The Autumn 2015 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.
Chasing “His Last Bow” from Crowborough to The Strand
by Russell Merritt with Leslie S. Klinger.
Saving Lady Eva
by William Hyder.
Eliminating the Impossible from “The Five Orange Pips”
by Stefano Guerra.
In Defense of Violet Hunter
by Resa Haile.
In Holmes’s Words: Manuscript, Metafiction, and Medusa in 1926
by Kate M. Donley.
Art in the Blood
by Scott Bond.
The Commonplace Book.
Baker Street Inventory.
The French Artist
by Basil Chap.
My First Meeting with Sherlock Holmes
by Jayantika Ganguly.
“Maybe you collect yourself, sir . . .”: To Limit or Not to Limit, and a “Final Problem” Resolved
by Nicholas Utechin.
Letters to Baker Street.
Whodunit?
* * *
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp
“Often walked down this street before”
by Steven Rothman, Editor
Sherlock Holmes lived in a world that was rapidly shrinking almost daily: Explorers climbed great heights, ventured through impenetrable jungles, hiked impassable paths, and braved the polar wastes. Telegraphs and then telephones and radios brought news from the farthest places almost as soon as it occurred. An aged queen sat on the throne. It was a time of worldwide discontent. A vast crowd of émigrés came to London from everywhere. The rich were terribly rich and the poor unspeakably poor. All in all, it sounds like stories from this morning’s news. What most differentiates our times is the great discomfort of being able to watch global miseries unfold before our eyes as they happen.
We lack a Sherlock Holmes to seek out order among the chaos of our daily lives. No wonder readers have always believed in those mythical London clerks wearing mourning bands after the publication of “The Final Problem.” If we had someone of such incandescent brilliance to solve our mysteries, we would feel much safer and sleep more comfortably in our beds. Holmes could save us not just from murderers, bank robbers, counterfeiters, and fraudsters, but also from ourselves. So of course—almost one hundred years after the final Sherlock Holmes story was published—he is still central to so many of us. If we cannot have Sherlock Holmes in our lives, we can have him dwelling in our hearts and minds and souls. He may inspire us to solve our own and the world’s problems by learning to observe their true root causes, and yesterday’s fiction may help heal tomorrow’s realities.
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Autumn 2015, Vol. 65, No. 3.
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