Happy Birthday, Arthur Conan Doyle!

Happy Birthday, Arthur Conan Doyle. And, all of ten minutes ago, I just got my 1892 first edition of the Strand magazine in the mail with the Adventure of Silver Blaze. Hooray!!!

"What's this?" sniffs Mollie.

"Oh, just the 1892 Strand first edition of Sherlock Holmes I found for $39 on ebay, arriving randomly in the mail on Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday." says I.

"Oh", says Mollie, and promptly goes back to sleep.

Today there have been a lot of conversations in my facebook feed about rights, the police state, and the culture of incarceration here in the US. First of all, I have my own personal experience hauling ass on concentrated evil, in a state where the political agendas of criminals easily trump human rights. This was thanks to a one-sided peace agreement and the ability of these criminals to woo the US government's cooperation in squashing and silencing me...but not for long. So I have experience fighting conspiracies that go to the very top, which is why I empathize with the loneliness of his character. But just as importantly, the very issue of police state affrontery to the workings of conscience is the very reason why I adore Conan Doyle's most beloved character twice as much.

The biggest cultural change I've noticed between the OLD Doyle canon Sherlock Holmes and the new BBC series, is that the OLD Sherlock had a considerably frosty (and sometimes hostile) relationship with DI Lestrade and Scotland Yard. This was for very good reason. Canon Sherlock had a fire lit under him especially to exonerate the wrongly accused, and bring actual criminals to justice. There were times Scotland Yard owed him everything, but also times they absolutely hated his guts, because more than anything they wanted a public image as being those who caught criminals, and in the canon that image was more important to them, than whether or not someone was actually guilty. And Sherlock despised it.

Arthur Conan Doyle literally invented the science of forensics in his stories to exonerate the innocent during an age when Britain was still executing people in prisons. He considered exoneration in many ways to be morally superior in cause to catching the guilty, and was one of his deepest inspirations in creating such a heroic character. Yes Sherlock is an eccentric jerk, but you really can't help but adore the fiery conscience of his creator, reflected in his character.

The challenge to such a one-sided system is absolutely necessary today, but in the new Sherlock, Lestrade is cast more as a compatriot and chum, and Sherlock the one who saves Scotland Yard's reputation.

But acquiring justice, whether or not the science of forensics is massively improved since the 1890s, is still a very bitter battle today being waged on citizenry by corporate quotas for prison beds, police forces not being held accountable, juries not being fully informed, and the sky high price of adequate representation not being made affordable to the poor and accused.

My own war of attrition with Sinn Fein/IRA from 2011-2013 utterly reflected Sherlock's struggle with the tendrilled conspiracy of sly operatives that was the mastermind of Moriarty, whether or not the theories of his invention of Moriarty are true. The conspiracy was desperately real for me, unfortunately. But the everyday fight he waged as a character was fired not only by his desire to catch predators, but more importantly, to make sure that good people weren't sent to the scaffold in the flashpoint mob mentality that possessed the general populace in those days... AND today in many respects.

Arthur Conan Doyle made an entreaty to our own conscience by asking us not just to see, but to observe. THAT canon is never more necessary than now, because we are all too willing en masse, on all sides, to believe in things that aren't true, and follow clues that aren't there, in the name of causes that aren't relevant, rather than listen in silence to the deepest instincts of our own conscience, and trust in our intellect in order to follow the right path to the facts that matter.