William S. Baring-Gould

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William Stuart Baring-Gould (1913–10 Aug 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.

Biography[]

He is the grandson of Sabine Baring-Gould

He married Lucile "Ceil" Marguerite Moody in 1937.^[1]

He was creative director of Time magazine's circulation and corporate education departments from 1937 until his death.

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, .^[3] The book provides a wealth of information about nursery rhymes, and includes often-banned bawdy rhymes.

In 1967, Baring-Gould published , an annotated edition of the Sherlock Holmes canon.

Baring-Gould also wrote 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; and : 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. The two books were published posthumously, in 1968 and 1969, respectively.

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
• The Lure of the Limerick, Panther Books, London, 1968
• Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, 1969

References[]