To give you a taste of the stories in the book, here’s one from Claudia Gonson, of the Magnetic Fields, about a tape from her boyfriend, circa 1986. (You can hear the songs on the tape here, by the way.)

John was my boyfriend from age 15-19 or so, ie: my entire high school career. These of course are the years where music leaves a passionate, indelible mark on the core of your being. It’s hard for me to comment on these songs (or some of them, anyway) without wanting to shout “oh my god, this is the most amazing song EVER!!”

Which is why I am so grateful to John. I met John in the summer of 1983. I had just turned 15. A few days later, I introduced him to Stephin, my bandmate and best friend. They were both older than me, and musically precocious. I was a little doe-eyed kid who had only heard of the Beatles. The day they met, they immediately had an argument over which Lindsay Buckingham solo album was the best. I was scared they hated one another, but it turned out this is how some boys show how much they like one another.

The conversation then turned to Yoko Ono, and it went on, for months, years… Who got the latest single from Flying Nun, or Rough Trade, or Cherry Red? Who had the cool newest solo project from David Roback of the Rain Parade? (see the “Clay Allison” track below. They were then renamed Opal, and eventually morphed into Mazzy Star). We got fake IDs in Times Square, and went to see our favorite bands live, including the Bangles, Game Theory, the Chills, and The Three O’Clock.

It was clear to me that I needed lessons: “what’s the difference between the Rain Parade, The Raincoats, and Rainy Day”? These two men infused me with more information in a month than I could have gotten in years by myself. John would buy the first three Bee Gees albums and then make me a mix-tape of the best songs. All I think I discovered for him during our years together was the Smiths and REM.

Anyway, I am grateful beyond words for John and his mix tapes (and Stephin too of course). I am certain I would not be the person I am today had I not had this orthodox musical education. I’d probably be a banker or something.

John also showed me how to listen to production. He sat me down on the bed one day and put on the Archies “Sugar Sugar”. “Listen,” he said, “to the first verse. What instruments do you hear? Do you hear that tambourine coming in on the second verse? That tambourine on the second verse is the first rule of classic bubblegum production!”

Like many mix-tape artists, John worked hard to time out each song so that the tape wouldn’t have any remaining space at the end. He also began and ended the A-side of this particular tape with a song featuring the chimes of Big Ben (the Chills and Cheap Trick).

So many of these songs have stories and memories connected to them, I could write a story for each (in fact, John sent me a marvelous email in which he did just that). And, while I don’t want to sound like that person… but what the hell, I will- some of these songs are the BEST SONGS ON EARTH. EVER EVER EVER.

Ever since YouTube crashed onto the scene a few years ago, companies have been holding video contests, and anywhere from several hundred to several thousand video-makers have been entering each one. Now, such contests have become so popular that there are at least a dozen running at any one time, and veteran commercial directors are beginning to gripe about losing work to the great unwashed masses. So what are these contests, and which videos are winning them? I did a little legwork, and came up with this sampler of contest winners.

Doritos “Crash the Superbowl” Contest

This spot was shown during last year’s superbowl — quite an honor.

Turbotax Rap Video Contest

They even hired Vanilla Ice to be the judge. Here’s the rap Vanilla liked best:

Sketchies II YouTube Sketch Comedy Contest

For two years in a row, YouTube has gone looking for the best amateur sketch comedy troupes out there, via the videos they submit. This year’s winner has a special place in my heart, since it’s about Sherlock Holmes. (Shameless plug: check out my book!)

Radiohead Video Contest

AniBOOM hosted a contest for animators, who were invited to make videos for some of Radiohead’s new songs from In Rainbows. This mesmerizing entry for the song “Reckoner” took the prize.

Doritos “Guru” Conest Winner

The winner of this Doritos contest got to name a new flavor of chip. Find out why they call it “Scream Cheese” —

On the Lot Filmmaker Attacked by Aliens

Remember the ill-fated reality show On the Lot from back in 2007? It was kind of the ultimate video contest — the winners got to appear on the reality show, and then every week’s episode was a new video contest, the final winner of which got a development deal at Dreamworks. (Kind of a weird prize — the writer/director who wins gets to become a producer. Okay … ) Anyway, this was the video submission which earned filmmaker Zack Lipovsky a spot on the show.

