Winter 2025 BSJ

The Winter 2025 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.

Help Wanted: Holmes’s Many Collaborators
William Hyder.

Solving the Problems of “The Red-Headed League”
Greg Darak.

Rathbone, Bruce, and the BSI (Part II)
Jerry Kegley.

Clinical Notes by a Resident Doctor
Robert Katz.

Sherlock Holmes, Overnight Sensation
David MacGregor.

The Treatment of Jack Ferguson
Kira Settingsgaard.

Holmes and the Yard
Peter M. German.

Professor Moriarty and the Veiled Lodger
Daniel Friedman and Eugene Friedman.

The Commonplace Book

Baker Street Inventory

Letters to Baker Street

“Stand with me here upon the terrace…”

Index to Volume 75

Whodunit?

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* * *

“I have my eye on a suite in Baker Street.”

“I have my eye on a suite in Baker Street.”
“AND WHO IS SHERLOCK HOLMES? He is the spirit of a town and of a time.”
So wrote Vincent Starrett in the “No. 221B Baker Street” chapter of
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. True enough. And yet, modern
adaptations have taken him (or sometimes her, or sometimes an
anthropomorphic animal) beyond that time and/or town. What never
seems to change, though, is Holmes’s home base in Baker Street.
That is only right. Forty-eight of the Canonical tales—four-fifths of
the total—begin in Baker Street and 27 end there, at least by
implication. 221B is where John Oppenshaw emerged out of the
equinoctial gales with his tale of the five orange pips; Thorneycroft
Huxtable, M.A., Ph.D., etc. of the Priory School collapsed upon the
hearth rug; and the unhappy John Hector McFarlane was arrested.
For good reason, then, Starrett’s immortal “221B” masterfully uses
the address (not mentioned in the sonnet itself) as a symbol to evoke
that “age before the world went all awry.”
But Baker Street in general evokes Holmes, no numbers needed.
That is why some of the great Sherlockian/Holmesian essay
collections and anthologies have the street in the title: Baker Street
Byways, Baker Street Studies, Seventeen Steps to Baker Street,
Beyond Baker Street, Back to Baker Street, The Baker Street
Reader, A Baker Street Dozen, Baker Street Beat. In popular culture,
the TV show 77 Sunset Strip gave us “The Baker Street Caper” in
1962 (when I was 9 years old and I watched it) and Broadway was
graced with the musical Baker Street in 1965. Disney’s The Great
Mouse Detective from 1986? We all know that deerstalker-wearing
rodent was really Eve Titus’s Basil of Baker Street.
When Orson Welles presented his radio adaptation of William
Gillett’s classic play Sherlock Holmes on September 25, 1938, he
began with an introduction in his own persona, saying “Well, tonight
it’s back to Baker Street…”
Yes, back to Baker Street we go again and again—back home.