Summer 2023 BSJ

The Summer 2023 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.

Hardboiled Holmes?
by Ron Levitsky.

A Pun for All Seasons
by Bill Mason.

A Case of Identifying a Conspiracy: How a Holmes Story Made Legal History
by Daniel L. and Eugene B. Friedman.

A Page is Missing! Round up the Usual Suspects
by Bruce Harris.

In Defense of Baron Gruner
by Rich Krisciunas.

Cheating at Whist in “The Empty House”
by Michael V. Eckman.

How the Backstory Makes the Story in the Canonical Novels
by William Crick.

The Adventures of the Two Illustrators
by Sherry Rose-Bond and Denny Dobry.

Not All Mourned for Holmes
by William Allen Veselik.

The Commonplace Book.

Baker Street Inventory.

Letters to Baker Street.

Whodunit?

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The Editor’s Gas-Lamp

“A trifling monograph upon the subject”
by Dan Andriacco, Editor

Dan Andriacco, Editor, The Baker Street Journal

Vincent Starrett (1886-1974) and Rex Stout (1886-1975), two Sherlockian giants of the 20th century, were almost exactly contemporaries in terms of their birth and death years. They met in Chicago in February 1942 and “friendship was immediate,” according to Stout biographer John McAleer. They likely never met again, and their correspondence via what we now call snail mail involved long delivery times.

How different it would be today! For those heavily engaged in social media, as many of our tribe are, communication with fellow enthusiasts is almost non-stop. Moreover, multiple opportunities to gather in person draw together even those as unsociable as Sherlock Holmes. This year alone offered conferences in Atlanta, Dallas, Dayton, and St. Louis, as well as BSI Weekend in New York. And with the hybrid option, many scion societies have made their meetings open to anyone around the world.

What keeps Sherlockians together in conferences, scions, and after-parties is friendship. But what brings them together in the first place is, of course, Sherlock Holmes—and the chance to say or learn something new about him. That same spirit has animated the Baker Street Journal since 1946, and still does. Sherlockian pursuits began with and have always been sustained by the written word, what we often call “trifling monographs” with no small sense of irony. The Writings About the Writings enhance our enjoyment of the Sacred Writings themselves.

The late David L. Hammer asserted in a 1995 essay that, “Sadly, the Great Game is over.” In his view, the Sherlockian golden age and silver age were past. “What we have seen since has been a Babylonian Captivity, where too much has been written by too many for too few for too long.” Was ever a man so wrong? Traditional Sherlockian scholarship is alive and well, as you will see when you read in this BSJ how Colonel Sebastian Moran might have cheated at whist, what was likely in the missing page of Dr. Watson’s Dartmoor diary, and how a veteran attorney would defend the much-maligned Baron Adelbert Gruner.

At the same time, other monographs within these pages explore historical and literary aspects of the Sherlockian Canon and its characters, including the full history of what may be the world’s greatest pun. The Game isn’t over, but it’s not the only way to go back to Baker Street.

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Summer 2023, Vol. 73, No. 2.