Bjork “Innocence” Video Contest

Crowd-sourcing music videos seems to be catching on. Here’s a weird winner for a weird song by Bjork.

How to Outwit a Criminal Mastermind
“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.” —Sherlock Holmes describing Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem”

Powerful minds are not always drawn to the pursuit of good; there are those whose genius is tainted with criminality and who, as Holmes believed of his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty, possess “hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind.” Like Holmes, you may discover that the crimes committed in your city are not the random work of unrelated thieves and killers but are connected—though subtly—in a giant web, at the center of which is a mastermind like Moriarty, controlling all from a seemingly untouchable remove. Until you can find proof admissible in a court of law that such is the case, however, your day-to-day casework will remain an unending, Sisyphean task; unless you can outwit the mastermind, your crime-solving efforts will address only the branches of evil, not the root. By undertaking the following methods, you may be able to take the fight to him.

1. Gather evidence of the mastermind’s crimes. This first step is the most difficult, for as Holmes said of Moriarty, “so aloof is he from general suspicion . . . so admirable in his management and self-effacement” that finding proof of his criminal ties may seem impossible. Holmes’s method was comprehensive: He surreptitiously searched Moriarty’s house on three occasions (and found “absolutely nothing”), peeked into the mastermind’s finances (“I made it my business to hunt down some of Moriarty’s checks”), and tracked the doings of Moriarty’s criminal associates. Most importantly, he took every precaution to conduct his investigations without the mastermind’s knowledge; unfortunately, Holmes reports in “The Final Problem,” Moriarty was “too wily for that.” If you too are found out, proceed to the next step.

2. Thwart his attempts to assassinate you. “The only conceivable escape for him,” said Holmes of his archenemy, “lay in silencing my tongue.” Yet it’s not from the mastermind himself that the blow likely will fall, but from one of his many agents, and it’s in their interest to kill you quickly and quietly. That can only mean one thing: snipers. Holmes’s prodigious paranoia of assassins wielding silent-but-deadly air guns in “The Final Problem” likely saves his life, as does his insistence on keeping clear of windows and closing all shutters. Do likewise, and in addition make yourself as difficult as possible to track, keeping to alleys and by-ways rather than main thoroughfares and using rear windows and garden walls to access buildings. Keep a revolver close at hand, but use it only if absolutely necessary, else you might end up in the dock for murder, rather than your enemy.

3. Make yourself scarce. Once your damning evidence has been assembled and the machinations of the mastermind’s ruin are in motion, he will be at his most dangerous. Desperate, the mastermind will do anything to destroy you before the net of justice closes around him completely; it’s prudent, therefore, to get as far away as possible until the game is won. Don a disguise, as Holmes did when Moriarty came after him in “The Final Problem,” and hop the next train out of town. Tell no one save your most trusted confidant of your plans, for your enemy has spies everywhere. Travel light but leave nothing behind that you cannot live without—a lesson that Holmes and Watson learned the hard way when Moriarty’s henchmen set fire to their famed Baker Street rooms as they fled.

4. Resist the temptation to have the mastermind arrested prematurely. Certainly the mastermind’s desperate, last-minute attempts to assault you will involve a few arrestable offenses, but these are petty crimes compared to the vast network of felonies in which he has had a hand. Bide your time or risk watching him tried for an offense against which his powerful lawyers can easily defend while his henchmen go free, swearing vengeance against you. Or, as Holmes explained the dilemma to Watson, “We should get the big fish, but the smaller would dart right and left out of the net.”

5. Don’t let down your guard. He will eventually find you, of that you can be certain; all you can do is delay the inevitable showdown. Lest he should take you by surprise, adopt an attitude of hyper-vigilance, as Watson describes Holmes doing: “I could tell by his quick glancing eyes and his sharp scrutiny of every face that passed us, he was well convinced that, walk where we would, we could not walk ourselves clear of the danger that was dogging our footsteps.”

