How I met Mr. Holmes

Hello there! I thought I'd dive into this blog with a little brain attic archaeology. I've endeavored to make interesting to someone who is not me, and hope I succeeded. I gratefully accept any notes and responses! ~ K

I'm six or seven years old, it's well past my bedtime , and I'm sitting on the lid of a clothes hamper, peeking through the crack in my bedroom door. Not the most glamourous meeting, but I wouldn't know it for many years anyway.

I was a pretty sheltered child, but I always wanted to see what my parents watched after I was put to bed at night, even if it gave me nightmares. My bedroom door was situated looking directly out into the living room and the TV screen, and if I was absolutely quiet, I could position myself and squint through the slightly open door at forbidden grown-up television. Now, their viewing habits were fairly tame by anyone's standards - Hallmark and Lifetime being their usual - and rural Upper Michigan, where I grew up, had pretty basic cable, so most of the time this was something like a true ghost stories show, Gothic horror movies from two decades ago, or reruns of the Twilight Zone - for better or worse, these things shaped me: my nightmares and my inspirations.

"A ghastly face staring in the window" grew into a fear of my young life. It possibly had something to do with the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," which is a little hokey by today's standards, but to an impressionable young girl, pulling back the curtain to reveal the grotesque, almost clownish face inches from your own was absolutely terrifying. I was always afraid of what might be lurking the dark on the other side of a pane of glass, not so much because it could hurt me, but the horrifying, unexpected visage that both terrified and obsessed me - as much as it scared me shitless, I couldn't resist the urge to look. So, no matter how much ice water shot through my veins, I always had to put my eye back to the crack in the door.

And so, I couldn't look away from the horrible rictus grin of the corpse, the blurry, monstrous face at the window, or get the death grimace of the tropical poison out of my head. I was too young to understand, but I was watching the Sign of [the] Four.

About BSTLYH

Be Sure to Lock Your Homes: being the writings of a Lady upon Sherlockiana, Arcana, Cinema, and Assorted Mischellany.

Pleased to meet you, I'm "A Lady:" I usually just go by K here; my screen name in various places is unicorngirl or iamunicorngirl. I'm a librarian and writer living in Iowa City in the USA, but my heart is very often in England.

I started this blog as a repository for these "treatises" I keep writing or meaning to write about Sherlockian topics, movies, history, the paranormal - a good deal are probably going to be vampires, another favorite research topic - and whatever else fits. I don't know if much of it will be of interest to others, but I'm putting it out there regardless, if only to get my thoughts in order in a manner which would make sense to someone else.

I'm a proud novice member of the Younger Stamfords in Iowa City. While relatively new to the wider world of Sherlockian study, I've been a reader and fan most of my life. I'm also a writer and aspire to pastiche one day. I think better in writing, so this is a good place to get out some of my thoughts and organize some of my research (such as it is) into Sherlockian topics.

I'm also a film buff, and am definitely going to be using this platform for some of the movie reviews/musings on various films I have written or meant to write - once they're polished up anyway! I've been watching (and rewatching) movies obsessively my whole life, writing about them for some, and some previous attempts at blogging movie reviews were less than successful, but help me get my thoughts in order. I have a lot of thoughts on a lot of films, so you'll definitely be seeing those to come.

What's in the name?
When I was very young I saw a series of TV movies of Sherlock Holmes stories, and had a hazy memory of a scene from one, in which Watson confronts a heard-of-hearing and slightly daft shopkeeper. When asked his business, he says he's sent by Mr. Sherlock Holmes, to which the shopkeeper responds, "Eh?? Be sure to lock yer 'omes?" I found this very funny and clever, and it stuck with me long after I forgot where I'd heard it. Later when I read the canon, I always thought this joke would be in the stories somewhere, and was a little disappointed to find it wasn't. However I've valiantly given it new life as the title for this blog. (Later I went on a quest for that series of movies and discovered this scene appeared in the 2001 Canadian TV movie production of "The Sign of Four" with Matt Frewer and Kenneth Walsh, which I talk more about in this post.)

I welcome comments, even criticism or disagreement, but please keep political in-fighting and hurtful language out of my blog. Everything I express and espouse here are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted as original research or cited as someone else's research. I welcome viewpoints other than my own on Sherlockian ideas, but please respect mine and others' views on questions that cannot be definitively proven by the canon as one of many possible readings. Offensive comments will be deleted.