OT content to let the adventures of Sherlock Holmes rest at a mere sixty stories, thousands of authors have determined to place the Great Detective in every country of the world, meeting every possible person who’s lived from 1860 to 2300, and seeking mystery of every possible concoction, from plausable to positively ridiculous. It seems like an impossible task to keep track of them all.

But that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t tried.

The other day, I found myself wondering in which pastiche I read of Holmes’ encounter with Oscar Wilde. A standard old Google search proved fruitless. And then I remembered the site called Sherlock Holmes Pastiche Characters (at www.SchoolAndHolmes.com). A work of great effort and obvious devotion,

The site is essentially a listing of historical, fictional and canonical characters appearing, or mentioned in published Sherlock Holmes pastiches, parodies and other Sherlockian writings.

The site owner has thoroughly catalogued some 1200 works, providing everything from plot summaries to exceedingly detailed character appearances, and has even gone so far as to include book covers and a pastiche writer’s dictionary (with “translations” of Americanisms). This is truly an amazing labour of love and dedication.

As for Mr. Wilde, I was absolutely astounded by the number of his appearances in various pastiches. (By the way, it was Nicholas Meyer’s The West End Horror: A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D. that I was trying to remember.)

HEN I hear tales of entire houses or condominiums chock-a-brick full with Sherlockian tomes, I feel positively ashamed by the meagre offerings afforded by my few hundred books. A glance at the Shaw 100 (the wishlist of every aspiring Sherlockian) reveals that I have about a third of these essential volumes. Mind you, very few of them are still in print, and some are so rare that you’d be extremely lucky to find a copy for less than a hundred dollars.

Still, in keeping with my reductionist lifestyle of late, I’ve begun to think about which books I consider absolutely essential to my Sherlockian addicti… er, hobby. Herewith, the first part of my top ten. (The final five will appear tomorrow.)

1. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (short stories and novels), edited and with notes by Leslie Klinger. No surprise here. I have at least a dozen copies of the Canon by now, but this finally displaces my well-thumbed Annotated Sherlock Holmes edited by W. S. Baring-Gould. The cornerstone of every modern Sherlockian as far as I’m concerned, this hefty three-volume set is a little pricey, but worth at least two years of rolling pennies. I don’t yet have Kinger’s Sherlock Holmes Reference Library or the Oxford annotated Canon, but I do covet them greatly.
2. Sherlock Holmes, the Published Apocrypha, edited by Jack Tracy. “Extensions” to the Canon from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J.M Barrie, William Gillette and Arthur Whitaker, with commentary by Tracy. Also out of print, but slightly easier to find and with many of the same works, is Peter Haining’s The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (Many of these works are also available online over at the much-appreciated Diogenes Club library.)
3. The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana (a.k.a, The Ultimate Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia), by Jack Tracy. Out of print, but fairly easy to find online. The essential reference for Canonical characters, places and things. Not to be confused with the Encyclopedia Sherlockiana: An A-To-Z Guide to the World of the Great Detective by Matthew Bunson, which is still a fine book, but equally concerned with non-Canonical things like films and pastiches.
4. The Sherlock Holmes Handbook, by Christopher Redmond. I am amazed by how much fascinating –if not valuable– information Mr. Redmond packs on every page: it covers the Canon, the characters, the times, Sir Arthur, print, modern media, Sherlockian societies, and so much more. If I have five minutes to spare, this is the book I pick up. Out of print, but I do believe the writer still has a few copies to sell (and of course, you may find him at his ubiquitous site Sherlockian.net).
5. Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, by Daniel Stashower. In my opinion, this Edgar Award-winning book edges out Pierre Nordon’s Conan Doyle: A Biography, John Dickson Carr’s The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and even Sir Arthur’s hard-to-find autobiography Memories and Adventures. Vivid story-telling, a balanced perspective on ACD’s Spiritualism, a general survey of his whole body of work, and a very human portrayal of the “good giant” make this a favourite in my collection.

Tomorrow, the last five, and some tips on where to find the more elusive tomes.

N today’s mobile society, it’s becoming far easier –and perhaps even more desirous– to bring Holmes with you in forms other than those derived from dead trees (as much a fan of dead trees as I am). We’ve already seen here how Old Time Radio shows can be snapped onto your iPod in a matter of minutes, but what about carrying the actual texts digitally?

While there are a number of online services that allow one to use a Palm or other PDA (personal data assistant) to download and read ebooks –that is, “electronic books” for those unfamiliar with the term– these are often rather expensive, with pricing approximately the same as published paper books. In the limited selection of classics available, this seems quite costly indeed, especially given that copyright has elapsed for most of them (there’s therefore no royalties to be paid), and there’s no physical materials or costs to pass long to the consumer.