6. Prepare for the final assault. The mastermind will attack when he thinks you’re most vulnerable. You must let him do it, but be ready. In “The Final Problem,” Holmes and Watson flee London for the tiny Swiss hamlet of Meiringen and are trekking to see the fearful Reichenbach Falls when a messenger boy arrives with an urgent plea for Dr.Watson: A woman is dying at the hotel and needs Watson’s attention. Though it’s clear to Holmes that the boy is in Moriarty’s employ and his plea is nothing but a thinly veiled scheme to get Holmes alone in a dangerous locale, Holmes goes along with it; the showdown must happen, and he is ready.

7. Fake your own death. This step assumes that you have succeeded in besting the mastermind in the previous step, as Holmes did Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. After using martial artistry to send Moriarty plunging to his death, Holmes finds himself confronted by a unique problem: He has succeeded in ridding the world of a criminal mastermind, yet his own life is in more danger than ever. Moriarty’s henchmen remain free, and they will surely seek revenge. To return to London would mean facing assassination at their hands, and traveling under his own name would mean pursuit by those same would-be assassins. He’s forced to choose between facing death or feigning death and so opts for the latter, traveling far and wide for three years under an invented identity.

Other excerpts from The Sherlock Holmes Handbook:

How to Disguise Yourself
Opium Dens and Narcotics in the Victorian Era
How to Fake Your Own Death
How to Keep Your Mind Sharp
The “Real” Sherlock Holmes

The “Real” Sherlock Holmes
I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer an exact science. —Arthur Conan Doyle, from his autobiography

There is an entire branch of Sherlockian scholarship that trades upon the playful assumption that Sherlock Holmes and Dr.Watson were real people, and that the well-loved Holmes mysteries are not fiction at all but actual events, expertly documented by Watson and published under the name of his friend and literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle. “The Great Game,” as these speculative works of scholarship are called, are generally regarded as an ambitious and amusing distraction, but there may be at least a kernel of truth to them: If one were to ask Sir Arthur whether or not Sherlock Holmes was real, his answer may well have been in the affirmative.

The “real” Sherlock Holmes was a doctor and lecturer named Joseph Bell, under whom Conan Doyle studied while in medical school and upon whom he would later base his most famous character. Bell wasn’t interested in crime, of course, but he was a detective of medicine whose impressive observations and deductions inspired his students and colleagues, Conan Doyle especially. In an 1892 letter to his former mentor, Conan Doyle wrote: “I do not think that [Holmes’s] analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward. Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate, I have tried to build up a man who pushed the thing as far as it would go—further occasionally.”

Anecdotes that illustrate Dr. Bell’s legendary skills of observation and deduction are plentiful, and a few seem to mirror Holmes’s methods almost exactly. One recalls the doctor’s uncanny ability to deduce a patient’s occupation, history, and hometown within moments of first meeting. After having performed this medical parlor trick on a female patient for the benefit of his students, Bell explains how he did it:

You see, gentlemen, when she said good morning to me I noted her Fife accent, and, as you know, the nearest town in Fife is Burntisland. You noticed the red clay on the edges of the soles of her shoes, and the only such clay within 20 miles of Edinburgh is in the Botanic Gardens. Inverleith Row borders the gardens and is her nearest way here from Leith. You observed that the coat she carried over her arm is too big for the child who is with her, and therefore she set out from home with two children. Finally she has a dermatitis on the finger of the right hand which is peculiar to workers in the linoleum factory in Burntisland.

But the astute doctor didn’t limit his observations to the clinic. Another story puts Bell in a tearoom at a Scottish golf resort, where he overhears two elderly golfers arguing about the location of a village near the English town of Blackheath. Bell interjects, suggesting they put the question to a fourth man in the room, who is finally able to provide the answer. After the old men leave, the fourth man asks Bell, “What led you to refer them to me, a stranger?” Bell replies, “Well, I saw you this morning pivoting on your left foot on the golf course. That is a fault of those who learned their golf in boyhood. I heard you speak and knew you were English. Blackheath was about the only place in England where golf could be learned forty years ago, and I thought it probable you would know the neighborhood.”

Bell was proud of—if somewhat modest about—his connection to Sherlock Holmes and deflected flattering comparisons by claiming that Conan Doyle’s “imaginative genius” had made “a great deal out of very little.” But the author would have none of it, insisting in his autobiography that “it is all very well to say that a man is clever, but the reader wants to see examples of it—such examples as Bell gave us every day in the wards.”

