series at the moment is what
I've been working on a couple of them, and we'll
see if anything happens. I don't want to get too
specific for obvious reasons, but those are the things I'm

(59:21):
working on. I think I sent you my article that
I've sent to my agent about called the Forger's Dilemmas,
and maybe somebody will, you know, publish that, or somebody
will publish it. But those are the things I'm not idle.
And I also spend a lot of time, unfortunately or

(59:45):
fortunately working as an editor on people's stuff. The problem is,
what I've learned in the book publishing business is there
are not a lot of real editors around in publishing
houses anymore. Most of them are deal makers. They're deal makers,

(01:00:06):
they're not editor. If you want an editor, you're going
to have to pay an editor. And I discovered this
in a in a very strange way, but I also
discovered it from myself at one point on one of
my books, and I wrote to my editor and I said,

(01:00:29):
don't you think it might be better if this information
we're put someplace else? And this chapter ended here, and
I got back, oh, that's a very good idea, And
I thought, nobody there is giving any thought to this
the book. The margins in the book business are so

(01:00:52):
precariously thin blah blah that nobody has time to actually
spend giving thought. And I'm not expecting someone to be
Maxwell Perkins, who was a famous editor for the benefit
of your listeners.

Speaker 7 (01:01:08):
I just.

Speaker 5 (01:01:11):
Wanted somebody who was going to try to help me
make my book as good as it could be, as
opposed to signing the next author or whatever. And I
realized everybody is hard pressed for time, and all our
attention spans keep growing shorter. Some years ago, Jeffrey Katzenberg

(01:01:36):
came out with a thing. I thought it was called
Quibbi or kibbi or something, and it was all about
short dramas that you would watch on your phone. And
it was a flop. But ten years later, fifteen years later,
it's happening and people are watching these two minute verticals

(01:01:57):
they're called on your phone, and I have friends who
are acting in them. It's it's absolutely hilarious. But it
does make the idea of sitting down with a book
that's an engaging proposition of a certain kind that we

(01:02:19):
tell ourselves, Oh, I don't have time, you know, just
give me the bottom line, sum it up, Let Ai
reduce it to something, Let Ai write it. So, Yeah,
it's a it's a it's a different it's a different
furrow it is it is.

Speaker 3 (01:02:39):
Well, we appreciate you furrowing with us. Thank you and
sharing you know, some of these very philosophical concepts behind
the notion of forgery and plagiarism and the themes that

(01:02:59):
we see writ large in Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing,
which just dropped from a Mysterious Press of all places,
our friend Auto Pendler. The book became available on August
twenty six, twenty twenty five. So folks, if you haven't
already bought a copy, get out there to wherever you

(01:03:21):
purchase books and get a copy of Nicholas Myers Sherlock
Holmes and the Real Thing.

Speaker 6 (01:03:26):
If you don't like it, you get your money back.

Speaker 4 (01:03:31):
Oh and we should tell our listeners too. The Nick
is departing on a thirty day tour. It's going to
be an eleven states from the West coast to the
East coast in the month of September, and you should
be able on the Mysterious Press website to find out
all the details of his book tour. He's in Los Angeles,

(01:03:51):
San Francisco, Seattle, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Iowa City, Indianapolis, bloom Vie,
West Bloomfield, Chicago, New York, and Boston and even a
couple more.

Speaker 6 (01:04:01):
So there you go.

Speaker 5 (01:04:02):
You can find it on my website as well, which
is Nicholas Hyphenmeier dot com. I have a real website,
Nicholas Meyer and the real thing.

Speaker 3 (01:04:13):
This is great. We will have links to all of
those and more in the show notes.

Speaker 6 (01:04:20):
Nick, thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
Thank you so much, Eel, thank you for doing this.
It's a pleasure. As always.

Speaker 6 (01:04:27):
I've talked to you soon, I hope, Nick.

Speaker 4 (01:04:29):
Nick, I've got one more very quick question for you,
just sure curate, just something I was curious about. Have
you ever painted?

Speaker 6 (01:04:39):
It's a funny question. I have absolutely no talent, but in.