Well, don’t fret, because many of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be downloaded for free at Blackmask Online : Mystery/Arthur Conan Doyle. They have a variety of formats, including ones that can be opened in Adobe Acrobat, or a regular web browser (the “zipped” archives). But I love this site because of the various mobile formats, and in particular the files readable under Plucker or iSilo on my Palm. All I have to do is download, drag them to my install bucket, hit the button, and a few minutes later, I have dozens of works ready to go.

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AST weekend, I received an email from a college-age friend of mine wondering if he should spend what little money he had on Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, or, well… eat. To which I replied: “There are plenty of places to find semi-edible sustenance, from the mushrooms under rotten logs to the bins behind restaurants. And you’re still young enough to recover from short-term malnutrition.”

A little poking around for opinions which mean far more than my own yielded the following review in the UK Guardian: A four-pipe poseur.

As a single reference work designed to bring Baring-Gould’s original annotated edition up to date, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes seems unlikely to be superseded for some time. There is no more comprehensive repository of arcane Sherlockiana to be found in one place. Yet the curious situation remains that the more information one stores up about the detective, the less one actually seems to know. No amount of erudite commentary can alter the fact that Holmes remains an unfathomable enigma, as much a product of the information Conan Doyle withheld as the tenuous clues to his character he actually put down.

Amazon.com has a pretty good price right now, certainly better than the prices at my regional megastore. And remember, Dan: it is possible to live off no-name peanut butter, Mr. Noodles, and a dandelion/fern shoot salad (from the nearest park or ditch, of course), at least for three months or so. You can even make coffee by dry-roasting the dandelion roots. Just spring for an orange if the teeth get too loose.

LTHOUGH I figure many readers of A Study in Sherlock already know about this, I thought I should be sure to mention it for those newcomers to Holmes who may have missed the original announcement. (This is not to mention, I’ve had a few dozen kindly people send me email about it in the past couple of weeks.)

Stanford University is now publishing paper and PDF facsimiles of the original stories of Sherlock Holmes exactly as they appeared in the Strand Magazine, over a century ago, complete with the wonderful illustrations of Sidney Paget. The downloads are free, but if you have a U.S. mailing address (alas! I’m a Canadian!), you can subscribe to this most excellent service and have each one mailed to you as they are printed, free of charge. Once the program ends on April 14th, they will be shipping to international addresses.

Over 12 weeks from January through April 2006, Stanford will be republishing, free of charge, two early Holmes stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Speckled Band”; the nine-part novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles; and the famous “last” encounter between Holmes and Moriarty, “The Final Problem.” If you would like to receive paper facsimiles of the original magazine releases, you may sign up on our website. If you would prefer to download the facsimile as a pdf from the website, each installment will be available on successive Fridays.

Discovering Sherlock Holmes - A Community Reading Project From Stanford University

To date, they’ve published A Scandal in Bohemia [SCAN], The Speckled Band [SPEC], and the first eleven chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles [HOUN], all excellent choices for those who have never read an original Holmes story. I eagerly await April 14th, but in the meantime still become possessed with an insane jealousy whenever I hear of my American friends receiving one of these collectors items….

have seen a number of books over the years that are –as an academic friend calls such things– “quotefests”, collections of quotations taken from various sources to illuminate a particular subject. Any library of Sherlockian commentary is likely to contain a few of these, and mine is no exception. The first one that comes to mind (and one of the better ones, in my opinion) is The Sherlock Holmes Companion by Michael and Mollie Hardwick. However, many of these books having gone out of print over the years, it’s nice to be able to find one online that I can share with people, and so I was glad to trip across The Whole Art of Detection, written by “Sherlock Holmes” and edited by W. Lambert Gardiner. As you’ve probably deduced by now, this is an online book about Holmes’ observation and deduction, filled with quotations taken from the Canon and sprinkled with a bit of commentary. The name is taken from The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, wherein Holmes says, “At present, I am, as you know, fairly busy, but propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a text-book which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.” (ABBE) The premise here is that Gardiner has found this fabled book:

Taking my cue from Holmes, I will not describe my emotion but simply state the fact that, in the space above the false ceiling, there lay my quarry - the manuscript of The Whole Art of Detection. What follows is a transcription of this wonderful document. I have taken the liberty of adding footnotes to place it in its modern context, trusting that Holmes would have approved since he conceded that even he had little capacity to foresee the future [HOUN].

