For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!

Picture is text from EMPT which reads: “As I did so I struck against an elderly, deformed man, who had been behind me, and I knocked down several books which he was carrying. I remember that as I picked them up, I observed the title of one of them, The Origin of Tree Worship, and it struck me that the fellow must be some poor bibliophile, who, either as a trade or as a hobby, was a collector of obscure volumes.”

Just casually looked up Victorian tree worship (as you do) and came across this…

“…A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship, published anonymously in 1890. The fourth entry in a ten-volume “Phallic Series” printed privately in limited number…”

The most prevalent of Sherlockian and Holmesian theorists were and are generally those involved in academics before their engagement with the practice of Sherlockiana; that is, a decidedly un-meta critique of the Sherlock Holmes saga, whose sole activity is explaining discrepancies not with artistic merit but with real-world functional answers. These figures include Dorothy L. Sayers and Ronald Knox, alumni of Oxford, in medieval literature and classics respectively; fellow theologists and key figures in detective fiction’s generic discourse. There is Professor Jay Finley Christ and David Stuart Davies, who wrote his university dissertation on Conan Doyle; and Leslie S. Klinger who is noted as a leading expert on the most critically pervasive of the Victorian literary canon. Their analytical dispositions latched onto Sherlock Holmes as a fun, unserious exercise of a skill—Holmes being quite suited to this as a rather low-brow piece of literature but one full of encouragements to use powers of observation and mordancy. However, for myself, entering this space from the young age of fifteen created Holmes as my very introduction to this treatment of literature. I had been drawn into the key common interest of this sphere: literary analysis.

I just did a post on my Holmes blog about Rex Stout that mentioned what was clearly his magnum opus, "Watson was a Woman," which claims that Watson was a woman, Irene Adler in particular, who was married to Holmes- and that the two of them produced Lord Peter Wimsey.

Stout's allegation about Wimsey being born of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler/Norton/Watson (!?!?) is obviously garbage, as contrary to the scrupulously researched and deathly serious rest of the article /s, this statement is based on Stout vaguely assigning Wimsey a birthdate around the turn of the century, when The Second Stain was published- presumably because that connotes a clear point when Holmes and Watson were no longer actively solving cases, and presumably their removal to the Sussex Downs to raise bees was also intended to provide a place for them to raise their son away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Or something.

The problem here, of course, is that Wimsey was, per his author, born in 1890, when both Holmes and Watson were in the public eye solving cases. And, like, we know who Wimsey's parents are. So that's a wash.

...or is it?

There is another possibility. Wimsey's birthdate of 1890 is mentioned a number of times, one of which is in DLS's radio story written for the Holmes birthday centennial. In this story, she helpfully situates that Wimsey's birth came just before Holmes's apparent death, and that Wimsey's father was a "minor member of Cabinet" during the period of The Naval Treaty, and thus was involved in the affair at the time. It is implied that he may have met Holmes at this juncture.

The Naval Treaty is dated, in-story, as the July after Watson's marriage. Watson becomes engaged to Mary Morstan in 1888, and has married her by June 1889, per Twisted Lip. Ergo, Naval Treaty takes place in July 1889.

Apropos of nothing... let's consider Sherlock Holmes's hands. We're told over the course of the stories that he has "long, white, nervous fingers" and a "delicacy of touch," which he obscures by the fact that he always has punctures and chemical stains all over them. We'll of course get back to this.

So it's July 1889. Mortimer Wimsey, Duke of Denver (or Viscount St George, unclear), is a minor cabinet minister, a position he has most certainly fallen upward into. He is in a marriage of more or less friendly detente with his wife Honoria nee Delagardie, much cleverer than he is, on whom he is constantly cheating. She's already given birth to the heir, a clear chip off the old block. One day, Mortimer comes home and tells Honoria of the calamity of the disappearance of the treaty. A month or so later, he excitedly comes home to share that the great Sherlock Holmes has found the treaty, solved the case, and saved the empire. Honoria is, of course, pleased to hear this, and even more impressed by this Mr Holmes than she already had been from other tales of his exploits which had made their way to high places.

We know that Holmes did not shy away from connections with nobility and royalty, and that for all his protestations that he did not discriminate by class in his detective practice (clearly true), in his private life he did not object to being feted by the upper classes. It was probably not that difficult for Honoria to invite him for dinner, or get herself invited to a party celebrating Holmes's accomplishment. Or perhaps it was Mortimer, respecting intelligence greater than his own, who invited Holmes. It could have happened pretty much anytime over the next few months- and, somehow, and without my attempting to explain exactly HOW, because the mind recoils, Honoria's second child resulted without her husband's involvement.

We know that Mortimer had no idea, as he seemed uncomplicatedly joyful when, as DLS noted, he came home to Honoria to tell her the news of Holmes's return. We wonder if Holmes knew- Wimsey's narration makes clear that he's not sure why Holmes let him into the 221b rooms as a young child looking for his lost cat, but what else would he do for his secret son? And, of course, the Wimsey hands, the only positive trace of Wimseyness that wasn't quite overcome by Delagarditude, were in fact Holmes hands, also delicate and sensitive. (But Gherkins had the same ha- shut up.)