Speaker 5 (01:04:43):
Art school, in grade school, in art class, I was
always doing enormous murals that were so big that I
was out in the hall because they would unroll these,
you know, long pieces of paper, and I would do
paintings of two nights charging each other. Or I would

(01:05:03):
do paintings of Ahab and Moby Dick. Or I would
do paintings of all the Greeks coming out of the
belly of the wooden horse. None of this displayed any
talent whatever, but a heck of a lot of ambition.

Speaker 6 (01:05:19):
Cinematic stuff, yes, cinematics.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
See you were doing storyboards. Yeah, I like similar theme throughout.

Speaker 6 (01:05:29):
That's great. Thanks, thank you.

Speaker 4 (01:05:42):
The one word that I think describes the book to
me as clever. You know, it really is clever. I
love the conversation we had with Nick because it shows
you that, you know, the great range of his interests
in variety and how eloquent he is in some of
these issues. But the book is so clever, first of all,
because it's a great story. It's a terrific plot, and

(01:06:04):
he was comparing his work to Conan Doyle and this
is a more i think, elaborate and satisfying plot that
Conan Doyle would have done in a similarly sized novel,
if he'd ever written anything of that size. But it's also,
you know, just so full of so many interesting things
about art and about the chemistry of paint. You know,

(01:06:27):
Nick has Holmes at his chemistry table looking at the
colors and paint as they're put together and what happens
to them. So there's just a lot of fun in it.
I thought it was really well done.

Speaker 3 (01:06:38):
Yeah, And to me, you know, as we look at
this as a bookend of sorts, if it is in
fact the last of his pastiches, I think it compares
very favorably to the seven Percent Solution, and having read
all of them, I think it would be my second favorite.

(01:06:59):
You know thet and Horror, which was a follow on
to seven percent Solution. Well, that is kind of one
of these fiction meets history kind of pieces where oh,
we meet Oscar Wilde and we meet Bernard Shaw, and
you know, there's the celebrity sightings as it were of

(01:07:19):
a time and some of the other ones take us
on the road to Egypt and Paris and Russia and whatnot.
But this really has that same spirit of you know,
chasing around London and Sherlock Holmes in his in his
time and place, and you know the degree to which

(01:07:43):
there was a need for a little bit of knowledge
of the art world, but more importantly of the world
of forgery. We really get the technical side of homes
that comes comes home to roost, and we see Watson
with a romantic interest and you know a lot of
buttons that are pushed here that I think are familiar

(01:08:03):
and just wonderful to see from those of us who
enjoy the original stories. Well, Bert, she's back. Madeline Kennonis
is here again with another segment for us, and this case,
I think you'll be even more interested than usual because
Madeline has a very special show she's reviewing. This time around,

(01:08:31):
it's a chance of listening with your correspondent, Madeleine Qinyonez.

Speaker 7 (01:08:38):
Hello everyone, I'm Madeline Kennonis, and today is going to
be a bit weird because it is finally time for
me to talk about my own show, Dynamics of a Podcast.
Dynamics of Podcasts is the only podcast dedicated to Professor
James Moriarty, Napoleon of Crime in arch Nemesis of Sherlock Holmes.

(01:08:58):
I started this show in the spring of twenty twenty
one with one of my best friends, Dixie Parkinson. Mind you,
the show isn't about how we think Moriarty's so cool
or he's just misunderstood, Like, no, he's a terrible person,
and we know that. We just also think that he's interesting,
both in the canon and in all the ways that

(01:09:21):
he shows up in Sherilockiana. Dynamics is really about looking
at Sharlockiana through a Moriarty lens. Or put another way,
it's a Charlotculmbs podcast, this guy says, a Moriarty podcast.
But the Nietchs focus has allowed us to do some
really neat interviews and have some fun conversations. We have

(01:09:41):
a few different episode types, mostly because I am nothing
if not chaotic.

Speaker 5 (01:09:47):
We do have.