Other excerpts from The Sherlock Holmes Handbook:

How to Disguise Yourself
Opium Dens and Narcotics in the Victorian Era
How to Fake Your Own Death
How to Keep Your Mind Sharp

How to Keep Your Mind Sharp
A long series of sterile weeks lay behind us, and here at last there was a fitting object for those remarkable powers which, like all special gifts, become irksome to their owner when they are not in use. That razor brain blunted and rusted with inaction. —The Valley of Fear

“I am a brain, Watson,” Holmes famously quipped in “The Mazarin Stone.” “The rest of me is mere appendix.” It may sound like an exaggeration, but in one sense it was not. However much Holmes may have benefited from his expertise in self-defense or similar applications of the physical self, the primary instrument of his trade was his mind. For it was only by his powers of logical analysis and deduction that he could succeed where detectives before him had failed. Thus, in times of inaction or crisis it was crucial he find ways to keep his instrument sharp. Before undertaking Holmes’s techniques for yourself, be aware that many of them have no positive effect on the body—some even render a deleterious effect—but such was not his priority.

• Starve yourself. Though Watson often nagged him to eat, Holmes rarely took food while working on a problem, and during especially taxing cases he sometimes went for days without a meal. “The faculties become refined when you starve them,” he once explained to Watson. “As a doctor . . . you must admit that what your digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the brain.”

• Smoke copiously. Just because you refuse food while deep in thought doesn’t mean you must live like an ascetic. Tobacco was the first thing Holmes reached for when puzzling over a problem:“Holmes had pushed away his untasted breakfast and lit the unsavoury pipe which was the companion of his deepest meditations,” Watson writes in The Valley of Fear. While working on the “Mazarin Stone” case, Holmes humbly begs Watson not “to despise my pipe and my lamentable tobacco” because “it has to take the place of food these days.” We learn still more of his habits while Holmes is contemplating the outlandish “Red-Headed League” mystery, so difficult he deems it “a three-pipe problem.”

• Ignore that which is unimportant. Just because there are an endless number of things to be learned about the universe, Holmes proposes in A Study in Scarlet, doesn’t mean one should try to learn them all—quite the opposite, in fact. When Watson is dumbstruck that his brilliant friend doesn’t know the composition of Earth’s solar system, Holmes lays out the following theory: “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to his gets crowded out . . . it is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

• Always keep your mind occupied. “To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine,” Holmes says in “The Devil’s Foot.” “It racks itself to pieces.” When there is no case at hand—and sometimes even when there is—Holmes turns his attention to chemistry experiments, to his violin (the introspective work of German composers is best for the mind, he claimed), or, in extreme cases, to cocaine. Watson defends his friend’s taste for the latter thusly: “He only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.” Holmes himself provides a somewhat less apologetic explanation: “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”

Other excerpts from The Sherlock Holmes Handbook:

How to Disguise Yourself
Opium Dens and Narcotics in the Victorian Era
How to Fake Your Own Death

How to Fake Your Own Death
“I owe you many apologies, dear Watson, but it was all-important that it should be thought I was dead, and it is quite certain that you would not have written so convincing an account of my unhappy end had you not yourself thought that it was true.” — Sherlock Holmes, “The Empty House”

Any consulting detective as successful as Sherlock Holmes is sure to rack up an impressive list of powerful enemies, and sometimes—as Holmes decided was the case in “The Final Problem”—the best way to escape their vengeance is to fake one’s own death. This is by no means an option for the faint of heart. Not only is it a cruel thing to inflict upon those who care for you, but it requires an exceeding amount of bother to execute the deed properly. Pray that you never have to embark upon the steps outlined here!

1. Design a persuasive death scene. The best kind—and your only option, really—is a death that leaves no recognizable body behind. Explosions or fires are good choices, provided you plant a skeleton in the wreckage that may plausibly be identified as your own. Water-related tragedies in which the corpse is unrecoverable are also ideal, as was Holmes’s choice in “The Final Problem”—he made it appear as though he’d tumbled over the lofty Reichenbach Falls, the treacherous bottom of which authorities didn’t even bother to search for his remains. Holmes’s footprints led up to the precipice and disappeared, leading all concerned to conclude he had fallen to his death—when in fact he had merely climbed over a nearby ledge, where he hid until the scene was deserted and he could make a stealthy escape.

