Oblique Dee, Oblique Dah

"Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our profession. The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interests." -- VALL

The answer to every John Bennett Shaw quiz ever given is in that brief passage. one of the keys to a real understanding of Sherlock Holmes himself lies therein as well. Looking at both will give you an explanation for some of the more curious behaviours of Sherlockians.

A quick explanation for those of you who joined us late: A Shaw quiz is a series of questions that supposedly tests your knowledge of a given Sherlock Holmes story -- only the questions often view the story from a very twisted perspective. For two years running now, this column has run a little quiz of its own, inspired by the legendary Shaw quizzes, called "The Dissecting Room Bowl." It's a rather unsavoury name if you stop to think about it, and a lot of people view it as an unsavoury quiz. "Too trickyl" they cry, and that, dear readers, is the whole point.

The Dissecting Room Bowl, like a test by John Bennett Shaw, involves the oblique uses of the writings of John H. Watson. Looking at things from an angle other than the norm is the order of the day. For example:

Question Number one: Find the prime example of Mrs. Hudson's lax housekeeping. A normal reader might not take a quote like "the opposing windows loomed like shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths" to mean Mrs. Hudson had yet to take her Christmas decorations down in early spring. The reader viewing from the oblique, however, will surely spot it.

The same applies to "the only notable feature about the thing" in Question Two. Do the words remind you of an old James Arness movie? If so, you just may have the right attitude. The 2 Live crew fan of Question Three was plainly Watson, who had "a charge of sensationalism" urged against his records (this was before compact discs, remember).

". . . which I have made my special province," Holmes says, and obliquely, we must say that as Mycroft was the British government, so, too, must Sherlock have been the Canadian government (Question Four). This, just like the previous answers, could be viewed as puns of a sort and belittled by those pun-haters among us. But have you ever noticed how many Sherlockians like a good pun? There's a reason.

A pun is simply an oblique way of looking at a word or phrase. It may seem silly, but the way a word is used in a pun is exactly the way knowledge of all sorts was used by Sherlock Holmes. He took know-how usually used by doctors, chemists, tobacconists, janitors, and others for their own respective fields and twisted it to work for a criminal specialist. And in solving a case, he had to look at circumstances from any number of different angles until he found the one that applied to all the facts. Oblique was a Holmes specialty.

That's why I view those who take Shaw quizzes and attempt the Dissecting Bowl as a special breed, the potential Holmeses of a century later. Why am I complimenting these quiz-takers so highly? Well, it could be that they deserve it, and they do, good Sherlockians one and all. It could also be that I'm buttering them up for the outcome.

Looking at the first six questions, I'm left with a five-way tie. Five of the respondents answered five of the six questions to my satisfaction, all coming darn close but just missing the full flavor of one question by a whisker. These five finalists were Mike Cook, William Ballew, Linda Reed, Rosemary Michaud (last year's champ), and David McCallister.

The tiebraker came down to the poker hand in question seven. my hand was a king-high nothing. Rosemary Michaud held four fours. Mike Cook had a pair of kings. Linda Reed drew three of a kind. David McAllister had an amazing Royal Straight. But in the end, William Ballew took the pot with five aces. where did that fifth ace come from? He suspects that Holmes slipped it into the deck, as he admitted to having "endeavored to help the King," which was the highest card that would have otherwise filled out the hand.

Congratulations, my dear Ballew. Just remember, oblique will get you shot in a poker game where the players are in the same room.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, December 1991)