Speaker 7 (01:09:47):
Interviews where we've talked with friends, writers and actors, and
those conversations have been amazing. We have topic discussions more
early on when we were still finding our feet. If
we've even found them yet, jury's still out. We have
live and local episodes where we've recorded panels. We've hosted
IT two two one, becon and Ashley Paula Sek has

(01:10:10):
been on every one of them so far, and they've
been so much fun. We have adaptation discussions where we'll
talk about a particular adaptation, the adaptations homes, and then
the adaptation's moriarty. This one, in particular is an episode
type that can keep us going for years. There are

(01:10:31):
also recap episodes where we'll talk about a Shrilokian event.
This just occurred in the early days. It was just
me telling Dixie stuff and that obviously didn't work well.
So now we have a guest every time we do
a recap, and it's so much better. Honestly, these things
could almost be their own podcast. Kind of the trifles

(01:10:52):
to our ihos, but we do usually manage to tie
things back to Moriarty somewhere. And then there's the canon
dis discussion episode. Yes, we've only done one so far,
and we do plan to do more. But Madeleine, you
ask why would you do canon discussion episodes when there
are so many podcasts out there already.

Speaker 6 (01:11:12):
Doing just that.

Speaker 7 (01:11:14):
Well for Starter's ego, so write that down. But also
to everybody who thinks that Moriarty is in too many adaptations,
I ask you, what if we worked them into every
story in the canon. So yes, the real goal is
to try to tie back every story to Moriarty, or

(01:11:35):
at least to Moran in some way, which was even
the topic of our first com panel. So let's talk
about highlights. Usually i'd recommend an episode for each type,
but our one canon discussion episode is very long since
it covers the study in Scarlet, and our topic discussion
episodes are maybe not our best foot forward, so I'll

(01:11:59):
set those aside. Actually, if you're going to listen to
one episode out of our whole show, please make it
episode twenty one on the Holo Deck with Daniel Davis,
because we actually got Daniel Davis on our show. You know,
he's Marie already on Star Trek and Nile's the butler
on The Nanny, and it was amazing. Most of the

(01:12:22):
conversation was about his past and recent appearances on Star Trek,
but we did talk a little bit about The Nanny
and also about his role in the Hunt for Read
October with Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery. That was the
best episode ever and we still can't believe we did that.
I'd love to recommend other interviews, but in the interest

(01:12:42):
in moving on, let's talk about adaptation discussions here. I've
got a plug episode fourteen nol Holmes two Reaction, which
I still think is one of our best conversations. That
is just me and Dixie, and we did it entirely
off the cuff. No notes are outlined, because we had
planned an entirely different episode and that fell through, so

(01:13:03):
we had to pivot. But enola Io was brand new
at the time and we were already thinking about covering
it since they introduced a unique moriarty, and that's exactly
what we did. As far as con panels go, I
have to recommend episode thirty from Baker Street to the
Holi Deck two. We were talking about Star Trek and
the connections between Star Trek and Charlotte Holmes, and we

(01:13:26):
had a terrific lineup of co panelists. Ashley, as mentioned previously,
had a Holloway now former director of two two one
week on a Lee Shackelford, who was actually part of
the writer's room for Star Trek the Next Generation and
got Moriarty back on the show and Ship and a Bottle.
We went into how that all came about and how
the episode developed into what we see on screen, and

(01:13:48):
also a little bit about what it was like in
the writer's room. In terms of recap episodes, I'm going
to go with episode twenty three, Moriarty in the Heartland,
which was our recap of the three Holmes in the
Heartland rich Enemese conference since Saint Louis. We've never had
a recap more relevant to the podcast, since Moriarty was

(01:14:10):
covered in two separate presentations along with a Moran focused presentation.
Heather Hinston, one of the conference organizers, joined us to
talk about the weekend and I also managed to get
many interviews with Raye Beetzner, Beth Diego, and Kristen Mertz,
the speakers for the aforementioned presentations. There may also be

(01:14:30):
a little bit of accidentally recorded audio from a particular
trivia competition, if you know you know. Of course, the
amusing irony is that in the end Heather hedges on
whether Holmes in the Heartland will happen again, and indeed
it will next summer, and you better believe that's going

(01:14:51):
to get a recap. Look, the thing is, my show
is not a top quality production. Actually write scripts for
these segments so that I can give you the the
best experience possible. Dynamics is not scripted. It's very raw.
Sometimes I'm bone tired so often that it's a running gag.
But I love doing it. I think that we bring

