William S. Baring-Gould
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 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. His paternal grandfather was the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, named as the godfather of Sherlock Holmes in a pastiche Holmes novel The Moor by Laurie R. King.
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, Lucile "Ceil" Baring-Gould.[3] 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.
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 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. 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
