2021 

• April 9 - 10  DC Rare Book and Art Fair  VIRTUAL   This is the new name for the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair, which has joined with the Capital Art Fair. The event will feature books, maps, prints and fine art. Information is here.
• April 9 - 11 221b Con  VIRTUAL The popular Atlanta conference will be virtual this year. Information here.
• June 19 Red Circle Meeting  VIRTUAL  Peggy Perdue joins the Red Circle to examine "Sherlock Holmes in Advertising." 1:00pm ET. All are welcome. Registration here in late May.
• July 14 - 17  More than Malice VIRTUAL  An online version of the popular Malice Domestic is on tap for July. Registration is open here.
• August 6 - 7  A Scintillation of Scions  VIRTUAL  The pandemic has forced this well-regarded conference to go virtual for the second year. Keep up-to-date here.

2022

• January 11 - 16 Sherlock Holmes Birthday Weekend returns to New York City, live and in person. The BSI dinner (invitation only) will be held on January 14. All other events will be announced in due course, and as always, will be open to all. The schedule is likely to be similar to years prior to 2021 and will be posted here as details become available.
• July 29 - 31  Sherlock Holmes and the British Empire  This conference, sponsored by the Baker Street Irregulars, which had been scheduled for 2020 has been postponed once again and rescheduled for July 29 - 31, 2022. The venue has not changed and the event will still be held at the Bear Mountain Inn in the Hudson Valley, near West Point, New York. You need not be a BSI member to attend, and if you would like to receive direct notifications about this and other BSI doings, you can join their email list by clicking here.

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

Sherlockian Calendar.

To commemmorate the 10th anniversary of the Red Circle website, we've just completed a comprehensive "cleanup" of our pages, with special emphasis on our archive, which has grown substantially and features some truly fascinating content. We've divided the archive into four categories, which you can see in the box at the top of the page. Click on any of the topics to see its table of contents, from which you can call up individual items. This month your webmaster is exercising his "privilege of the chair" to revisit a paper I gave back in 2017 called "A Scandal in Manhattan," which investigated the quiz show scandals of the 1950s and how Sherlock Holmes was the unwitting victim of foul play on the Great White Way. I gave the paper again in 2019 in the Twin Cities at the popular conference  presented every three years by the Norwegian Explorers and the University of Minnesota Libraries. Both text and video versions are available. Click here for the text and click the street sign for the video.

  The Red Circle's March 13 Meeting brought 145 Sherlockians to our fourth virtual get-together. Our special guest was the always enjoyable Catherine Cooke, who Zoomed in from London to tell us about Mr. George Bradshaw and his ubiquitous Railway Guide--one of the references always on hand in the Baker Streeet flat. There were lots of other doings at the meeting as well, and you can read all about them in Carla Kaessinger Coupe's Meeting Notes here. You can also watch the video of the meeting simply by clicking the screen at the right.

BSI Invests Ten New Irregulars; The Red Circle well represented  Peter E. Blau reports that the Baker Street Irregulars held their first-ever virtual annual dinner on January 8, via Zoom, and the agenda included the usual toasts, rituals and papers. This year the traditional toast to Mrs. Hudson was delivered by the lady herself, splendidly impersonated by Denny Dobry, from his re-created sitting-room at 221B Baker Street. The BSI's "Wiggins," Mike Kean, presented Birthday Honours (Irregular Shillings and Investitures) to ten people, three of them well known to the Red Circle: Debbie Clark ("Mrs. Cecil Forrester"), Carla Coupe ("The London Bridge") and Alan Rettig ("The Red Lamp"). Our congratulations to them all.

It was another "virtual" success on Saturday, December 12, as the Red Circle welcomed author and Sherlockian Mattias Bostrom to its quarterly meeting. Joining us from Stockholm, Mattias focused on "Sherlock Holmes in the 1920s," and gave a marvelously researched talk, where he zeroed in on the films of Sherlockian actor Eille Norwood. Many people inside and outside the Sherlockian world have wondered whether--after nearly a year of pandemic isolation--"Zoom fatigue" might be setting in, but this meeting set another attendance record for the Red Circle. Our two previous online events counted 115 and 130 participants respectively, while our get-together with Mattias brought 150 people to our virtual clubhouse. Carla Coupe's meeting notes are available here. The video of the meeting can be seen by clicking the photo.

Red Circle Pins  Tom Fahres reports that a new supply of Red Circle pins has arrived and is availble for order. The pin has been proudly worn all over the Sherlockian world, from Rockville to the Reichenbach, so Red Circle members (which includes everyone who's ever been to a meeting) will treasure having their own. The price is $14.95 each, which includes shipping anywhere. Send an email to Tom to order.

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