Monthly Meeting Minutes - 2nd December 2023

Date of Meeting: 2nd December 2023

 

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

 

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

 

Apologies:

I apologise for the hasty distracted nature of this meeting.

 

Presentation:

Paul Thomas Miller (The Entire Canon) presented the following mean-spirited pastiche what he wrote. He explained that he had already rejected the idea of sharing this piece once before because it was at once a horrible bullying sort of thing to write and also rather hypocritical. However, as he was overloaded with other things and struggling to come up with anything new, he had wheeled it out anyway.

The Adventure of the Modern Day, Poorly Researched, Ill Thought Out, Badly Written Pastiche Which Nevertheless Gets Published by a Bad Publisher Who Pumps Out Any Old Crap Without Proof Reading It

(Or “Poorstiche” for short)

It had been a typically hot English March morning in 1902. Mrs Hudson had just cleared away our breakfast of grits and waffles and Holmes and I fell to discussing the announcement that morning that Queen Victoria had just commissioned a sailing vessel named The Titanic on which she planned to travel to America. She was to be accompanied by Irene Adler, the well-known adventuress - because it was an adventure,

Just as Holmes was suggesting that the unsinkable ship might one day prove capable of going around the world in eighty, days, there was a ring at the bell. We heared Mrs. Hudson open the door and this was quickly followed by footsteps clattering up the stairs and the door to our quarters bursting open.

Holmes is not one for surprise, but even he was left speechless by the sight of Sir Winston Churchill – leader of the Labor Party and president of the United Kingdom of Britain – standing they’re upon our threshold. Winston was quite out of breath and could barely keep his cigar in his mouth as he stood panting in our doorway.

Once he was settled in an armchair by the roaring fire with a glass of Pernod and black and some Spam sandwiches, he began to speak.

“I apologize for my appearance, gentlemen, but I have run all the way here from Downing Street to seek your help.”

“Think nothing of it,” replied Holmes, “we are used to such entrances here at 221b. Prey compose yourself and tell us the cause of your consternation.”

“You have heard, no doubt, of the successful experiments in aviation by the Wright brothers in Texas last month?”

“Indeed. It made for rather surreal reading.”

“Well, this clearly marks the beginning of airborne warfare. If we encounter another world war, we need to be able to bomb from the sky better than the communists in Russia.”

Up until this point, I had been able to follow the goings on and largely ignore the anachronisms, Americanisms, errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation, general mistakes about Victorian language and the wilful misinterpretation of the original Canon, but things were about to get much, much worse.

“Naturally. As we, in The West, love, above all things, our democratic freedom, we must all be on guard against the insidious threat of communism as perceived by the current author who will now spend several paragraphs putting their personal barely considered political opinions into the mouths of Watson, Churchill and Holmes.”

…

“Indeed,” replied Holmes again, although I don’t know what he was agreeing with, because I, like any reader who may have foolishly purchased this book, had chosen to skip forward a page.

“In summary, then,” Churchill helpfully interjected, “the prototype of the RAF’s Spitfire plane has been stolen from RAF Digby and we need you to find it. We think it is being held by a group of spies based in the sportsground behind the lecture building of the University of Cambridge.”

“Of course,” said Holmes. “I know all about Spitfires and will now spend two and a half pages talking about them because the author wishes to show off that they have real the WHOLE page about them on Wikipedia.”

…

“So you, see Watson,” said Holmes once I skipped to the start of the next chapter, “that is why we are on this express train to Scotland station: so that we can go to the Lecture Building at The University of Cambridge. Where I will entirely forget who I am and instead become a James Bond like character and battle the forces of something the author isn’t keen on and which Victorians had never heard of.”

“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t really paying attention because I was thinking about how the font was stupidly large and the text was all double spaced so that the publisher could get away with pretending this short story was a novel and charging accordingly.

When we disembarked at a train station, Mycroft was there to meet us. He was holding a turbo-horse which was towing a hansom cab that we got into through the side doors.. We entered into an in depth discussion of something controversial the author is either massively in favor of or massively against 100 years before a term for it would be invented. The characters present all agreed that it was a black and white issue and allowed no room for the gray middle ground the real world exists in. And then the character who initially thought differently to Holmes rethought their values and agreed with him wholeheartedly. Any pretence to be an attempt at a pastiche was abandoned at this point. But then the author remembered what they were supposed to be doing.

“This is much like the case I wrote up named “The Bruce Partington Plans”, isn’t it Holmes”, I said, so that the reader knows how clever the author is at weaving their story imperceptibly into The Canon.

“The matter is a perfectly trivial one but there are points in connection with it which are not entirely devoid of interest and even of instruction.” said Sherlock. 

“Are you just lifting quotes from The Canon to try to sound more like Arthur Conan Doyle?”

“Yes. Is it working?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you are using quotes from The Canon that don’t make any sense here.”

“I am next to the apple tree” interrupted someone who we will not mention until much later so that the conversation becomes impossible to follow because you don’t know who is talking to who.

“Thun ’er by thee garn t’pit in thy ‘arrogarb” said someone in an attempt by an American to invoke some sort of imagined regional accent from the Englandish Kingdom.

…

Somewhere in the next chapter, I began paying attention again and was amazed by Holmes’s invention of ninjitsu. Having subdued all the guards,, a love making session was embarked upon that involved any number of the following: Irene Adler, Dr. John H. Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Silver Blaze, Moriarty and…

“Of course!!!,” cried Holmes, interrupting the badly written sex scene.

“What?” I said, wiping off whatever it was I had put into someone or had had put into me.

“I forgot to mention Moriarty! We should go off on a tangent about Moriarty. Everyone loves it when it all turns out to be Moriarty again!”

… 

Skipping to the last page I discovered a resolution which left a dozen loose ends and relied on the supernatural. Or did it? Yes! Or did it? No!  Or did it? Ect.

I retired to bed that evening worn out but unable to sleep due to the sounds of the author waggling their eyebrows pridefullizingly.

 

Any Other Business:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) asked whether there was any port. There was no port.