Spring 2025 BSJ

The Spring 2025 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.

Will the Real Fred Porlock Please Stand Up?
by Bob Sharfman.

The Economist and the Detective
by Graham Moore.

Re Vampires and Vertebrae
by Marina Stajić and Robert S. Katz.

Conan Doyle’s Dog in the Night-Time
by Donald Pollock.

“Playing Tricks with the Laws of England”
by William Hyder.

Carina: New Clues
by Vera Mazzotta and Enrico Solito.

Death by Drowning
by Pasquale Accardo and Jennifer Accardo.

“Ten Miles by Road but Only Six Across the Moor”
by Karen Murdock.

The Commonplace Book.

Baker Street Inventory.

Letters to Baker Street.

The 2025 BSI Weekend Report.

“Stand with me here upon the terrace…”

Whodunit?

Subscribe to the BSJ today!

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The Editor’s Gas-Lamp

“Let me recommend this book…”
by Dan Andriacco, Editor

Dan Andriacco, Editor, The Baker Street Journal

In 1950, a seminarian on break from his college studies in Rome asked his father to drive him to a downtown Cincinnati bookstore to buy a very special volume: Doubleday’s The Complete Sherlock Holmes. He went on to become not only a priest, but a bishop, an archbishop, and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And he once told me that the Complete was one of his most treasured possessions.

It’s one of mine as well. I paid my parents $5.50 to order it for me in 1964. I came home from the seventh grade one day to find a suspicious mound under a white tea-towel. Is it only in my imagination that my mother removed the towel with a flourish reminiscent of Holmes in “The Naval Treaty”? In any case, the book had arrived! And it had more than just the stories. It came with an introduction (by a man named Christopher Morley) that was magical; I read it and re-read it. And in college I read it aloud at “Holmes parties” along with friends who are still my friends (and one is also my wife).

Not all of us first journeyed to Baker Street early in life, but many of us did. Although Holmes and Watson haven’t changed since then, we have—and that makes a difference. In 2011 “The Red-Headed League” was my favorite story. Today it’s “His Last Bow,” in which we stand with Holmes and Watson on the terrace for that last quiet talk.

Our relationship with the world of Sherlock Holmes is not static. And one of the great things about Sherlockian sodality is that it exposes us to the thoughts of kin spirits, in this Journal or in person, who may change our perspectives and bring new enjoyment to our pursuit of the Canon. Even if we are reading out of a book bought long ago.

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Spring 2025, Vol. 75, No. 1.