No further applications to dine before the meeting can be accepted.

The 2022 Richard Lancelyn Green Lecture will be held at the National Liberal Club at 1, Whitehall Place, London, SW1A 2HE, at 6.00pm for 6.45pm.  The National Liberal Club is located on the corner of Whitehall Place and the Victoria Embankment, not far from Embankment Underground Station and also conveniently placed for Charing Cross mainline station.  The lecture will be preceded by the delayed Annual General Meeting.

Members and their guests may opt to attend the AGM only, for which there is no charge; the AGM and the lecture for £14.00/US$18; or also to dine beforehand at a cost of £48.00/US$60 per head.  The meeting and dining charge includes VAT and service but not drinks, which must be paid for on the night.  For those who choose to dine, the meal will comprise two courses: a main course of overnight lamb shoulder, boulangère potatoes – braised red cabbage – lamb jus followed by a dessert of apple panna cotta blackberry gel – honey & walnut granola and then coffee and chocolates.  If you wish for the vegetarian alternative or have other dietary requirements, please advise your requirements when booking.  A cash bar will be open in the Smoking Room on the first floor of the building from 6.00pm.  After the meeting, members may use the Club bar.  Dinner will be served promptly at 6.45pm in the David Lloyd George Room, also on the first floor and will be followed by the meeting from around 8pm.

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We will start with the Annual General Meeting, which we were not able to hold at our May meeting. The Agenda is enclosed. Please do come to support the Society’s Council, so they can continue to organise a range of events, publications and so forth for the benefit of members.  We are still looking for a Treasurer, so do think about whether this is a role you could take on, or whether you know of someone who could.  We really cannot function without a Treasurer.

The lecture will commence straight after the AGM.  We are particularly honoured this year to have as our speaker the crime writer Mike Ripley.  Mike will be considering the history and development of spy fiction from the 1890s onwards and will speculate on how Sherlock Holmes might have fared among the fictional spies of the 20th Century.

Mike is the author of twenty-nine novels and has twice won the Crime Writers Association ‘Last Laugh Award’ for best humorous crime novel.  He lectured on crime writing at the University of Cambridge.  Working with the Margery Allingham Society, Mike completed the Albert Campion novel left unfinished on the death of Allingham’s widower, and he has written ten further Campion novels to date.

After twenty years of working in London Mike moved to East Anglia and became an archaeologist.  In the words of his publisher, “he was thus one of the few crime writers who regularly turned up real bodies”.   In 2007 he was made a Patron of the Essex Book Festival, and for twelve years has written the monthly Getting Away With Murder column which has a regular international readership of more than 90,000.

Mike’s non-fiction reader’s history Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a survey of the boom in British thrillers 1953-1975, was published in May 2017 and won the H.R.F. Keating Award for non-fiction at CrimeFest 2018.

Dress is smart casual and gentlemen are asked to wear a jacket and tie.  Anyone attending a Society function for the first time should bring along and display their yellow cards of introduction, so that we can identify them and introduce them to our members.  They should also note that applications are not normally acknowledged nor are tickets sent.  We look forward to seeing everyone on the night.  If an acknowledgement is required, please provide an e-mail address or a stamped, addressed envelope with your application.

The Society likes to keep a record of its activities, including photographs of our meetings which are published in the Journal and on the Society’s website/Facebook page.  If you do not want to appear in a Society photograph please avoid being in any posed photographs and advise one of the meeting organisers.

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THE NATIONAL LIBERAL CLUB

Since lockdown the Society has experienced considerable difficulty in finding central London locations for meetings at a reasonable cost. We have now taken the opportunity to cement our relationship with the National Liberal Club and will be using their meeting rooms when they are available and suitable for the particular event.  These will usually be the scholarly meetings in March, May and October and the Film Evening.  One possible consequence is that some members of the National Liberal Club may join The Sherlock Holmes Society of London.  The National Liberal Club is hoping that it might also pick up some new members.  The National Liberal Club is well aware that the Sherlock Holmes Society has no political affiliation, but it has two classes of membership, political and non-political.  They advise All we ask of our members is that they don’t use the Club premises for any activities that are harmful to the cause of Liberalism.  The Chairman of the National Liberal Club, Mr Tim McNally has advised that if anybody in The Sherlock Holmes Society of London wishes to join the National Liberal Club, the Club will waive the £200 joining fee.  The National Liberal Club website can be found at nlc.org.ukHomepage – National Liberal Club