I first met Stephen Lee when he was handing out free books at the vendor's room during the Birthday Weekend. Who doesn't want to meet someone who is giving away free books? That book was Sherlock Holmes and the Silent Contest which I promptly dropped into my bag and moved around to other tables. But when I finally read this slim volume, Holy Cow! Stephen has done some amazing work to reconcile major issues in the Sherlockian Canon.
Soon after that, Stephen started popping up in all kinds of places: his Modern Detection substack, a Crew of the Barque Lone Star meeting, the Federal Bar Association, Harper's Magazine, and the 2024 class of the Baker Street Irregulars. So what's this guy got to say? Read along to find out!
How do you define the word “Sherlockian”?
To me, anyone who loves Sherlock Holmes stories and treats them as something worth analyzing is a Sherlockian. We don’t all read the stories the same way, but I think we all think that there’s something worth studying and discussing.
How did you become a Sherlockian?
I came to Sherlock Holmes later than many other Sherlockians. I did not read the stories as a child but read them all for the first time as an adult and while I was working as a federal prosecutor. When I read the stories, I saw things from the perspective of someone who had actually investigated real-life crimes, and I thought the stories were actually very good from that perspective. Sherlock Holmes is not a magician or a superhero, but someone who brings a lot of academic and practical experience to his craft, so much so that what he does seems magical or amazing to others.
Even so, I was not expecting to dig deep into Sherlock Holmes until I realized that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never really told us in "The Final Problem" how Sherlock Holmes brought down Professor Moriarty. Holmes sees Watson for the first time in months and tells him that he has been investigating London’s criminal mastermind.
“If a detailed account of that silent contest could be written, it would take its place as the most brilliant bit of thrust-and-parry work in the history of detection,” Holmes says. “Never have I risen to such a height, and never have I been so hard pressed by an opponent.”
But Holmes and Watson never tell us what Holmes did. Instead, the rest of "The Final Problem" is a chase through Europe ending at the Reichenbach Falls.
I was disappointed in "The Final Problem," but then I read The Valley of Fear, which turned everything upside down. In that story, we learn that Holmes had been investigating Moriarty for many years and we learn some of the steps that Holmes has taken. But we also realize that some aspects of The Valley of Fear contradict "The Final Problem." Many Sherlockians had noticed this before, but I realized that some of my real-life experience investigating crimes could provide an explanation that fit within the canon. I ended up studying the entire canon in this light and then wrote up my monograph “Sherlock Holmes and the Silent Contest,” which I self-published and distributed at the BSI weekend in January 2022.
What is your profession and does that affect how you enjoy being a Sherlockian?
I was a federal prosecutor for 11 years and have been in private practice since 2019, and I focus on health care fraud cases. I started off my professional career as a newspaper reporter. All of this has given me a lot of experience conducting investigations, and I think that informs my love and appreciation for the Sherlock Holmes stories.
The stories hold up very well in terms of investigations and offer a lot of practical advice for people who do investigations. I love the line, “If you have all the details of a thousand [crimes] at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.” This resonates with my experience investigating crimes. The first time I investigated a bank robbery or a health care fraud scheme, those cases seemed difficult. But as I did more of these cases, I knew what to look for and found things that others had missed.
What is your favorite canonical story?
I recommend "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League" because it’s such a great introduction to Sherlock Holmes and his world. The idea is clever, and the execution is fun.
In terms of the Silent Contest idea, I love A Study in Scarlet. I imagine what Watson and Holmes must have considered in deciding what should go into print. What secrets did they leave out, and what misdirection are they doing? One of the most famous parts of that story is when Watson reveals that his friend does not know whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa. Everyone laughs at this, and Professor Moriarty would have laughed more than anyone else. But I think that Watson and Holmes actually had the last laugh, knowing that this seemingly extraneous bit would lull Moriarty into complacency.
Who is a specific Sherlockian that you think others would find interesting?
I’ve met a lot of amazing Sherlockians over the years, but I want to highlight Nicholas Meyer, whose Seven Per-cent Solution was a great attempt at reconciling the oddities of the Moriarty story. Nicholas and I came up with very different solutions, but I think that his work is a great supplement to the canon.
As someone who read the Canon for the first time in the past few years, how much had pop culture influenced what you did or did not expect from the stories?
I think my longtime love of comic books helped me view the canon with a fresh perspective. Readers of comic books are very used to stories that contradict each other and that effectively rewrite old stories (“retconning”), and Stan Lee of Marvel Comics offered “No-Prizes” to people who could explain away mistakes in the comics. All this probably helped make me very comfortable with seeing contradictions in the canon and then trying to come up with ways to reconcile them
What book would you recommend to other Sherlockians?
In terms of non-canonical fictional works, one of my favorites is Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald, which brings Lovecraftian horror to Victorian London in a clever way. It’s better to read it not knowing much about the story, but it provides a great perspective on the canon.
For non-fiction, I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. This book is a great resource for understanding how people actually think and the flaws in our reasoning. This is something that I think we all could better understand.
In terms of non-Sherlock mysteries, I highly recommend The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino. This is not a whodunnit mystery, but a duel of wits and logic between two brilliant adversaries. It’s not quite Sherlock Holmes vs. Moriarty, but it’s close!
Where do you see Sherlockiana in 5 or 10 years from now?
I hope we get more fresh perspectives from people who love the stories but might not even know about the Sherlockian community. I actually sat on the Silent Contest for a few years after finishing my monograph because I was not sure what to do with it and did not know about scion societies at the time. I am sure there are more people out there whom we can reach and who would have a lot to give, and I hope to bring more people into our community.
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