2. Skip town.
As long as you remain near your old familiar haunts or anyone who might recognize you, you’re in danger. Get as far as possible from your home and the scene of your “death,” as quickly as you can. When Holmes miraculously returns to London in “The Empty House,” he tells Watson about the exotic places he’d lived in the intervening three years:Tibet, Persia, Mecca, and Egypt, among other distant locales. Those were extreme choices, to be sure, but extraordinarily safe ones—the chances of his meeting someone there whom he had known prior to his “death” were low indeed.

3. Assume a new identity.
Though your body lives on, your former identity must die. Grow facial hair, change your walk, and develop a new accent to help bury obvious traces of your former self. While traveling far and wide, Holmes went undercover as a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson, whose exploits and discoveries were fantastic enough to make international headlines.Yet he was never recognized as Holmes himself, so convincing was this disguise.

4. Arrange access to a supply of money.
Travel is expensive, and you’ll no longer have access to bank accounts or lines of credit established under your real name. You can always bring cash with you or deposit money into an anonymous offshore account, but keep in mind that making any sudden, last-minute transfers or withdrawals into that account before your death is extremely suspect behavior. If you’re able to plan your death significantly in advance, make gradual, monthly transfers over a period of several years to avoid suspicion. Less advisable was Holmes’s technique: He revealed himself to his brother Mycroft, who became Holmes’s sole confidant and source of funds. Had Mycroft been compromised in some way, Holmes’s secret would’ve been revealed, and his life put into considerable danger. Which brings us to the next point:

5. Reveal yourself to no one.
The wrenching heartache endured by your loved ones is your enemies’ most convinc- ing proof you’re really dead. Should their grief-stricken ululations seem forced or overly theatrical, someone is sure to smell a rat. This profound separation from friends and relations will undoubtedly be the most trying aspect of your ordeal, as even cold and logical Holmes admits—“Several times during the past three years I have taken up my pen to write to you,” he apologizes to Watson—but such cruel alienation is necessary. Holmes explains why: “I feared your affectionate regard for me should tempt you to some indiscretion which would betray my secret.”

6. Wait until your enemies are at their weakest to return.
With time, the fires of your enemies’ vengeance will cool, and their guard will fall. They may themselves die or be jailed (for such are dangers of the criminal life) and when they are at their most defenseless, as Holmes judged his to be shortly before his dramatic resurrection, it’s time to return home.

7. Minimize the shock to your friends and family.
When Holmes finally reveals himself to Watson, he does it in such a shocking way—which Holmes himself later confesses was “unnecessarily dramatic”—that poor Watson, a veteran of war and a man of sound constitution, faints on the spot. Imagine the effect such an appearance would have on the elderly or the anxious, and do your all to introduce yourself to them gradually. Save surprising flourishes for your enemies!

Other excerpts from The Sherlock Holmes Handbook:

How to Disguise Yourself
Opium Dens and Narcotics in the Victorian Era

One of pop culture’s most beloved characters — and some say the most famous fictional character of all time — Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on screens both large and small by dozens of men. Since I’m posting excerpts from my Sherlock Holmes book all week, I figured I’d make the leap from book to film and share some of my favorite Holmeses here.

John Barrymore played Sherlock Holmes in this 1922 silent film, Sherlock Holmes. He meets Moriarty for the first time in this scene.


Ten years later, Reginald Owen lent his likeness to the role in this film version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet.

Arthur Wontner played Holmes in this 1935 adaptation of The Valley of Fear.

Jumping forward a few hundred years, Brent Spiner as Commander Data channeled Sherlock Holmes in the episode “Lonely Among Us.”

Of course, Data wasn’t the only primetime television character inspired by Sherlock Holmes. There’s also Greg House, M.D., whose sour temperament, coldly rational mind, musical talent and weakness for drugs all echo Holmes’ character. Here’s an awesomely cheesy fan-made video set to Rihanna’s “Rehab” which compares House and Holmes’ respective addictions.

