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INTRODUCTION

HARDLY A VILLAGE LIBRARY anywhere is without some volume of Sherlock Holmes. Hardly a cartoon or show business figure has never dressed up in “deerstalker” hat and magnifying glass to communicate instantly to a universal audience that here is the great detective, known to North American toddlers as “Sherlock Hemlock” and to late-night movie watchers as the hyperactive, overcoated Basil Rathbone. If the creator of Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, was once identified as “the best-known living Englishman,” Sherlock Holmes has a claim to be the best-known Englishman who never — quite — lived.

Everyone who is literate knows Sherlock Holmes, if only vaguely, and those who do may someday wish to know more. A few enthusiasts already know far, far more, to the point that they exchange trivia at the regular meetings of Sherlock Holmes societies from Tokyo to Toronto. When it first appeared in 1993, this book was intended for both kinds of people, and — despite the development of the Internet in the meantime — I respectfully doubt that any more comprehensive tool for either group has appeared. For the enthusiasts, the Sherlockians, this new edition may serve as a key to larger libraries, including their own shelves as well as to the burgeoning online library of Sherlockiana. It has been designed, too, as a ready reference for information currently scattered in often inaccessible places in the great Sherlockian literature. I hope it will stand beside the chief printed reference works for Sherlockians and the leading online sites. For general readers, it may be of use as a companion to The Complete Sherlock Holmes, or to whichever smaller volume of Holmes stories may be at hand. For a few of them it may even become an enticement into the Sherlockian world that has been my home for as long as I can remember.

By no means could I hope to include all knowledge about Sherlock Holmes in a single volume. But the essential facts are here, along with generalizations that provide a context for them, and a good many indications about what else has been said or written for those who want to know more. I welcome corrections, comments, and suggestions, and I am grateful to the many readers who provided such responses to the first edition (especially Roger Johnson, who kindly wrote that the book contained “an astonishingly tiny number of errors in such a densely-packed text”).

I hope the style of these pages makes it clear that I take the stories of Sherlock Holmes seriously, but enjoy them at the same time. It would be a pity not to take them seriously, for they demonstrate such insight, and can teach us so much. It would be a disaster not to enjoy them as five generations have already done. As entertainment they generally speak for themselves, but perhaps this book will be a little help for those who hope to understand better the language in which Sherlock Holmes, and Arthur Conan Doyle, make themselves known, a language that is increasingly different from the one we encounter every day.

In 1993 I noted that the writing of this book had depended on many sources. At my elbow, I wrote, I had kept the Canon itself, and two essential reference books: Good Old Index, by William D. Goodrich, and the Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle edited by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. Beside them stood, as sixteen years later they still stand, Jack Tracy’s Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana and the Ronald DeWaal World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, as well as annotated editions of the sixty stories — the difference being that at the time there was one such edition of importance, edited by William S. Baring-Gould, and now there are four.

“Rarely,” I continued then, “have I managed to write a paragraph without jumping up to consult some other volume: perhaps Steinbrunner and Michaels’s The Films of Sherlock Holmes, Hugh Harrington’s privately printed Canonical Index, Bigelow on Holmes, the indexes to the Baker Street Journal, and Bill Rabe’s 1962 Sherlockian Who’s Who and What’s What.” In this year’s revision, too, I have consulted those and many other books, of which the most important new arrival is Starring Sherlock Holmes by David Stuart Davies. “Practically every other volume on my shelves,” I wrote, “was needed at least once during the several months in which I drafted the pages that follow.” Between 1993 and the present my study has moved two storeys upward, but most of my books have not, and I cannot count the number of trips I have made down the stairs to the shelves and up again to the keyboard.

Many individuals, too, have been of great help. In 1993 I acknowledged Cameron Hollyer and Victoria Gill; I must now add Peggy Perdue, their successor at the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection of the Toronto Public Library. My good friend Barbara Rusch encouraged me throughout the original writing and has been a loyal supporter again. I take pleasure in acknowledging the help of Kate Karlson, who has, during my long friendship with her, contributed enormously to forming my view of the Sherlockian literature and the Sherlockian world, on which this book is based, and developing my knowledge of both. In the same way I am greatly indebted to my father, Donald A. Redmond, whose guidance and companionship have made my Sherlockian work possible. In addition, in the rewriting I have consulted many other Sherlockians — mostly by email — on points with which I thought they could assist, and I have rarely been disappointed.

The principal difference between the 1993 writing of this book and the 2009 updating has been the role played by the World Wide Web. The original edition briefly mentioned the existence of Sherlocktron, which in 1993 was a dial-up service; this edition has an entire section about Sherlockian resources and activities on the Internet. In addition to consulting Sherlockian sites many times (I am particularly indebted to Randall Stock, the online master of reliable information in several vital domains), I have been able to save myself much time, and repeated trips to a library, by drawing specific facts and background information from Web sources. I do not blush to admit that, for example, the essence of the paragraph about William Morris that I have added to Chapter V of this edition was drawn from the article about him on Wikipedia, and I gratefully acknowledge the editors on that site and many others who serve the cause of knowledge by their work.

My dear wife, Susan, still resists becoming a Sherlockian (a policy that helps keep me in modest touch with the world outside my study) but has provided affectionate moral support throughout the writing of these chapters. As I finished the first edition, our son Christopher was just reaching the stage of real literacy, with a special enthusiasm for Nate the Great. As I finish this one, he and his partner, Suzie, have made us grandparents. I look forward to the day, not so many years off, when young Swithin will be reading the best stories ever written (I’ll recommend that he start with “The Priory School”) and another generation will be added to the long chain of readers of Sherlock Holmes.

CAR

May 2009