You can read the entire book online at Scot & Siliclone Books (don’t fret — it’s fairly short). If you’re not famiiar with the abbreviations, don’t forget that you can download my handy-dandy reference card to help you along.

ELOW is one of the most oft-used depictions of Holmes and Watson. This beautiful illustration by Sidney Paget adorned the original Strand publication of Silver Blaze, and is captioned “Holmes gave me a sketch of the events.”

This is the signature image of Sherlock Holmes burnt indelibly into our minds by popular culture. Anyone wearing a deerstalker is therefore automatically assumed to be playing the role of the great detective, applying logic and observation to the unravelling of some crime.

The problem –and this is one of the most basic “secrets” that an initiate into the world of Holmes must learn– is that the Master rarely wore such a hat, if ever. Why? Well, simply put, a deerstalker (or “fore-and-aft cap”) is something used for country excursions. In Silver Blaze, Holmes and Watson went into the countryside where horses were being bred and trained, and hence it’s appropriate in this illustration. The text actually reads:

And so it happened that an hour or so later I found myself in the corner of a first-class carriage flying along en route for Exeter, while Sherlock Holmes, with his sharp, eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling-cap, dipped rapidly into the bundle of fresh papers which he had procured at Paddington.

Paget interpretted this cap as a deerstalker. The image of Holmes in deerstalker was further spread through the famous play by –and the popular depictions of– the reknowned Holmes actor William Gillette. Eventually, it became synonomous with the character.

But, since it’s meant for country outings, you’d no more wear such a cap in the middle of London than you would wear a top hat climbing a mountain, or a jester’s cap while on safari. Sorry if this leads to any degree of disallusionment, but look at the bright side: you can now impress your friends with your vast knowledge of Victorian headwear. You’ll be the hit of the party, to be sure.

(And don’t forget that you can read Silver Blaze (SILV), replete with the original illustrations, at the incomparable Camden House.)

rom the February 27, 2006 edition of the Yorkshire Post Today comes an article by Martin Hickes about Dr. Francis O’Gorman’s new annotated edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles - A whole new world in the story of Conan Doyle’s famous hound:

EVEN Holmes would have been bemused.

Seventy-five years after the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the erstwhile detective’s illustrious creator, a new edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles suggests Holmes’s best-loved case may actually have been more of a journey into the psyche of its author rather than a simple whodunit.

Dr Francis O’Gorman from the University of Leeds has just completed a fully annotated version of the Hound, a book first published 105 years ago, which is allegedly Tony Blair’s favourite detective novel, and loved by millions across the world.

And while Conan Doyle’s interest in spiritualism – he was after all the man who resolutely backed the infamous photographs of the Cottingley fairies – has been well-documented elsewhere, the leading English literature academic, believes it reflects his own inner debates about the supernatural more so than has previously been realised.

See also the publication details from Broadway Press: The Hound of the Baskervilles with the Adventure of the Speckled Band.

ver a decade ago, I was forced into a debate with a fellow mystery fan who insisted that downloading any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (known affectionately among the faithful as “The Canon”) from that new World Wide Web thing was actually illegal. After all, he said, why would anyone bother buying books if they could get the text for free?

Those were different days, of course. Few people had any knowledge of copyright or intellectual property, and even fewer were familiar with the Web. Times have changed, and now it’s possible for almost anyone to browse through the thousands of books with expired copyrights available on Project Gutenberg, and then download anything that strikes one’s fancy to a computer, a Palm, an iPod or even a disc for the local copy shop to print off. While I don’t believe that squinting at the glare of a digital device will ever replace the intimate experience of a good book, this still opens up many exciting possibilities. Schools can now assign classic literature without concern for non-existent funds, people in far-away places can access books they’ve been hoping to read for years, and –to finally get to my point here– newcomers can sample the original stories of Sherlock Holmes immediately and without cost.

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t the National Public Radio (in the United States) website can be found a ten minute interview with Leslie Klinger, the editor (and, erm, notemaker) of the must-have Sherlock Holmes edition for this generation: It’s Elementary - An Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

In the year of the famed sleuth’s 150th birthday, Norton has published a definitive edition of the Holmes canon: The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories. NPR’s Liane Hansen talks to Leslie Klinger, editor of the huge two-volume set.

Also on the same page is a 17 minute interview “extra” with Jeremy Brett, the celebrated Grenada/BBC television Sherlock Holmes of the 80’s and 90’s.

Yes, this is from December 2004, but please be patient while I play a little catch-up.