It was 4:30 in the morning. Ethel Merman would not stop boisterously belting, “You’ll be swell! You’ll be great!” on an endless loop in my head. All the caffeine taken in via sundry Coca-cola products the night before had kicked in full force, and sleep was no longer an option, especially with that durn Ethel Merman. But that’s show biz . . . which is kinda what “From Gillette to Brett II” was all about. Taking a break from our normal literary pursuits, well over a hundred Sherlockians were getting together to celebrate Sherlock Holmes’s adventures on screen for a very full Saturday.

The good Carter and I had rolled into the North Indy Hilton about 9:30 the Friday night before, coming right out of a late-night construction traffic jam and in no happy mood. I was cheered up a little bit by the very professional desk clerk trying to suppress whoever was being totally unprofessional on his hotel walkie-talkie, and with key-cards to room 418 in hand, I gathered up Carter and the luggage and headed for the forth floor. Coming out of the elevator, it was immediately apparent that a party was going on down the hall to our right, and somebody was talking about Angelina Jolie. We turned left, found our room, freshened up, and headed back done the hall. Somewhere in this hotel a Sherlockian soiree was almost over, and we were intent to at least look in on it to say “hello.”

As we neared the elevator, this time the voice coming out of the party at the other end of the hall was the familiar attention-commanding tones of Mike Whelan, chairman of the board at Big Sherlockiana Inc., a.k.a. the Baker Street Irregulars of New York. This must be where the party is, I told the good Carter.

After enough time in Sherlockian circles, you get the distinct feeling that you’re Norm from the TV show Cheers! When you walk into a really good Holmes event, everybody seems to be greeting you at once, even though, upon second glance, you’re sure you only know half the people in the room. It’s enough to get things off to a good start, even though Carter and I were very late to the party and its wall-to-wall people period was long past. As it was, we got to be there for the collapsing-in-a-chair point of our hosts, Steve Doyle and Mark Gagen, the showmen/publishers of Wessex Press, Gasogene Books, and the late, lamented Sherlock Holmes Review. Their recap of their day of arriving guest speakers, frenzied preparations, and hotel price gouging on ice was all the backstory on the coming event that a character new to the tale could want.

I think it was all their talk of screenwriters, actresses, and the like that filled my sleep with show business dreams. I think I was writing for SNL with Danny DeVito as the host in the most prominent one. I had gotten my wife a walk-on as a background character and she kept looking in the monitor and saying how handsome I was, which messed up the skit. How that led into Ethel Merman singing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” I don’t know. But when I was awake at 4:30 A.M. on Saturday, it didn’t really matter.

I did a little reading, got cleaned up, and headed down to the restaurant for breakfast as soon as I thought it would be open. The good Carter was left snoozing away, but there were certainly a lot of people who weren’t. I encountered Steve Doyle in the hallway, and we soon entered an elevator full of what appeared to by underage Vegas showgirls. The canny Doyle asked them if they were here for the marching band championships, and they said they were. The hotel lobby was even more full of the Vegas Smurfettes in their blue sequined outfits and blue make-up, enough to stage a big Hollywood musical production number. More show biz, I thought.

The hotel restaurant was less glamorous, with a scattered handful of Sherlockian dealers who had gotten up early to set up their tables. I hadn’t seen Joe Eckrich in a long while, so I made camp at his table to get some needed nutrients. Of course, after catching up with Joe and Jerry Margolin at the next table, that still left an hour until the conference began, so I sat down to write this column in the lobby. The Smurfettes were gone, so it was quiet enough.

That writing period is precisely why you’ll find all the previous detail about everything before “From Gillette to Brett II” and not as much about the conference itself. What followed was a whirlwind of activity, a blitzkrieg of media, a cavalcade of entertainment on entertainment. Inevitably, my early sleeplessness would lead to a crash, and a nap that would cause me to miss Terrence Faherty’s interview with Michael Hoey, the son of actor Dennis Hoey, who played Lestrade in the Rathbone films, but there were more than enough other highlights that I hardly felt deprived.

This conference seemed to focus more on the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films (and radio shows) than its predecessor, but that was just fine with me. The Baz will be my screen Holmes until the day I die. Terrence Faherty’s “Top Ten Reasons To Love The Rathbone Holmes” led that charge, and even though Julie McKuras spoke on Edith Meisner’s varied career (which included writing radio scripts for Rathbone and Bruce), and even though David Stuart Davies and Kathryn White each were doing overviews of Holmes movies (David on Holmes and Watson’s depictions being like a typical English marriage, and Kathryn on the roles women were delegated to.), Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce just kept showing up.

Maybe we’re a little star-struck by our English cousins over here, but it must be said that guests, David Stuart Davies and Kathryn White, along with featured speaker Jeremy Paul (whose screenwriting credits not only include half the Granada Holmes, but Upstairs/Downstairs as well as many others) added a level of glamour to the proceedings that we Midwesterners are always excited by. Even though David and Kathryn are literary folk, you could easily imagine a film with David as a clever Michael Caine-ish schoolmaster with Kathryn as the school’s blonde librarian that the boys are all agog over. By the time we got to Jeremy Paul’s stories of a life in television, getting an agent while still in school, marrying a beautiful actress, and heading into a successful career on some very well-known shows, well, one could not say that the day’s speakers were anything but stellar.

“From Gillette to Brett II” has to claim the title of “Most Over-filled Symposium Program Ever” by sheer virtue of its non-stop entertainments. From its start at 8:30, either someone was speaking or a Sherlock Holmes-related film was being shown on the big screen at the front of the hall in every single minute. Trailers and cartoons during the breaks, a Rathbone film over lunch, short films during the registration period in the morning. If you could stay seated (and Steve and Mark put great stock in attendees being in their seats – I won a nice DVD set for being seated when one particular break was over) for it all, you could take in some marvelous film rarities. (I would imagine it might have even distracted a few customers from many dealers in things Sherlockian – I don’t think I managed to visit all of the tables.)

Occasionally I head an attendee or two complaining about the hotel’s service in one area or another . . .  I don’t think I noticed any of it. Waiting for a waitress? Does it matter if you’re deep in conversation with an old friend you haven’t seen in a year or two? Is the buffet running short of veggies? If we stopped talking long enough to pay attention to what we were eating, it might have mattered. (I was greatly amused by one table next to ours who seemed to be having such a great time that they constantly missed getting up for things like food or the movie being shown down the hall.)

It was truly a charmed weekend. Dashing madly out for fast food at lunch, the good Carter and I discovered that my old favorite Loon Lake Lodge was just around the corner (I’m a sucker for animatronic forest animals!) and we managed to get in a first-class lunch and still get back in time for the on-time prize drawing. A friend we thought might never see the inside of a Baker Street Irregulars dinner mentioned they were on the list this year. The program book actually had a chart for finding Comet Holmes. Even the little things were lining up, and that’s when you know it’s jackpot time.

Oddly, Ethel Merman was right. Everything was coming up roses for the friends of Sherlock Holmes in Indianapolis this weekend.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver