Black Gate

Peter Haining was a notable Sherlockian who compiled/edited several useful Sherlock Holmes books.

Back around 2005 or so, an article in the Wall Street Journal was about Barnes & Noble’s in-house publishing imprint. They have been reproducing classic works for years and selling them at affordable prices. But they range father afield than that, and my Sherlockian bookshelf includes several of their titles, such as The Sherlock Holmes Companion, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The latter was the main source for the Doyle on Holmes series. The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of stories, plays, and essays about Holmes that are not part of the Canon but certainly make nice supplementary reading. An excellent addition to any Holmes library.

It is somewhat similar to the out-of-print and often difficult to find Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha by Jack Tracy. Both books include the “almost Sherlock Holmes” stories and plays that don’t fit in the Canon, but are certainly in the neighborhood. I wrote about that one, here.

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And it’s another essay by Arthur Conan Doyle about his famous detective. This was also the last one he wrote, appearing in The Strand in March of 1927.

The fifth and final short story collection, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, was due out shortly.

He wrote a piece to announce a contest for readers of The Strand to name their twelve favorite Holmes stories. He would make his own list and see how they compared. The response with the closest list to his would win a $100 check and an autographed copy of his autobiography, Memories and Adventures. One hundred more people would win autographed copies of the autobiography (no check).

There are actually four components to this. The announcement, written by someone at The Strand, was A Sherlock Holmes Competition.

Doyle’s accompanying essay was Mr. Sherlock Holmes to His Readers.

In June, someone at The Strand wrote The Sherlock Holmes Prize Competition: The Result.

Which was accompanied by Doyle’s essay, How I Made My List.

So Doyle wrote an essay to announce the contest, and another a few months later, to name his favorite stories. Each of those two essays was accompanied by some in-house text, with its own title.

Clear as mud? Okay, let’s go!

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This essay precedes the two prior ones in our series, having appeared in Tit-Bits in December of 1900. The aptly named Tit-Bits was a potpourri of ‘stuff’ which was published by George Newnes, who also owned The Strand.

Wanting to make a big to-do about their thousandth issue, Newnes used his unique position to secure an ‘interview’ essay written by the publicity-shy Doyle. Holmes had gone over The Reichenbach Falls and Doyle was resisting pressure to bring him back.

To interview Dr Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, is not an easy matter. Dr. Doyle has a strong objection to the interview, even though he has no personal antipathy to the interviewer. Considerations, however, of his long and friendly relationship with the firm of George Newnes Ltd, in the pages of whose popular and universally read Strand Magazine Sherlock Holmes lived, and had his being, overcame Dr. Doyle’s reluctance to be interviewed, and he consented to give the following particulars, which will be read with interest by his admirers all over the world.

It’s Elementary – Man, that is one serious run-on sentence above!

“Before I tell you of Sherlock Holmes’ death and how it came about, it will probably be interesting to recall the circumstances of his birth.”

So does Arthur Conan Doyle open this essay, seven years after readers had been shocked by “The Final Problem.” He reminds the reader it began with A Study in Scarlet, with Holmes suggested from “a professor under whom I had worked at Edinburgh, and in part by Edgar Allen Poe’s detective, which, after all, ran on the lines of all other detectives who have appeared in literature.”

It’s Elementary – It’s interesting to me that Doyle does not name Dr. Joseph Bell here, though that’s clearly who he is referencing. He cites Poe’s Dupin as an influence. That was mentioned in the first essay, The Truth About Sherlock Holmes. And that’s a main item in next weeks’ post, The Case of the Inferior Sleuth.

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I have about 500 Holmes/Arthur Conan Doyle-related books on my shelves. No surprise, there are some pretty neat things. I’m going to do a couple posts over the next few weeks, looking at some things written by Doyle – or directly involving him.

The first is in my copy of Peter Haining’s The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It’s a really nifty book put out by Barnes and Noble in 1995 (with Jeremy Brett on the cover). If you don’t have a copy of Jack Tracy’s essential The Published Apocrypha, this has several items included in that hard-to-find classic. It’s also got some additional things including a really cool essay by Doyle.

In 1923, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Truth About Sherlock Holmes, for Collier’s Magazine.

In 1903, Collier’s offered Doyle big money to write new Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle had set The Hound of the Baskervilles back before tossing him over the Reichenbach Falls. So, Holmes was still dead. It was too big an offer to refuse, and Doyle agreed to write eight new stories. They all appeared in Collier’s, and then immediately after in The Strand. Colliers included terrific color covers by Frederic Dorr Steele.

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