Autumn 2023 BSJ

The Autumn 2023 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.

“Free of Any Legal Crime”? Did Holmes Know the Law in The Adventures?
by Ira Brad Matetsky.

Sherlock Brown: Bert Lytell’s Forgotten Success
by Sonia Fetherston and Howard Ostrom.

The Understudies in “Black Peter”
by Howard Brody.

The Great Moriarty Deception
by Bob Sharfman.

Got Milk? A Serpentine Musing
by T. Michelle Fromkin.

The Continuing Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in Parody and Pastiche
by Peggy MacFarlane.

Science and Sherlock Holmes
by László Blutman.

The Landlady Mystery
by Greg Darak.

Guns and “The Gloria Scott”
by John Dollar.

“Have you the Dates?”
by Leslie S. Klinger.

The Commonplace Book.

Baker Street Inventory.

Letters to Baker Street.

“Stand with me here upon the terrace…”

Whodunit?

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The Editor’s Gas-Lamp

“One of the most remarkable ever penned”
by Dan Andriacco, Editor

Dan Andriacco, Editor, The Baker Street Journal

Considering the Canon as a book, it is certainly “one of the most remarkable ever penned,” as Sherlock Holmes said of The Martyrdom of Man. But is it literature?

Of course, it is. Why else would “The Speckled Band” and “The Red-Headed League” so often appear in middle school and high school literature textbooks?

In some minds, “popular fiction” and “literature” are opposites. Nonsense! Popularity is not a defect. In fact, universal appeal—crossing cultures, classes, and eras—is one of the hallmarks of literature. The perennially popular Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Poe, and Stevenson belong to everyone, not just English literature majors. Their works have stood the test of time, as has the literature of Sherlock Holmes 136 years after the publication of A Study in Scarlet in Beeton’s Christmas Annual.

And what causes universal appeal? In part, universal themes and emotions. In the Canon we find love, hate, jealousy, hope, sin, redemption, happiness, sadness, justice, forgiveness, and even that cri de cœur to which we are all prey on occasion—as in, “What is the meaning of it, Watson? What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear?” Hamlet, that gloomy Dane, must have felt much the same.

T.S. Eliot, one of the great poets of the 20th century and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was probably leg-pulling when he told a group of fellow intellectuals at a meeting of the Wednesday Club in 1956 that his favorite passage in the English language was the dialogue in The Valley of Fear ending with “Yes…Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards.” More telling is that he quoted a good portion of “The Musgrave Ritual” in his play Murder in the Cathedral. Surely that is literature!

The Baker Street Journal is a literary journal featuring real scholarship, sometimes applied to topics of great importance and sometimes to lighter matters. (The term “pseudo-scholarship” is correctly applied only to a spoof like Ronald A. Knox’s seminal “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” in which the future monsignor simply made up the authors and works he cited. That trifling monograph was, after all, one of Knox’s Essays in Satire.)

Not all mystery stories are great literature, but the canonical 60 Sherlock Holmes tales are. In his September 2, 1969 appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, Rex Stout responded to the notion that some critics dismissed the literary claims of detective fiction: “Well, that sort of attitude to mystery stories is just one form of snobbery, and you don’t argue with snobs. They’re just snobs.”

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Autumn 2023, Vol. 73, No. 3.