The thoroughness with which John Hamish Watson, Vincent Starrett, H. W. Bell and John Dickson Carr have elucidated the career of William Sherlock Scott Holmes has coerced the fourth biographer of the great ratiocinator into extensive research. Given the hard rind of Holmes’ shy and necessary exclusiveness of person, that research has turned up a fine catch of discoveries. William S. Baring-Gould has collated and arranged in tidy order all the facts relative to the first consulting detective, averaging a secretion of ten footnotes the chapter. There are sixteen pages of bibliography. This is a scholar’s biography, by no means displacing Watson’s propaedeutic eminence. Watson wrote in the heat of things, as a witness, and had in command a less decumbent prose than Mr. Baring-Gould, much of whose style is a victim to contemporary displacements within the art of biography.
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective, by William S. Baring-Gould. Potter, $5.00
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