A ONE-DAYconference on Sir LA ArthurConan Doyle and -L---`Uherlock Holmes at a Toronto library. More than a hundredpeople are here, all sanguine and wellread partisans of literarycross-dressing. A bespectacled man in his thirties is wearing a red velvetsmoking-jacket, recounting an esoteric joke about Dr. Watson and laughingloudly with his friends. A plump middle-aged academic with thick whitesideburns balances a plate of cheese and ham in one hand, a glass of domesticwine in the other. He wears a schoolboy`s striped blazer and cream trousers; avision that could only have sprung from the mind of a drunken or deranged Mr.Chips. A pained individual with sensible shoes and a permanent grimaceanxiously darts from group to group, asking - nay, demanding - to know whyConan Doyle "is not on the accepted university syllabus." They have come from four countries forthis gathering of the clans. A local musician has composed a number of shortsongs based on each of the 60 Holmes stories. He plays his guitar and sings tohis comrades; the rhymes are as ingenious as they are incongruous. Anotherzealot is the author of "In Bed With Sherlock Holmes." One stalwartremembers with glee a lecture on the question of whether Sherlock Holmes was awoman. "Very interesting," says my informant, "but wrong. Yousee, he wasn`t." These are hussars for the great detective; the Bootmakersof Toronto. "From amid a tuft of cotton-grasswhich bore it up out of the slime some dark thing was projecting. Holmes sankto his waist as he stepped from the path to seize it, and had we not been thereto drag him out he could never have set his foot upon firm land again,"Doyle wrote in The Hound of the Baskervilles. "He held an oldblack boot in the air. `Meyers, Toronto,`was printed on the leather inside. `Itis worth a mud bath,` said he. `It is our friend Sir Henry`s missingboot.`" This is the only place in the Holmes canon - it is Sherlockiannomenclature to refer to the stories as "The Canon," and to fait tounderstand what is meant by the term is as sure a sign of fraud as a badlyreturned Masonic handshake - where Toronto is mentioned; hence the name ofthese Holmes guerrillas, hence the fact that the chairman is known as the"Meyers," and that various officers and officials tabour under thetitles "Tongue," "Left Shoe-Horn," "RightShoe-Horn," and "Polish." The impetus for the foundation of theBootmakers in 1972 was the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection - known by theinitiated as the "ACDC" - at the Metropolitan Toronto ReferenceLibrary. Racks of pipes, walking sticks, a period fireplace, that notoriousslipper in which Holmes hid his tobacco, several busts of Napoleon from theeponymous short story, volumes of Holmes in every language, dialect, andedition known to humanity. A large room in a downtown library transformed, infact, into an insular sanctum of lateVictorian London. One almost expects acockney urchin to run in, tug his forelock, and shout, "Mister, QueenVictoria` as snuffed it." I am obliged to ask myself whether thesepeople are a group of obsessive, risible, eccentric monomaniacs, or a collection ofdedicated and benign scholars. Therein lies, as one deer-stalkered detective mightsay, the crux of the conundrum. In our flaccid age, riddled as it is with psycho-babbleand therapybores, most of this activity is viewed as being unhealthy, some sort ofgroup neurosis, with needy and potentially dangerous people living out a vicariousexistence. It would be tempting to argue that allthis is harmless fun. But that just won`t do. In the wider context of contemporaryCanada, with the storm troopers of sensitivity and the warders of politicallycorrect blandness skipping their jolly way through the offices of ourgovernments, our newspapers, and our universities, people like the Bootmakerspossess a deeper significance. Eccentricity, the right to be different, evenjarringly so, has taken on a political flavour. More than this, not only was Conan Doylewhite, middle class, male (and now dead - though as a dedicated spiritualist hemay be able to wiggle out of this little problem), but he hardly wrote aboutwomen at all, his minorities are often devious colonials, and the physicallychallenged in his books have a disconcerting habit of murdering their enemieswith poisoned arrows. And Holmes`s work possesses a conventional structure andpromulgates a system of objective morality and an ethical code. It is obviousthat his books should be destroyed, and his followers burnt at the stake. Allwe need is someone without sin to light the first match.