"My dear Holmes!" I ejaculated.

I can't even tell you how many times that sentence, or some form of it, has appeared in the Sherlock Holmes stories that I've been reading steadily throughout the summer. And it doesn't matter that I am a serious scholar of Victorian literature, or that I am a mature adult--I must suppress a giggle every time. The reason is this: within the BBC Sherlock fandom, as I am sure no one who reads this blog will be even remotely surprised to learn, there is a gigantic collective of folk who support the theory that John Watson and Sherlock Holmes are in love.

And I am one of these people.

I'm not going to offer support or evidence in this blog post--that's just not what this blog is for--but I thought it was high time I did a post on Sherlock Holmes.

As I stated before, I've been making my way slowly through the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels this summer. I bought my father the complete short stories (in a nice hardback volume that includes the original illustrations, too) for Father's Day, because he zipped through a large anthology of short stories about Texas that I gave him for Christmas. He seems to like being able to squeeze in a story a day, and I thought it would be nice for him to read something that I myself am actually doing work in. We're not reading the stories together exactly, but I've been trying to keep up with him between the Victorian novels that I'm reading on my own.

It's no mystery that the BBC Sherlock was my gateway into the fandom. I'm not ashamed. But it did seem a natural direction for my interests to take as my studies in affect have led me to the sensation novel and subsequently into the detective novel via Wilkie Collins.

So, I've developed a bit of Sherlock Radar. Just in the past week in Austin, I've taken note of the following:

R and I checked out this pub yesterday. Unfortunately, as R phrased it, the inside betrayed it to be nothing more than a "glorified Applebee's." We did not stay to drink a pint.

I was camped out at Book People earlier this week, finishing up my syllabi and assignments for my Rhetoric classes this semester. Before I left I went to the loo and what graffiti should I find in the stall but this glorious scrawl. Ha.