St. Albert's Barry Bailey is probably the luckiest Sherlock Holmes fan in the universe right now.
Not only is he the proud owner of a first edition copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (along with a shelf-load of other books on the fictional detective), he actually got to touch the original papers upon which Doyle wrote that book earlier this month.
A book restorer, Bailey had been invited by a friend to help assemble a new exhibit on Doyle's famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, in Edmonton last week.
"I got to handle all the artifacts," he said, including one of the only 36 known pages from the original manuscript of The Hound of the Baskervilles still in existence.
"I never thought in my life that I would hold in my hands the piece of paper Conan Doyle was writing on," he said.
"I had to stop drooling on the artifacts since (the staff) were getting really mad!" he joked.
Bailey was one of a handful of St. Albert residents who got a peek at The International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes before it opened at the Telus World of Science Edmonton Friday.
The exhibit features scores of props, pictures, and original documents related to the many books, plays, films, and video games that star fiction's greatest detective.
Visitors can learn about the history of the character and Victorian London, visit a reproduction of Holmes's drawing room (complete with Persian slipper tobacco pouch on the mantelpiece), and perform chemical, footprint, and blood-spatter analyses to help solve a mystery involving a murdered woman, a smashed bust of Napoleon, and a strange seed.
Richard S. Fowler teacher Josephine Pacholik previewed the exhibit Wednesday at the Gazette's request. A fan of the BBC's Sherlock series, she said she hoped to do a novel study of Holmes's adventures with her Grade 9 students.
"It's a character that doesn't get old," she said of Holmes.
"Time won't change how awesome Sherlock Holmes is."
A study in fandom
Pacholik said she's been hooked on Holmes since she was a teenager, having first learned of the character through his TV and movie appearances.
"I just love the way his mind works," she said – he might do weird stuff, but it's always for a real purpose.
Bailey said he was introduced to Holmes in the summer of 1969.
"I've always been a voracious reader," he said, and he found a collection of short stories featuring Holmes one day and flipped through it, starting with A Scandal in Bohemia.
"Before I knew it, it was morning. I'd read them all."
Bailey said the challenge of trying to crack the case before Holmes did appealed to him, as did Doyle's detailed descriptions of Victorian London, with its mysterious fogs and glowing gas-lamps.
"It was like you were right back there, riding in the hansom cabs."
Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson were also very endearing characters, he added. While some might like Holmes for his eccentricities (such as his habit of firing bullets into the walls of his drawing room), Bailey said it was his intellect that he found most appealing.
"He (Holmes) was just so much smarter than everyone, including the poor bumbling metropolitan police."
Victorian superhero
In addition to his unusual habits, Holmes is famous for his mastery of deductive reasoning and observation, skills that let him decipher a person's life story from a stain on their boots or solve a murder without leaving his sitting room. Whether it be a missing horse, a mysterious ritual, or a maddening cipher, there seems to be no case he can't crack through the use of logic, reason, and forensic science.
That was one of the big innovations that Doyle brought to detective fiction with the first Sherlock Holmes story in 1888, said Geoffrey Curley, curator of the exhibition. Instead of having Holmes solve his cases through trickery, luck, or some clue he withheld from the audience, as was common at the time, he had Holmes use science.
"When the conclusion comes, it's based upon the facts you've already read in the book."
Doyle was a trained doctor who studied at the University of Edinburgh, Curley said. One of his professors, Dr. Joseph Bell, was a major inspiration for the character of Holmes.
Bell stressed to Doyle the importance of making close observation of one's patients when making a diagnosis, and, like Holmes, was able to identify a cobbler by the wear on a man's pants or a cork-cutter by a callous on a thumb. He was even known to wear a cape and a deerstalker hat – items now closely associated with the great detective.
Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories in the late 1800s, a time when the sciences of ballistics, fingerprinting, and toxicology used in them were still cutting edge.
"There really weren't any forensic scientists," Curley said, and the police were more likely to use politics than science to solve crimes.
The advent of the Metropolitan Railway had given rise to the suburbs and flooded downtown London with immigrants and the poor, causing a surge in crime. Whole sections of the city were effectively no-go zones for the cops, who had just recently completely failed to catch the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.
"There was a lot of questions and there was a lot of fear," Curley said.
"It was a prime time ... for a hero, a superhero to come out and give us the tools to understand what was true and what was not."
Holmes and his magnificent mind reassured readers that they could use science to cut through the fog of lies in their world and get to the truth, Curley said.
His adventures were also grounded in the real world, he continued. There were murders, of course, but also more mundane matters such as missing jewels and mistaken identities, all involving realistic characters. Doyle also used the character of Watson as an audience surrogate, letting them follow Holmes as he did his work. All these factors made him an immediate hit with readers.
Forever popular
The Sherlock Holmes series is still immensely popular more than a century later. There have been three blockbuster films about the character in the last decade alone, and scores of spinoff books, plays, action figures and memorabilia released over the years.
The Holmes stories had an immense effect on modern policing, popularizing the idea that you could prove a crime using science instead of relying on eyewitnesses, Bailey said.
As for why the character is still so popular today, Curley said it might be because we're going through the same troubled, fearful times that London did back when Doyle first wrote his stories.
"Today it's so hard to judge what's true and what's not," he said, what with blogs and augmented and virtual reality.
"The ability to cut through all that, use the facts, use science to figure out what's true and then have it be then revealed is a very comforting thing for all of us."
Bailey said one quote from Holmes has held particular influence over his life: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
"If you look at a problem that way, and you eliminate and take away, the solution is probably going to present itself," he explained.
The exhibit runs until Sept. 5. Visit telusworldofscienceedmonton.ca for details.