As long as we’re on the subject of unconventional Holmses, check out John Cleese’s Holmes in this bit from Comedy Playhouse:

How about a Russian Holmes? Vasily Livanov played the role to great acclaim in a number of Russian film and television adaptations in the 1970s and 80s.

Then, of course, there’s my favorite: the late, great Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes to a tee in Granada’s long-running series for British television. Here’s a great clip:

Will Robert Downey, Jr. make a good Sherlock Holmes? It’s hard to tell from the trailers, but I’ll certainly pony up ten bucks to find out. Holmes is due out Christmas day in theaters across the U.S.

Opium Dens and Narcotics in the Victorian Era
“The division seems rather unfair,” I remarked. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?” “For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine bottle.” And he stretched his long white hand up for it. — The Sign of the Four

Sherlock Holmes was many things: peerless detective, logical genius, master of several natural sciences, and virtuoso violinist. He was also, by his own account, a drug addict. Holmes preferred a “seven-percent solution” of cocaine injected with a syringe, sometimes embarking on binges that left his “sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks” as “for days on end he would lie upon the sofa . . . hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night.” In Holmes’s defense, Watson characterizes his friend’s habit as an “occasional” reaction to “the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.” But just a few years later, during the “Missing Three-Quarter” case, Watson admits the seriousness of Holmes’s problem, revealing that he’s only just begun to wean the detective “from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career.”

In an era when narcotics of all sorts were legal and freely available, when opiates were the active ingredient in countless over-the-counter patent medicines and heroin was marketed as a side-effect-free cough suppressant, Watson’s recognition of cocaine’s addictive powers was striking. Even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica’s 1888 edition claims that addiction to narcotics “happens chiefly in individuals of weak will-power, who would just as easily become the victims of intoxicating drinks, and who are practically moral imbeciles, often addicted also to other forms of depravity.”

It was an attitude toward drugs shared by many in the Victorian era. Shortly after German chemist Albert Niemann first isolated cocaine from coca leaves in 1859, it became a sensation in Europe and the United States. Hailed as a wonder drug, cocaine was widely consumed in the form of coca-fortified wine, and its fans included Queen Victoria, Sigmund Freud, and Pope Leo XIII, who endorsed it in advertisements and carried some coca-wine with him in a personal hip flask. Cocaine was especially popular with writers, artists, and intellectuals—Sherlock Holmes among them—many of whom credited the drug’s stimulant properties with their ability to work unforgiving hours. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the addictive powers of cocaine and opium were becoming undeniably clear, and the tide of public opinion was slowly but surely turning against them. Horrific depictions of opium dens in popular literature certainly played a role in this transformation, including Sherlock Holmes’s famous turn as a disguised opium addict in “The Man with the Twisted Lip.”

Watson describes his descent into an East End opium den as one into Hell: “Through the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies lying in strange fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back, and chins pointing upward, with here and there a dark, lack-lustre eye turned upon the newcomer. Out of the black shadows there glimmered little red circles of light . . . as the burning poison waxed or waned in the bowls of the metal pipes.” To Watson’s utter surprise, Holmes the master of disguise is lurking in the den as well, though at first glance Watson only recognizes him as an “old man . . . bent with age, an opium pipe dangling down from between his knees, as though it had dropped in sheer lassitude from his fingers.”

But the reality of London’s opium dens didn’t quite match their sensationalized portrayals by authors such as Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. Rather than a slum teeming with dens and frequented by thousands of morally bankrupt Chinese immigrants, the East End’s Limehouse district never had more than a few hundred Chinese and about a half-dozen opium dens—if you could even call them that. On the whole, these “dens” were simply rooms where Chinese men gathered to smoke opium, gamble, and gossip; they were more like informal social clubs than dens of desperate iniquity (or as Holmes describes the den he visits in “Twisted Lip,” “the vilest murder- trap on the whole riverside”). It’s not known exactly how many Londoners slummed it in opium dens, but the general impression at the time was surely exaggerated; many more Victorians partook of and became addicted to opium in the form of laudanum—an alcoholic derivative so popular it was spoon-fed to teething infants—than by smoking it, a practice that suggested exotic danger simply because it was associated with the “alien” culture of Chinese immigrants.

