Tom Brydges of Hanover is one of the founders of the Sherlock Holmes Club of the Upper Valley. The following is an edited interview.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the best-known names in the world. People have done studies on this. You can go into almost any remote corner of the world and when you say Sherlock Holmes, they have a vision of what this means.

Holmes had these incredible faculties of observation and deduction that most of us can aspire to but don’t have. He also had his habits and his idiosyncrasies. I mean, he pinned his letters to his mantelpiece with a knife, he made notes on his shirt cuff, he kept his tobacco in a Persian slipper. He did things that most of us don’t picture ourselves doing.

Watson was an ordinary guy. In the books, he comes across as not having the acumen of Holmes, of course, but he doesn’t come across as a buffoon. He was a doctor, an educated man. He was married, he had a practice. Ordinary people like us can’t identify very well with Holmes, but we can all identify with Watson.

This is not a wear-funny-clothes kind of operation. It’s not a literary club sitting around comparing Doyle to Dickens. We focus on the stories but we try to deal with them in imaginative ways. We’ve put on a play, we’ve watched videos of the stories, we’ve listened to old radio broadcasts.

People come at it for different reasons. Some people are just plain mystery fans, there are people that are Holmes fans and there are people that just like to have fun.

My wife’s observation is that people who are enthusiastic about something are generally interesting people. It almost doesn’t matter what they’re enthusiastic about. I think that’s a very astute observation and it’s true of the Sherlock Holmes group.

You could see that there’s a great camaraderie. People feel they’re meeting people that they really enjoy being with. That’s a big drawing card of the club. We don’t have people that are going to publish things in the Sherlockian literature. Well, there might be one or two, but we’re not going nuts over Sherlock Holmes.

We’ve observed that we just plain like being together and enjoy each other’s company. I think that’s the main thing. Fun and learning is our motto, and I think people will say they’ve had both.