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Popular Culture Review
Sherlock Holmes, but I will remind readers that the most famous creation of Conan
Doyle made his debut in A Study in Scarlet in 1887 and continued—with some
breaks, including the false death at Reichenbach Falls—through the 1920s. Holmes
was assisted, of course, by the narrator of the novels and short stories, John H.
Watson. The cases collected in these works cover an enormous variety of settings,
characters, and narratives, united primarily by the indefatigable pursuit of solutions
by Holmes and the similarly indefatigable presence of the loyal Watson. 1 will say
more about setting, method, and Holmes himself throughout the essay, so 1 will
simply reaffirm Holmes’ status— above Poirot, Hammer, and Encyclopedia
Brown—as the world’s most famous detective.
Art Bell is certainly less iconic but he is nonetheless a significant figure in
contemporary popular culture. His overnight radio program “Coast to Coast AM,”
which deals with all manner of paranormal activities—from UFOs to zombie cults
to 9/11 conspiracies—is featured on over 400 stations across North America. His
website, www.artbell.com, featuring everything from information on program
sponsors to alleged Bigfoot photos, is approaching 100 million hits. Bell’s career,
like Holmes, has been marked by hiatuses and premature retirements, yet he has
always returned to helm the program. He remains the most popular overnight radio
personality in the U.S., and through shortwave broadcasts and the aforementioned
website, enjoys a significant international presence.
The Capital of the Empire or a Doublewide in the Desert: Spaces and Times
One of the immediately notable aspects in any comparison between Holmes
and Bell involves the physical location associated with each. Holmes conducts his
detection from the famous digs at 22IB Baker Street in central London, while Bell
broadcasts from his home studio located in his complex of trailers (described
extensively in The Art o f Talk) in rural Pahrump, Nevada, a desert community near
Las Vegas. Each location is itself important in understanding the broader picture
of popular knowledge reflected in each figure.
The turn of the century London that Holmes inhabits was, of course, the capital
of the still dominant British empire (an empire referenced in Watson’s service and
subsequent wounding in Afghanistan) and rival to Paris and Vienna as cultural and
intellectual center of the western world. As Michael Harrison argues in The London
o f Sherlock Holmes, the city was a true heterotopia (to borrow a term from Michel
DeCerteau), a diverse and exciting place with a broad spectrum of neighborhoods,
a vast array of restaurants and pubs, theatres and galleries, and a wide array of
other establishments. Holmes is presented as possessing a phenomenal knowledge
of the city, even telhng Watson in The Red-Headed League, “it is a hobby of mine
to have an exact knowledge of London.” Certainly, his adventures take him to
every quarter of the city, from the squalid alleys of the East End to the sumptions