Sometimes I wear a lapel pin bearing the silhouette of Sherlock Homes, one of the two or three most recognizable silhouettes in the world. It’s a nod to my favorite literary genre and one of my favorite literary characters.

I discovered mysteries almost as soon as I could read.

Cousin Peggy had some of the early Nancy Drew series from Grosset & Dunlap with those catchy covers. The simpleminded mysteries themselves were entrancing to the young me, but what proved more interesting was Nancy herself: independent, a driver of her own roadster, feisty, bold, even willing to get knocked on the head or locked in a closet. Anything a guy could do, Nancy did. She became a feminist icon for me before I even knew the word, and later, she was acknowledged as a role model by First Ladies and Supreme Court justices.

Almost simultaneous with this discovery, I found the Hardy Boys. Our parents began to give my brother and me a book apiece for our birthdays and Christmas—possibly because they thought them more appropriate than the girly Nancy, possibly because they just thought we’d like them better. I didn’t. I found them different, of course, but entertaining on much the same elementary level.

And then I found Sherlock Holmes. Frankly, I cannot recall just how I found him, maybe a library book. I didn’t actually buy Holmes books until I was an adult, but early on, I found Holmes a fascinating, captivating character; his brilliance, his esoteric knowledge, even his moodiness placed him light-years ahead of his juvenile competition.

His villains were truly villainous, and Professor Moriarity (that “Napoleon of crime”) almost his equal.

As important as Holmes himself were the settings and atmosphere: the London fog, gaslights, hansoms cabs and hooves clopping on cobblestones, street urchins, mysterious country estates, and all the rest. I was very happy when I found and bought a complete set of the works, annotated.

Now I had footnotes on thousands of people, places, and happenings which are mentioned as part of the local color of the Holmes canon, and the works become that much richer.

All this became more important when my dear friend Lewis spoke of his love of Holmesiana, so deep that his repeated readings had quite worn out his copy of the works: pages were growing tattered, and some had loosened from the binding. He told us that while in grad school, he’d sometimes put himself to sleep mentally drafting trivia quizzes based on obscure tidbits of information: for instance, the most popular female first name Doyle used was “Violet,” applied to four different women.

At that moment, I knew what his Christmas gift would be: not just a replacement copy, but an ANNOTATED replacement copy. And so it came to pass that we found and bought one and presented it to him, and made him a happy lad indeed. May it last as many decades as the one it replaces.