• May 20, Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall, 9:00pm on most PBS stations. Check local listings.
• May 24, A screening of the 1925 silent film based on Conan Doyle's celebrated Professor Challenger story The Lost World has been scheduled at the Library of Congress theater in Culpeper, Virginia. The film has been restored by the George Eastman House and will be presented with musical accompaniment. The show starts at 7:30. Full details here.
• May 27, Sherlock Holmes on the Hudson River. Some of us fondly remember journeys to the Hudson Valley for the grand gourmet Sherlockian dinners at the Culinary Insitute of America. There will be echoes of those gala feasts on May 27 at the 40th anniversary celebration of the Hudson Valley Sciontists in Poughkeepsie. The dinner will be supervised by award-winning CIA teacher and chef Fritz Sonnenschmidt, the culinary impresario behind those legendary evenings of yore. You're welcome to join the fun, and details are available from Lou and Candace Lewis. Feel free to drop them an e-mail.

• June 9, A Scintillation of Scions, Laurel, Maryland. Sponsored by Watson's Tin Box, the fifth edtion of this enjoyable annual event will scintillate earlier in 2012 than in past years. There is a full schedule of activities on the 9th, a reception the evening before, bargain hotel rates and the promise of lots of fun. Full information at the Scintillation website.
• June 12, Reservations are due for The Red Circle's dinner meeting on June 15.
• June 15, Dinner meeting of The Red Circle of Washington.
• August 4, Sherlockian Tea Party. To celebrate MX Publishing's Sherlock Holmes Week 2012, a mid-Atlantic Sherlockian Tea Party will be held between noon and 3 pm at a location yet to be determined in the Washington area. Featured will be readings, discussions, debates and a tea raffle. See more at their website here, and at their facebook page here.
• August 31 - September 3, Sherlock Holmes: Behind the Canonical Screen, Los Angeles. Sponsored jointly by the Baker Street Irregulars and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Registration is now open. For full details, click here.
• November 2-4, Sherlock Holmes Weekend in Cape May, NJ. This year's festivities at the Jersey Shore will include participants solving the mystery of "Sherlock Holmes and the Trial of Moriarty's Challenge," and a performance of "Sherlock Holmes and the Norwood Builder" by the East Lynne Theater Company. Get all the details here.

PLAN AHEAD

• May 3-5, 2013 Laurie R. King will be guest of honor at Malice Domestic 25 at the Hyatt Regency In Bethesda. Her long series of Mary Russell novels also feature Sherlock Holmes (now her husband). Malice is a long-running conference for mystery writers and readers, and it offers a fine opportunity to meet your favorite authors (and get them to sign your books).
  
• May 29—June 23, 2013 Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club, a new play by Jeffrey Hatcher, will have its area premiere at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, MD. It is extremely likely that there will be a Red Circle theatre party during the run. Watch this space, and see the Round House press release here.

For a much more comprehensive list of Sherlockian meetings and events around the United States and beyond, see Ron Fish's

Sherlockian Calendar.

• CBS Adds Elementary to Fall Lineup  After seeing the pilot episode, CBS has slotted the new Sherlock-in-Manhattan series Elementary to air Thursday nights at 9 (Eastern Time) beginning this fall. Jonny Lee Miller is cast as Holmes and Lucy Liu does the honors as Watson, who in this telling turns out to be a defrocked surgeon, having lost her medical license after a botched operation. You'll find further information in an earlier note on this page, and you can watch a nicely-produced trailer here.

• Sir James Bond? He would have refused a knighthood. As part of the Olympic opening ceremony the Queen will be knighting James Bond. But 007 always regarded himself as the eternal outsider, says Jake Kerridge. Read the full article in the Telegraph, kindly noted by Cindy Coppock.

• The George Eastman House restoration of "The Lost World" (1925) has been scheduled at the Library of Congress' theater in Culpeper, Virginia, at 7:30 pm on May 24. It's a grand film (it was added to the National Film Register in 1998), and there will be musical accompaniment. The dinosaurs were created by Willis H. O'Brien, who went on to bigger things when he worked on "King Kong" (1933). Find more information here.
• No Kidding, Sherlockians Are About Having Fun is title of an article featuring our own Peter Blau and published in the AAPG Explorer. The "AAPG Explorer" is published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists of which Peter is a member. In the article Peter points out that in the Sherlock Holmes stories we first find a detective using geology to investigate crime. You can enjoy the entire article by clicking here.
• Access the new WETA UK channel online. The new WETA UK channel is a feast for Brit-TV lovers, and they'll be showing the Granada series on Thursday. It will be carried by the various cable companies in the Washington metropolitan area. You can access the channel online here.

