The Barker Street Regulars

hustled Rowdy from person to person.
    By the time we finally entered Althea’s room, the three Sherlockians were deeply involved in a collaborative analysis of the evidence. Pausing briefly just inside the room, I felt my view of the three undergo yet another transformation. Through my newly Holmesian eyes, I’d previously seen Hugh and Robert as cooperative actors who shared the roles of Holmes and Watson in a long-running performance of the Great Game. In appearance, the tall, distinguished, keen-eyed Robert was a natural for the part of the Great Detective; Hugh made a rather short and hefty Holmes. It was Hugh, however, who’d have conducted the stinky chemical experiments that had absorbed Holmes, Hugh whose laptop computer was the present-day version of the albums in which Holmes had stored and catalogued his files. Or did the laptop also cast Hugh in the role of Watson? The computer was, after all, the ultimate recorder. And it was Robert who armed himself with the Master’s favorite weapon. Hugh, like Watson, favored a revolver. As for Althea, I’d accepted Hugh and Robert’s plain assertion that for both of them, Althea Battlefield was Irene Adler. She was the woman. And who was I? At most, I was the anonymous Reader. In the world of Sherlock Holmes, I was no one at all.
    Now, pausing before entering the drama, I sensed a reassignment of the immortal roles. Ignoring Althea’s near blindness, Hugh and Robert were presenting her with photographs. Hugh stood on one side of her, Robert on the other.
    “Is this woman attractive?” Althea asked.
    “Moderately,” Robert replied grudgingly.
    “Moderately,” Hugh agreed, stroking his pale mustache.
    “A man,” said Althea, “visits an attractive woman. What further explanation is required?”
    “The man,” said Hugh in ominous tones, “is the owner of a large dog.”
    “An inference,” Robert continued, “drawn from the creature’s response when we approach the vehicle in which it is incarcerated. The vehicle is a windowless van of sorts.”
    “A panel truck,” Hugh said. “The cargo area at the rear has no windows.”
    “Just so,” Robert agreed.
    “What Robert is trying to say,” Hugh said, “is that we attempted to observe the dog on two occasions, last night and the night before, but each time, the dog created a ruckus that would have drawn attention to our
    presence.”
    “How disappointing,” Althea commented. “How ordinary! The incurious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
    The story was “Silver Blaze.” There, the dog did nothing in the night-time —and “That,” as Holmes remarks, “ was the curious incident.” When someone approached, why did the dog do nothing? Because the intruder was no stranger to the dog. And Nicole Brown Simpson’s Akita? Ponder it. “Silver Blaze”?
    “The depth and volume of the dog’s barking,” Robert reported, “were sufficient to establish the size of the animal.”
    “Data,” Hugh said, “consistent with evidence collected at the scene of the murder concerning a tall white male dog with exceptionally large feet.”
    As Hugh and Robert took turns presenting information to Althea, I continued to ask myself who was who in this Holmesian scenario. Speaking almost with one voice, Hugh and Robert were two halves of Holmes: Robert, the contemplative thinker; Hugh, the scientific analyst. I thought of Rex Stout’s lighthearted essay. If Watson was a woman, had Althea now become Watson? Clearly not. It was she who was being presented with the evidence, she who was apparently expected to make something of it. Ah hah! Hugh and Robert, the men of action, collected the evidence and were now reporting to Althea, who never left the Gateway. Mycroft Holmes! Sherlock’s brother, need I inform you? Yes, Mycroft, who, according to Holmes himself, possessed better powers of observation than Sherlock, but lacked ambition and energy, and only in times of crisis left his lodgings in Pall Mall for anywhere other than the Diogenes Club, where every member was forbidden to take any notice whatsoever of any other member. So, Althea was now Mycroft: the great brain lodged in a largely immobile body. The Gateway was her club. The murder victim was, of course, the unfortunate Jonathan Hubbell. The client, albeit an unwitting one, was Ceci. I felt a strange satisfaction in having squeezed the present situation into the Holmesian mold.
    Again, who was I? In real life I was the professional writer in