The Summer 2024 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.
Who Killed Charles Augustus Milverton?
by Carla Kaessinger Coupe.
The Ark of Archenemies in the Canon—a Zoological Approach
by Marcus Geisser.
The Non-Homicidal Holmes
by Howard Brody.
“Brain-Fever” in the Canon
by Ross Philpot and Michael Duke.
KL7FBI: Sherlock, Shemya, and a Case for Killing Time
by Sonia Fetherston.
The Curious Incident of Beryls in the Sherlock Holmes Adventures
by Ed Sams.
Philo Vance and the Lessons of Sherlock Holmes
by Ron Levitsky.
Reconciling Watson’s American Secret
by Brad Keefauver.
Could Captain James Calhoun Be Convicted of Murder?
by Rich Krisciunas.
The Commonplace Book.
Baker Street Inventory.
Letters to Baker Street.
“Stand with me here upon the terrace…”
Whodunit?
* * *
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp
“You will find some books over there.”
by Dan Andriacco, Editor
Some attention has been given, and rightly so, to 2024 being the 90th anniversary year of the Baker Street Irregulars. But another milestone is also worth noting this year—the 80th anniversary of the “Trilogy Dinner” of the BSI on March 31, 1944. That event heralded the debut of three landmark volumes: Edgar W. Smith’s Profile by Gaslight, Ellery Queen’s The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Christopher Morley’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship.
To pick up these books is to be hurled back into a time only 14 years after the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and 17 years after the publication of the last Canonical adventure, “Shoscombe Old Place.” The bibliography at the end of Profile included only three pages of “The Higher Criticism” because that’s all there was.
The Contents page of Profile is filled with classics of the founding era of Sherlockian scholarship: Rex Stout’s “Watson Was a Woman” and Julian Wolff’s rejoinder “That Was No Lady,” one of Morley’s “Clinical Notes by a Resident Patient,” James Keddie Sr.’s “The Mystery of the Second Wound,” Dorothy L. Sayer’s “Dr. Watson’s Christian Name,” Vincent Starrett’s “The Singular Adventures of Martha Hudson” and “221B,” Elmer Davis’s “Constitution and Buy-Laws,” two essays and a marvelous forward by Smith, and Alexander Woolcott’s forever controversial account of the first annual BSI dinner. All of this, and much more, is enclosed in end papers containing Dr. Wolff’s maps of “The World Strictly According to Doyle” and what we might call canonical England. Frederic Dorr Steele provided a new illustration of a meditative Holmes in dressing gown (color unknown) for the frontispiece.
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, famously suppressed by the Conan Doyle brothers, was the first anthology of Sherlockian parodies and pastiches. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson was the first venture into annotating some of the Canon (five stories), and also includes Morley’s trenchant comments on each of the 60.
Each of these volumes belongs in your Sherlockian library, no matter how small it is. Not to collect them, but to read them.
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Summer 2024, Vol. 74, No. 2.
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