The Summer 2025 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.
A More Serious Matter Than We Had Expected
by Burt Wolder.
Who Was R.T. Norman?
by Matthew Hall.
Edmond Locard, the Forensic Pioneer Inspired by Sherlock Holmes
by Fabienne Courouge.
The Adventure of the Treacherous Translator
by Alexander E. Braun.
A Case of (Islamic) Identity
by Nawazali A. Jiwa.
Clinical Notes by a Resident Doctor
by Robert Katz.
The V.R. Bullet-Pocks Mystery
by Dennis W. Keiser.
This Singular Business
by Darlene A. Cypser.
The Baker Street Secret
by Tom Campbell.
The Economist and the Canon
by David L. Leal.
The Commonplace Book.
Baker Street Inventory.
Letters to Baker Street.
The BSI Midwest Canonical Conclave.
“Stand with me here upon the terrace…”
Whodunit?
* * *
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp
“I trust that age does not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety”
by Dan Andriacco, Editor
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Preface to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes contains his last published words about his most famous creation. It’s worth re-reading periodically for that reason, but also because it’s great writing. It begins beautifully with:
I fear that Mr. Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular tenors who, having outlived their time, are still tempted to make repeated farewell bows to their indulgent audiences. This must cease and he must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary. One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott’s heroes still may strut, Dickens’s delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray’s worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.
More astute sleuth? There has never been one!
The preface’s final paragraph begins, “And so, reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes!” Farewell? Hardly! Every From the Editor’s Commonplace Book in the BSJ brings news of new Holmes-related plays, films, TV shows, cartoons, and games, while Baker Street Inventory offers pages of book reviews. The “whiskey and sodality” aspect of being a Sherlockian is equally alive, with Holmes, Doyle, & Friends, the BSI Canonical Conclave, and 221BCon all packed this spring within weeks of each other.
“The friends of Mr. Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well…” Watson wrote in his preface to His Last Bow. In this case, the often-unreliable narrator was more accurate than his creator.
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Summer 2025, Vol. 75, No. 2.
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