The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore, uses meetings as a springboard, launching its fun, clever plot with the murder of the world's foremost Sherlock Holmes scholar in his New York City hotel room during a conference of the Baker Street Irregulars -- a real-life organization of Holmes devotees. The rest of the novel is taken up with the investigation of the murder by another Sherlockian, interspersed with passages about Arthur Conan Doyle himself tracking a serial killer in Victorian London. And, from time to time, Moore fills in details about how the Sherlockians convene:
The Irregulars' dinner, held this year at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fourth Street, fell amid a grand week of Sherlockiana. For four days around January 6, Holmes' birthday, all the world's societies devoted to the celebration of Sherlock Holmes gathered in New York. Lectures, tours, book signings, sales of Victorian antiques and first-edition printings -- for a Sherlock Holmes devotee, it was heaven.
You can do without one of your attendees getting murdered, for sure, but wouldn't it be nice if everyone else described your meeting as heaven?
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