(01:15:13):
something unique in fun to this fandom of ours. And
when you have a podcast host who is herself an
obsessive podcast listener, you get a show that is constantly
in conversation with other shows. Sometimes it's with the Baker
Street Babes by way of callbacks, Sometimes it's with The
Watsonian Weekly. Most commonly it actually is with I hear

(01:15:34):
Sherlock everywhere, and sometimes the Trifles as well. When you
know that Scott and Burt have talked about something it's
an easy reference point. We've just done two amazing episodes
about two two one becon first with outgoing directors Crystal Nolan,
Heather Holloway and just now with Johanna Draper Carlson and
Heather Henson. So we're doing our best to stay on
top of new set off fectsss. Plus we have some

(01:15:56):
fun stuff coming up. So no ever say this, but
this is my baby.

Speaker 6 (01:16:03):
Please give us a try.

Speaker 7 (01:16:05):
And that's it. I've spent too long trying to win
you over already, and I actually need to be planning
our next couple of episodes because maybe we'll finally nail
this scheduling thing yet.

Speaker 6 (01:16:16):
Catch you later.

Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
Well, I mean we got the baby and the bathwater.
That's wonderful. It's so great.

Speaker 4 (01:16:27):
Oh, I'm so happy to know about that. You know,
I didn't realize that Madeline had actually talked to Daniel
Davis about Moriarty that's grand, and to Lee about you know,
the writer's room and Sola. That sounds fabulous.

Speaker 3 (01:16:41):
Yeah, it's delightful and clearly there's a passion there, and
that's what makes all the difference in any good podcast.
Because speaking of unscripted shows, I think and We've heard
this from listeners as well. The magic of what happens
here on I hear of Sherlock everywhere is the report

(01:17:05):
that you and I have with each other. Well, we
clearly don't script things out and it shows sometimes, but
we have fun while we're doing it, And it's it's
all in the personality of the hosts and the content
that we or they in the case of Madeline and
her co host Dixie, decide to give us. So yeah,

(01:17:28):
it's so charming.

Speaker 4 (01:17:30):
Yeah, and it's also what we find. You know, I'm
hoping to get a personality for Christmas this year.

Speaker 3 (01:17:35):
I'll tell you what. I'm not going to wrap it
so it'll be easier for you.

Speaker 4 (01:17:41):
Oh, that's the same unwrapped personality I've always had. I look,
I can tell they used personality a mile off. First
of all, there's no gift receipt. Now what am I.

Speaker 3 (01:17:52):
Gonna And it's wrinkled too, I mean, yeah, you've got
a better iron yours.

Speaker 4 (01:17:57):
Don't get me started.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
Oh you know what those jaunty strings mean. That's right.
It's time for a canonical couplet, the Sherlock Holmes Quiz program,
where we give you two lines of poetry and ask
you to put on your own deerstalker, pull out your
own magnifying glass. Well, we won't go so far as
to ask you to puff on a pipe, but we
will ask you to solve for it. And the last

(01:18:28):
time we were around here, the clue sounded something like this.
When a missing gem sparked consternation, Holmes chose a sly impersonation. Okay, Bert,
I'm going to hand it to you now. Which Sherlock

(01:18:49):
Holme story? Are we talking about?

Speaker 6 (01:18:52):
Easy? Easy? That begins?

Speaker 4 (01:18:54):
You know, at Watson's house with Mary. That's the case
where missus Neville Saint Clair planes to Mary Watson that
her laundry delivery service is sending her wrinkled undergarments. Boy,
that's the case Watson called the van with the twisted slip. M.

Speaker 3 (01:19:17):
I don't even know why I show up some weeks. Yeah,
a valid valiant attempt, but not correct. I know we're
all shocked. We're all shocked here. But our friend Eric
Deckers once again comes to the rescue. He writes, how's gozeiknet?

