The Sherlockian output of Derham Groves

This is a fan post. About Derham Groves. I haven't met Derham, because he lives in Melbourne, Australia. But I've gotten together some wonderful publications by Derham (partly thanks to him as I'll mention at the bottom). Derham is a Baker Street Irregular ('Black Jack of Ballarat'), an by profession an architect with a PhD. He has taught architecture at a number of universities, and spent two blocks at time at the University of Minnesota (where there is an amazing Sherlockian collection including Shaw's donation). Along with a range of Sherlockian publications with a significant art and design emphasis, Derham has also published on a range of topics related to architecture and design.

For me, it all started started with "You bastard Moriarty : being a consideration of the collectability of ephemera related to the greatest detective that never lived, Sherlock Holmes". This amazing book (published in 1996) was first shown to me by Denny Dobry, and I was intrigued. The book has a beautiful decorative wrapper of marbled paper, and is incredibly thick despite being just over 50 pages because of the beautiful thick card-stock used.

 

The book is primarily composed of an essay by Groves that is a tribute to collecting Sherlockiana and to the king of collecting John Bennett Shaw. Groves also reflects on his personal journal collecting, and correspondence with Shaw. The book is also a work of art, containing a range of linocut prints (I'm showing just three examples below), a bookplate, and facsimiles of letters to Groves from politicians and Abbey National. 

 

The closing part of the essay describes Shaw's annual "Unhappy Birthday you Bastard Moriarty" event held at the Frontier Saloon in the town of Moriarty, NM. It is an absolutely beautiful book.

There are plenty of photographs of the now-closed Frontier Saloon in Moriarty, NM where the annual celebration was held. Groves relates that one year while the members of the Brothers Three of Moriarty were taking feces to add to the Moriarty Manure Pile outside the saloon, "one of the town drunks buttonholed John and slurred: "Hey Shaw, I jus' wanna let you know that we all appreciate you bringing some culture to this fucking town"."!!!  

For the launch of "You Bastard Moriarty" a booklet was produced called "The Coming Out of Holmes & Watson". This was a souvenir and contains a copy of the invitation to the book launch, a photograph of the author, and a lino-cut. It too has a beautiful marbled cover.

More recently (by which I mean in this century), Groves has published three Sherlockian books - each different and remarkable.

There's No Place Like Holmes (Black Jack Press, 2007) takes the approach of considering architecture as a detective story. Crime fiction is about 'place', and in this book Groves discussed and explores a range of spaces. For example, there is a chapter that explores and discusses the layout of the 221B study from a range of design considerations (feng shui!), with many study layouts shown. Groves also shows teaching designs by architecture students of various places in Holmes stories - truly remarkable - and there's a chapter on a design assignment to design a "BSI Hotel"! As a bonus, there is an appendix with detailed instructions on how to make a knitted Sherlock Holmes! Now I wish I could knit - I might send it to my mum to road test. I believe the design was created by Ethel Groves (the author's mother). This book is difficult to track down and I'm very thankful to Derham for sharing a copy with me.

Victims & Villains: Barbie and Ken meet Sherlock Holmes Ramble House, 2009) is a wonderful piece that walks the reader through a design teaching exercise. The primary goal was to design a "Center for Australian Crime Fiction" (with a number of Australian authors discussed), but the warm-up exercise was  to use Ken and Barbie dolls to recreate characters and modes of death in the Canon.

As Groves says "Each student had to read a Holmes story and then portray the victim or villain in that story by changing the appearance of a Barbie or Ken doll. They produced a horrifying collection of dolls that had been bludgeoned, garroted, hanged, mauled, poisoned, scared, shot, stabbed, and strangled (images of these dolls appear later in this book). I have since discovered that many people enjoy doing all sorts of terrible things to poor Barbie and Ken (see www.alteredbarbie.com), however I originally got the idea for this exercise from the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death', a series of dollhouse-sized crime scenes made by International Harvester heiress Frances Glessner Lee during the 1940s."

This book is a lot of fun - I do wish it was an expensive coffee table book with color photographs, but it's wonderful to see these characters. Next step is clearly a Barbie doll animatronic episode of a Holmes story. The book can easily be purchased at places like Amazon.

 

 

And thirdly....

Sherlock in the Seventies - A Wild Decade of Sherlock Holmes Films (The Visible Spectrum, 2021). Nine Sherlock Holmes movies were made in the 1970s (after something of a popularity hiatus), each inventive and different - some were indulgent adaptations, others based on pastiche. This book is a detailed look at each of these movies - one at a time. In fact, I've found it's a perfect companion to a chronological binge watch of the 70s movies. Each chapter provides background, a detailed overview of the movie, quotes from creators and actors, and some images of advertisements and art work. It even has an introduction by Peter Blau !

Strong strong recommend - the book can easily be purchased at places like Amazon.

It's hard for a 'new' (by which I mean less than 10 years in this Sherlockian world) to discover a rich vein like this - you find one book, and all of a sudden a new world is opened up. I hope this post draws someone towards one of Groves' wonderful books. I've started a sliver of shelf space for "Australian Sherlockian works" and these books will be prominent among that collection.

EDIT: A few days later.... Derham read this blog post, then messaged me to ask: "Originally, there were various bits of ephemera in a pocket inside the front cover. Not sure if your copy still has them, Matt?"

And well... wow! The cover (shown above) is lined on this inside with telephone book pages for Moriarty and Holmes. Some people reading this might not quite know what a telephone book is! I searched the front.... nothing. Then the back, and what do you know! I whole bunch of ephemera! This includes another Sherlock silhouette that I can frame, and a pamphet for a meeting of the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota where Derham presented on his design for "The Sherlock Holmes Centre: An Illustrated Tour of the Building". Wonderful.