A Look Back at The Parallel Case of St. Louis by Joe Eckrich

With the second “Holmes in the Heartland” conference almost upon us, I thought it would be appropriate to take a look back the history of The Parallel Case of St. Louis and our previous St. Louis conferences.  

We began, rather inauspiciously, on 15 November 1998, a small group of Sherlockians meeting in my apartment in Shrewsbury, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.  However, the idea for the group began during meetings of The Noble Bachelors, the oldest scion society in St. Louis.  They met two or three times a year, usually in dinner meetings with 30 – 40 people attending.  There was always a Sherlockian program but little or no opportunity to discuss the actual stories.  So sprang the idea of a smaller group meeting more often to discuss the Canon and anything else of Sherlockian note.  The idea took off and 35 years later we are still meeting and still discussing one case at a time.

For a name I wanted something with a connection to St. Louis.  There were actually two mentions of St. Louis in the Canon; “the Jefferson Hopes of St. Louis” in a STUDY IN SCARLET and, in THE SIGN OF FOUR, Holmes talks of referring a French detective, Francois le Villard, to two parallel cases involving a will which took place in Riga in 1857 and in St. Louis in 1871.  “The Jefferson Hopes” was already taken, so I chose “The Parallel Case of St. Louis.”  Note that case is singular, although our first booklet was titled “The Parallel Cases of St. Louis”.  More on that later.

We began meeting in members’ homes and eventually moved to a mystery bookstore called “The Big Sleep."  Helen Simpson, owner of The Big Sleep, kindly opened up just for us on the evening of our meeting, on the third Monday of every other month at first, and eventually the 3rd Thursday of every  other month.  During the first year we began the practice of inviting guest speakers periodically beginning with John Lutz, a local author of mystery and suspense books.  We also had Francis M. Nevins, author and Ellery Queen expert, Fred Levin, BSI, a noted Chicago Sherlockian quite knowledgeable about the Reichenbach Falls, and Bob Randisi, mystery author and president of the Private Eyes of America.

In 1989 we held our first Summer banquet with guest speaker Tony Harries who had been secretary to Sherlock Holmes at the Abby National in London.  The following year our guest speaker was David Hammer, BSI, Sherlockian author and publisher.  

In 1991 Pat Accardo suggested we should have a newsletter and offered to edit it with me as co-editor.  It was named “The Parallelogram” and ran for over 10 years.  In 1999 we produced our first “writings on the writings," a booklet entitled “The Parallel Cases of St. Louis."  We produced a second booklet, “Romancing The Hound” on August 2001 for both the 10th anniversary of "The Parallelogram” and the 100th anniversary of the publishing of the first part of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES in the Strand Magazine.  While a totally separate booklet, it was listed as Special Supplement Number One of “The Parallelogram” and sold separately.

St. Louis has a proud history of Sherlockian Conferences beginning in the 1990s.  The Harpooners of the Sea Unicorn produced several in St. Charles, Missouri, including “The Game’s Afloat” in 1998 which took place on a Showboat docked in St. Charles.  The speakers for this event were Terence Faherty, Brad Keefauver, Rosemary Michaud, Roy Pilot and John Smithkey III.  These were followed by two at Westport Plaza, the location of this year’s Holmes in the Heartland, at the old Westport Playhouse.  These were joint efforts with all of the St. Louis scion societies. 

The Parallel Case of St. Louis then held two conferences under the banner “Holmes Under the Arch” and “Holmes Under the Arch II”.  The first took place in 1999 and was subtitled “Weekend at Baskerville Hall” and included a murder mystery written by Brad Keefauver to be solved during the weekend.  Both conferences were highly successful but for limitation of space I will concentrate on the second.  This was held at the Holiday Inn/Viking hotel and conference center in Sunset Hills, a St. Louis suburb.  It took place on June 20 – 22, 2005 and was very well attended.  Our speakers included Catherine Cooke, current Chairperson of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London and, at the time, librarian at The Marylebone Library in charge of their Sherlock Holmes collection.  She spoke on “1951 – A Vintage Year”, about the Festival of Britain and Marylebone’s contribution of Sherlock Holmes study and the resulting founding of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London.  Les Klinger spoke on “Game Over."  Les had produced THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES, which played “the game” of Holmes and Watson being real people, which we know they are.  As such he and the Annotated received some criticism from various sources, which was his subject.

Bill Mason, with the able assistance of his wife Cynthia Mason, gave us “Hooray For Doctor Sterndale, The African Explorer."  Among other things, Bill posited that Dr. Sterndale was the inspiration for “one of the greatest and most memorable classic scenes in the history of cinema.  I speak, of course,  of the 1930 film, “Animal Crackers," and more specifically, to the movies signature musical number, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding”.  Bill and Cindy then proceeded to give us various stanzas of the song substituting Dr. Sterndale for Dr. Spaulding with a riotous conclusion.  Julie McKuras then gave us “Holmes on the Mississippi” and spoke about our own Gray Chandler Briggs and also the beginnings of the Sherlockian collection at the University of Minnesota.  This was followed by Sue Vizoskie’s “Downstairs in the Canon” and particularly Mrs. Isabella Beeton and her BOOK OF HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT.  In addition, we held a pastiche writing contest with the winning pastiche “The Adventure of the Empty Case of The King of Beers” by Julie and Mike McKuras.

The First “Holmes in the Heartland” took place in 2018.  We were due to follow it up two years later but something called Covid interfered and then there were a few other conference scheduled elsewhere, so here we are in 2023 ready for our second “Holmes in the Heartland."

As you can see St. Louis is a place to be reckoned with when we discuss Sherlockian Conferences!