The Persistence of Sherlockian Scholarship

The new (Summer 2019) issue of Canadian Holmes, the journal of the Bootmakers of Toronto, includes my article on “Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned from Sherlock Holmes: Life Lessons from the Great Detective.”

It was a thrill to get my copy in hand and find out that I’m in such excellent company, as usual when traveling with Sherlockians. Other articles in the issue are by Barbara Rusch, Jayantika Ganguly, Cliff Goldfarb, Paul Thomas Miller, Suzanne Durkacz MacNeil, and Charles Prepolec.

With some surprise, I realized that this is the 10^thperiodical in which my Sherlockian articles or fiction have appeared. Number 11 is on the horizon later this year when The Bean Home Newsletter, the publication of Friends of Freddy, reprints my Baker Street Journal article on “Freddy the Porcine Holmes.” (Freddy the talking pig is a barnyard detective who idolizes Holmes. But you probably know that.)

Many of the publications for which I have written are no longer with us, sadly. The includes The Sherlock Holmes Review, edited by Steven Doyle, in which my first fiction was published. “The Peculiar Persecution of John Vincent Harden,” a Holmes pastiche, appeared in two installments in 1990. I’ve had 16 books of mystery fiction and Sherlockiana published, and two more ready to go, but that was my first success in fiction-writing.

So I was excited and pleased at the word that the SHR, like Holmes himself, will soon make a return from the dead. But is there really room for another Sherlockian journal? Or is Sherlockian scholarship a mine that is close to being played out?

Yes to the first question, and no to the second! As a look at the high quality of material in the Baker Street Journal, The Sherlock Holmes Journal, and Canadian Holmes will attest, “the game” is not nearly over. Like Holmes himself, it will never die.