Other excerpts from The Sherlock Holmes Handbook:

How to Disguise Yourself

How to Disguise Yourself
“It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.” – A Scandal in Bohemia

Sherlock Holmes was more than just a shrewd detective-among other distinctions, he remains one of history’s foremost masters of disguise. His profession demanded it: Concealing his identity allowed Holmes to trail suspects without their knowledge, slip his enemies’ traps time after time, and in “His Last Bow” to break a German spy ring that might have cost England dearly if not for Holmes’s undercover intervention. That Dr. Watson himself failed to recognize his old friend in disguise on at least five occasions is further proof of Holmes’s genius; and considering that Watson was a sharp if underrated mind in his own right, it goes without saying that Holmes’s efforts went much further than simply donning a costume. To master the art of personal camouflage, every aspect of your person, from your clothes and hair to the manner in which you speak and carry yourself, must be altered beyond recognition.

• Select a new identity. You will fool no one by simply donning exotic clothes willy-nilly; a disguise lacking in coherence appears to be just what it is-a disguise. Instead, think like an actor: Imagine a character most unlike yourself and let that guide your selection of clothing, the manner in which you speak, the cover story you concoct, and so on. Consider the sex, age, profession, economic status, and personality of this character, as Holmes did when he disguised himself as an aged seaman in The Sign of the Four : “Altogether he gave me the impression of a respectable master mariner who had fallen into years and poverty,” reports a briefly duped Watson.

• Change your clothes. In his career, Holmes wore a black robe and hat to become an talian priest in “The Final Problem,” a “blue blouse” to portray a rough-edged French plumber in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” and a tweed suit and cloth hat to appear like “any other tourist” in The Hound of the Baskervilles, among many other costumes. But Holmes does more than simply take these clothes from the rack and drape them on his person; he adapts them to the subtleties of his roles. For instance, his aged sailor costume in The Sign of the Four consisted mainly of a pea-coat, but it wasn’t just any pea-coat: Watson describes it as “old” and “buttoned up to his throat,” touches that reinforce both the poverty and infirmity of the character Holmes is playing.

• Change your hair. Holmes’s sailor disguise employed not only a wig but fake whiskers and eyebrows as well, creating the impression of an unkempt man rarely acquainted with scissors or a razor. But false hair can be dangerous; nothing will ruin your cover more quickly than an ill-fitting wig.

• Change your face. This can be achieved by artificial means-with makeup to create wrinkles or flesh-colored putty to reshape the nose-as well as naturally, through facial expressions. For maximum effect, employ both techniques simultaneously, as Holmes does in “The Final Problem”: “The aged ecclesiastic had turned his face towards me,” Watson writes. “For an instant the wrinkles were smoothed away, the nose drew away from the chin, the lower lip ceased to protrude and the mouth to mumble . . . and the next the whole frame collapsed again, and Holmes had gone as quickly ly as he had come.” He takes a different approach in “The Dying Detective,” affecting the look of a man on his deathbed by applying petroleum jelly to his forehead, daubing his eyes with irritating nightshade to turn them angry red, and encrusting beeswax around his lips.

• Change your body. Desperate fools might submit to a surgeon’s knife in order to change their bodies, but for a master of disguise, such measures are superfluous. Your natural stride should be lengthened or shortened, or a limp adopted. Holmes often altered his height by stooping while in disguise, a wonderful trick but no easy thing to maintain over a long period, as he pointed out after portraying a hunched bookseller in “The Empty House” — ”I am glad to stretch myself, Watson,” said Holmes. “It is no joke when a tall man has to take a foot off his stature for several hours on end.”

• Alter your speech. An accent is easy enough to fake, but a new manner of speech is considerably more difficult. The most elaborate role of Holmes’s career was that of an Irish American traitor named Altamont in “His Last Bow,” whose voice alone was enough to convince the Germans on whom he was spying of his authenticity. “If you heard him talk you would not doubt [that he is Irish American],” Von Bork assures a German comrade. “Sometimes I assure you I can hardly understand him. He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.”