(01:19:37):
And I've solved it because in tight Eric, it's the
story of a romance novelist whose sister is abducted, and
the ransom is a treasure map to a valuable jewel.
Holmes poses as a notorious but lovable smuggler who rescues
the novelist and her sister and recovers the missing gem.
It's the story Watson called rom Mazarin the Stone, except

(01:20:04):
I think I messed that one up because Holmes looks
nothing like Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito makes a terrible Watson.
I'm thinking of the nineteen eighty four classic Romancing the Stone.
But the correct answer is the Adventure of the Mazarin Stone. Yes,
that is right, Eric, in a roundabout way. Once again,

(01:20:25):
you've done it. Oh you know, and I should mention
I've got a copy of it right over here. Our friend,
our friend, Eric Deckers has a new book out ooh,
called Whither Utopia? Twenty years after nearly all the conservatives
in the world died, the liberals have their ideal utopia,

(01:20:47):
and they're screwing it up. If you're a fan of
political satire and bureaucratic boobery, or ever wondered how a
utopian future could ever go wrong, this book is for you.
If you loved Catch twenty two The Woody Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy, or The Short Rain of Pipping the

(01:21:07):
Fourth then You'll love with her Utopia. It's available from
Four Horsemen Publications dot com. A little plug for our
friend Eric, who does so much of this tireless and
thankless work every week combating the witticisms of Burt. So

(01:21:28):
with that out of the way, yes, the answer is
the Mazarin Stone, and we did have a handful of
people who guessed that properly. There were a few people
who guessed the barrel coronet, believe it or not, but
the majority of people did guess correctly as the Mazarin Stone.
So let's pull out the prizewheel and give it a

(01:21:48):
big spear. It was aroun and slowing down on number nineteen,
and that looks like it is, Dan Petty, and congratulations

(01:22:08):
to you. He submitted his answer. He said, my record
hasn't been very good lately. I find myself looking too
deeply and missing something. My initial guess is the Mazarin
Stone and my final answer, well, that worked out for you, Dan,
so congratulations on that. We will have something from the
vault for you and this time around because it is

(01:22:35):
our interview with Nick Meyer. We're going to have a
copy of Sherlock, Holmes and the Real Thing for the
winner of this canonical couplet. Here we go. Gregson and
Lestrade made contributions minimal within three days. Holmes's hand was
on the criminal. If you know the answer to this

(01:22:57):
episode's canonical couplet, put it in an email to comment
and I hear of Sherlock dot com with canonical couplet
in the subject line. If we choose your name at
random from all the correct submissions, you'll win. Good luck. Okay, Bert,
I don't know how we did it. Yay, I don't

(01:23:20):
know how. Oh did you have the record button on?

Speaker 7 (01:23:25):
No?

Speaker 6 (01:23:25):
No, No, isn't this the rehearsal.

Speaker 3 (01:23:30):
We're going to be doing that for quite a while,
I think. Well, we have another episode coming up for
you in the middle of September, so make sure you
stay tuned for that. Check out the sherlockan calendar to
see how you can get involved all around the country
or around the world if people submit dates for other

(01:23:53):
events from non North American places, and of course, we
encourage you to share, share, share the show whatever platform
you happen to be listening to us on just hit
that share button and let other people know that there
are Sherilockian podcasts available, particularly I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere. Well,

(01:24:17):
what have you got to say for yourself?

Speaker 4 (01:24:19):
Bert, not guilty and I waive consecutive translation.

Speaker 3 (01:24:27):
Well, vox populi vox day.

Speaker 4 (01:24:31):
Yeah, yeah, sure, no, it's easy. That's easy for you
to vox.

Speaker 3 (01:24:38):
Stay tuned in our next episode for the unfoxing and
the unboxing. Well, this is the always boxed about Scott Monty.

Speaker 4 (01:24:49):
And I'm the poorly labeled Bertwolder.

Speaker 3 (01:24:52):
Together we say.

Speaker 5 (01:24:56):
The game.

Speaker 3 (01:25:01):
Oh uh, the games are a foot. I'm afraid of
the pleasure of this conversation. I'm neglecting business of importance
which awaits me. Thank you for listening. Please be sure

(01:25:25):
to join us again for the next episode of I
Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, the first podcast dedicated to Sherlock Holmes.

Speaker 4 (01:25:36):
Goodbye and good luck and believe me to be my
dear mama.

Speaker 3 (01:25:43):
That is sincely yours, Sherlock Holmes.

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Episode 317: Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing

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