Books in Brief: The Baker Street Reader

The Baker Street Reader: Cornerstone Writings about Sherlock Holmes, edited by Philip A. Shreffler (Greenwood, 212 pp., $27.50)

Philip A. Shreffler has given us what is probably the best anthology of essays on Sherlock Holmes ever assembled. Not that The Baker Street Reader couldn’t have been substantially improved; it is hard to feel altogether comfortable with a Holmes reader that fails to include Julian Symons’s “The Case of Sherlock Holmes,” Christopher Morley’s introduction to The Complete Sherlock Holmes, or anything at all by G. K. Chesterton. Moreover, Mr. Shreffler’s book contains far too many examples of the sort of pseudoscholarly whimsy-whamsy that is the stock in trade of Baker Street Irregulars at play. (One particularly flagrant case: an essay devoted solely to the pressing question of whether Holmes attended Oxford or Cambridge.) Still, most of the old reliables are here—Edmund Wilson’s “ ‘Mr. Holmes, They Were the Footprints of a Gigantic Hound,’ ” Ronald Knox’s “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” Rex Stout’s “Watson Was a Woman,” various pertinent extracts from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s memoirs. There is also one real find: a 1929 essay by T. S. Eliot exhumed from The Criterion, that dusty repository of so many uncollected Eliot gems. The bibliography and index are adequate if not exhaustive.

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The Baker Street Reader: Cornerstone Writings about Sherlock Holmes, edited by Philip A. Shreffler (Greenwood, 212 pp., $27.50)

Philip A. Shreffler has given us what is probably the best anthology of essays on Sherlock Holmes ever assembled. Not that The Baker Street Reader couldn’t have been substantially improved; it is hard to feel altogether comfortable with a Holmes reader that fails to include Julian Symons’s “The Case of Sherlock Holmes,” Christopher Morley’s introduction to The Complete Sherlock Holmes, or anything at all by G. K. Chesterton. Moreover, Mr. Shreffler’s book contains far too many examples of the sort of pseudoscholarly whimsy-whamsy that is the stock in trade of Baker Street Irregulars at play. (One particularly flagrant case: an essay devoted solely to the pressing question of whether Holmes attended Oxford or Cambridge.) Still, most of the old reliables are here—Edmund Wilson’s “ ‘Mr. Holmes, They Were the Footprints of a Gigantic Hound,’ ” Ronald Knox’s “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” Rex Stout’s “Watson Was a Woman,” various pertinent extracts from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s memoirs. There is also one real find: a 1929 essay by T. S. Eliot exhumed from The Criterion, that dusty repository of so many uncollected Eliot gems. The bibliography and index are adequate if not exhaustive.