La stanza di Sherlock

His favourite author is Raymond Chandler; he loved Holmes since high school when he sold self-produced comics to his classmates: for the first time Estleman gives an interview in Italy about his unconditional love for Sherlock Holmes: “Arthur Conan Doyle – he explains – enchants me and makes me envious”.

Russell Stutler is an illustrator, musician, missionary and collector. It is almost hard to give a definition of this man, born in Japan in Fukukoa in 1956. Stutler currently lives in Tokyo, but he’s actually American, having moved to Ohio when he was only one year old. His illustration of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson’s room at 221B Baker Street is one of the most famous, and most accurate, that can be found online. There is no paper copy of this beautiful drawing even though it was made by hand in 1995, just before Russell owned a computer; in 2008 a second version, completely digital (and definitive) was published on his site. Since then, many sites and publishers have used his drawing as a detailed “photograph” of what was supposed to be the room that Holmes and Watson shared in London, since, as Russell tells us, every detail drawn comes only and exclusively from the descriptions of Arthur Conan Doyle in novels and short stories.

What inevitably attracts the attention of Sherlock’s worshippers about this drawing is undoubtedly the concrete possibility of peeking through the very detailed references to objects, positions and hiding places that are mentioned in the stories and, why not, also “correct” any “inaccuracies”. It is the same fascination that attracts thousands of visitors to the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London or to the small but precious Swiss museum in Meiringen: to be able to see and touch the myth.

Russell came to visit us: we had him sit on one of the armchairs in the Sherlock’s Room, we asked Mrs. Hudson to prepare a cup of black tea and a cup of hot coffee, and that’s what he told us in front of the fireplace.