• The Countdown Continues for the second series of three Sherlock adventures from the BBC. The programs will air on PBS beginning May 6, when Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman return as Holmes and Watson. At the new PBS page promoting the series is a countdown clock, along with links to a variety of video clips, a "reader discretion advised" interview with Benedict Cumberbatch and a feature on Andrew Scott, who definitely portrays one of the more imaginative Moriartys. You can find it all here. The programs have already aired in the UK to near universal critical acclaim, and they promise to be a highlight of the current TV season for those who are already fans of the great detective. . .and those who will be. Some other links you will find of interest is the WGBH-TV website and the the Face Book Page. There will also be a live Twitter discussion during each of the three broadcasts with the Baker Street Blog, The Baker Street Babes, Lyndsay Faye, and Les Klinger ... @masterpiecepbs.

• We're not the only Red Circle. Doug Wrigglesworth (of The Bootmakers of Toronto) has kindly forwarded news of a new book about a different (and non-Sherlockian) Red Circle:The Red Circle - Americas Deadliest.
• Texas Sherlockian Steve Mason is doing some research for an upcoming presentation. He asks you to choose one memento from the Canon that you would like to receive and keep. It can be any physical item, but it must come directly from the Canon, not from a pastiche or other derivative work. Further, it must be something that you would agree to keep for the rest of your life, so avoid choosing your souvenir based merely on its intrinsic cash value. Drop Steve an e-mail with the name of the item, the story in which it is found, and your reason for wanting it. We'll reveal the results here in due course.

• Effort to Save Undershaw Gathers Steam. As the critical May 23 date approaches, the efforts of the Undershaw Preservation Trust have swung into high gear. On that date a hearing before England's High Courts of Justice will determine whether Conan Doyle's estate in Surry can be given over to crass residential development. At the Red Circle's December meeting Jacquelynn Morris gave an outstanding presentation on the campaign to save Undershaw. You can read the notes from that meeting here. The Trust now suggests that all who support its work do three things: first, sign the online petition. Many have already done this, but if you haven't, please do so here. Second, support the Trust's efforts by buying some of the items they're offering. Find them here. Third, have your Sherlockian society submit a letter of support. Happily, Peter Blau has already done this on behalf of The Red Circle. If you belong to other Sherlockian groups, you can spearhead a similar letter. You can find a sample here. As events progress, we'll keep you up to date in this column.

• The website Firstshowing.net claims that Sherlock Holmes is enjoying something of a "renaissance." Sherlockians know better: Holmes cannot be reborn simply because he has never died! Nevertheless, Firstshowing tells us that Sir Elton John will contribute to the current wave of Holmes films with Gnomeo and Juliet: Sherlock Gnomes. The film will feature "the greatest ornamental detective" as he searches for missing gnomes and investigates "crimes against gnomanity." Read Firstshowing's article here.

• Back in the fall we alerted you to a call for young people to audition for the Mt. Vernon Community Theatre's production of "The Speckled Band." Fourteen area teens have just completed their run in the dramatization of one of Conan Doyle's favorite Sherlock Holmes stories, and Bill Mosteller was one of those in the audience. Bill was quite impressed with the effort. He says that the acting was very much up to snuff, and that everything from the story to the adaptation to the costumes and the scenery were fine. Bill reports that this adaptation has all the action taking place at the Roylott home at Stoke Moran, and that Julia Stoner's death was portrayed very graphically onstage. Freestyle casting meant that Dr. Watson was portrayed by a young lady, and Bill tells us that the entire cast did a fine job.

• Cindy Coppock alerts us that CBS has ordered a pilot episode for a new Sherlock Holmes series to be called Elementary and set in modern-day New York City. Rumors about such a series have been swirling for months, and it appears that the producers are betting that the huge international success of the BBC's Sherlock will translate into strong interest in a Gotham-based 21st century Holmes and Watson. There are more details at Screen Rant, and there's a comprehensive unofficial fan site for the Sherlock series, Sherlockology, which is well worth a click. CBS has tapped British actor Jonny Lee Miller as the star of Elementary. In a strange twist of casting fate, the BBC's Sherlock series lead, Benedict Cumberbatch, was Miller's co-star onstage in London in Frankenstein last year. They both shared Best Actor prizes for their alternating roles in the play. Now they once again will share the same role, but in competing productions as 21st century consulting detectives. Actress Lucy Liu has been signed to play Dr. Watson in the CBS pilot. Laura Prudom, the assistant TV editor for the Huffington Post, has an interesting take on this effort. Read it here.

• Red Circle December 2 Meeting Notes

• Film Review. . .Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is reviewed by Red Circle webmaster Alan Rettig, with links to other reviews and commentary, and a chance for you to add your views.

• For those who need to be reminded of the variety of ways Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on screen for more than a century, the good folks at Rotten Tomatoes have posted a delightful slide show to jog our memories.

• The Red Circle website celebrated its first birthday in November. Read webmaster Alan Rettig's look back at our first year online.

• Be an Inner Circle Contributor We welcome submissions from all quarters for this page and for the forthcoming photo gallery. Please direct materials to the webmaster, alan@redcircledc.org
• For earlier, archived items from The Inner Circle, click here.