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deerstalker caps on the end of the table where a hairless man in a bow tie was accepting money from people buying these treasures. This was the “field bazaar,” according to the colloquium program. I was just thinking that somebody had misspelled “bizarre” when I heard an all-too-familiar rumble behind me.
    â€œRather impressive for our first colloquium, eh, Jefferson?”
    I whirled around, nearly spilling my coffee, just in time to see my brother-in-law bite into a pastry with some sort of white filling that oozed out of both sides of his mouth.
    â€œThat wasn’t really the word I had in mind,” I said.
    I was spared elaboration by the arrival of Al Kane, who appeared behind Mac looking like a hung-over CPA. He must have made a few too many assaults on the liquid provisions at Mac’s house last night. His mustache was crooked, the evident result of an unsteady hand with the razor, and his breath smelled like cigarettes.
    â€œI hear somebody made a big score yesterday,” he rasped.
    â€œYou refer, of course, to the raid on the Chalmers Collection?” Mac said. We hadn’t mentioned it last night upon sneaking back into his house because Mac didn’t want to put a damper on what remained of the party.
    Kane nodded. “Sure.”
    â€œIs everybody talking about it already?” I asked, exasperated.
    â€œEveryone,” Mac assured me happily.
    Great.
    â€œIt’s in the Erin newspaper this morning,” Dr. Queensbury said unnecessarily, joining us. “‘The press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if only you know how to use it.’ - ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.’ It is rather exciting, don’t you think? A real Sherlock Holmes mystery.”
    Queensbury had “BSI” after his name on the colloquium program, the same as Mac, meaning that he was a member of the Baker Street Irregulars. That’s a big deal for American Sherlockians, and maybe why he felt compelled to quote the Sacred Writings of the cult. At least the “BS” part fits.
    I looked around, straining my eyeballs for a familiar face. Surely the Observer would send somebody to follow up on Ben’s story, probably Maggie Barton. The old gal covers the college most of the time, except for the occasional campus crime story that went to Ben Silverstein, and she’d written a couple of advance stories about the colloquium and the donation of the Chalmers Collection. But I didn’t catch a glimpse of her.
    â€œCertainly this is a prime opportunity for a display of Sherlockian deduction,” Mac said. “Or induction, to be accurate but uncanonical.”
    Al Kane snorted. “Play Holmes, you mean? Solve the crime like an amateur sleuth in some book? Forget it, Mac. It’s never happened and it never will. Put the whole lot of you against one professional police officer with a crime lab behind him and it’s no contest.”
    â€œHe’s right, you know,” I said for the benefit of Mac and Queensbury and a few others hanging at the periphery of the conversation. “Maybe Max Cutter or Red Maddox could use force to find out a few things the cops can’t because the boys in blue are hemmed in by Miranda rules and the rights of criminals. But a modern-day Sherlock Holmes just wouldn’t cut it.”
    â€œCynics,” Mac said.
    â€œOkay, then,” Kane said, “just how would you use Sherlockian methods to solve this adventure of the rare book thefts?”
    â€œHolmes would never be called in,” Queensbury asserted, not waiting for Mac to answer. “The case isn’t unusual enough. No red-headed league, no apparent madman destroying statues of Napoleon, no mysterious speckled band-”
    â€œThat,” said Mac, “begs the issue. The real question is, what are the methods of Sherlock Holmes? Holmes always observed the trifles, of course, and deduced - or induced - from them. He also