Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes

From time to time, people have asked me to comment on Sherlock Holmes, in ways other than what the novels provide. This collection of eight documents have all been published before, occasionally in slightly different versions. Some of them are straight nonfiction; others participate wholeheartedly in "The Game," that wildly imaginative edifice of Sherlockian scholarship built upon the solemn declaration that Holmes and Watson were absolutely real, that Conan Doyle was but their literary agent, and that the stories are absolutely factual--if only we lesser mortals can figure out the apparent flaws and omissions.

This collection includes the following essays: Dr. Watson's War Wound, which was delivered as a guest lecture to the annual Baker Street Irregulars, where I solemnly played the game--complete with footnotes! The Sabine Baring-Gould and Sherlock Holmes essay was published in the UK journal of the Sabine Baring-Gould Appreciation Society (which turned out to be a bit rude to Sabine's grandson who plagiarized his grandfather's memoirs).

A Holmes Chronology is an explanation of why "my" Sherlock Holmes isn't an aged geezer when Mary Russell walks over him on the Sussex Downs in 1915. Sherlock Holmes on Beekeeping, from the long lost volume by Holmes on his research into bees. Art in the Blood was commissioned by Penguin for their website as an introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle.

And three more: Textual, Higher, Radical, and Midrashic Sherlockian Criticism: an introduction to The Grand Game; Introduction to The Hound of the Baskervilles; and LRK on ACD.