William S. Baring-Gould
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William Stuart Baring-Gould (1913–1967) was a noted Sherlock Holmes scholar, best known as the author of the influential 1962 fictional biography, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A life of the world's first consulting detective.
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[edit] Biography
He married Ceil Baring-Gould in 1937.[1]
He was creative director of Time magazine's circulation and corporate education departments from 1937 until his death. His paternal grandfather was Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould.
[edit] Writing
In 1955, Baring-Gould privately published The Chronological Holmes[2], an attempt to lay out, in chronological order, all the events alluded to in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Three years later, Baring-Gould wrote The Annotated Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Old and New, Arranged and Explained, with his wife, Ceil Baring-Gould. The book provides a wealth of information about nursery rhymes, and includes often-banned bawdy rhymes.
In 1967, Baring-Gould published The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, an annotated edition of the Sherlock Holmes canon, its subtitle promising "The four novels and fifty-six short stories complete". The following year, Baring-Gould published The Lure Of The Limerick, a study of the history and allure of limericks; it included a collection of limericks, arranged alphabetically, and a bibliography. The book was republished in 1974.
Baring-Gould also wrote Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street: The life and times of America's largest private detective, a fictional biography of Rex Stout's detective character Nero Wolfe. In this book, Baring-Gould popularised the theory that Wolfe was the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.
[edit] Major works
- The Chronological Holmes, 1955 (with revisions from an earlier edition that appeared in the Baker Street Journal in 1948)
- Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, 1962
- The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 1967
- Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, 1969
- The Lure of the Limerick, Panther Books, London, 1968
