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Baker Street Irregulars

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The Baker Street Irregulars are any of several different groups, all named after the original, from various Sherlock Holmes stories.

The original

The original irregulars were a group of fictional characters featured in the Sherlock Holmes stories. They were a group of street urchins who helped Holmes out from time to time. The head of the group was called Wiggins. Holmes paid them a shilling a day (plus expenses), with a guinea prize (worth one pound and one shilling) for a vital clue. They first appeared in Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes story, A Study In Scarlet (1886).

Special Operations Executive

The Special Operations Executive (SOE), tasked by Winston Churchill to "set Europe ablaze" during World War II, had their headquarters at 64 Baker Street and were often called "the Baker Street Irregulars" after Sherlock Holmes's fictional group of boys employed "to go everywhere, see everything and overhear everyone," as they spied about London.[citation needed]

It should be noted that U. S. presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman maintained quarters for the Secret Service labeled "The Baker Street Urchins" on the map of Shangri-La (the presidential retreat now called Camp David).[citation needed]

The modern organization

The Baker Street Irregulars is also the name of an organization of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts founded in 1934 by Doubleday Editor Christopher Morley. Formal members (known as "investitures" & bearing club titles derived from the Holmes stories) have included mystery writers & critics William S. Baring-Gould, Anthony Boucher, Frederic Dannay, August Derleth, John Gardner, Richard Lancelyn Green, Howard Haycraft, and Rex Stout; science fiction and fantasy writers Poul Anderson, Fletcher Pratt, Isaac Asimov and Neil Gaiman; sportswriter Red Smith; mathematician Banesh Hoffmann; and actors Douglas Wilmer and Curtis Armstrong.[1] Honorary members include Holmes-enthusiast Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.[2] The organization continues to convene every January in New York City for an annual dinner, which forms part of a weekend of celebration and study involving other Sherlockian groups and individuals as well. The present leader of it is Michael Whelan of Indianapolis, Indiana.

The BSI, as it calls itself, is considered the preeminent Sherlockian group in the United States. There are also "scion societies" approved by the BSI in dozens of local communities. A list of these scions is maintained on Sherlocktron, a Sherlock Holmes website. Most scion societies welcome new members, but the BSI does not accept applications for membership -- instead, membership and the awarding of an "Irregular Shilling" comes as an honor to those who have made a name for themselves in local groups or in Sherlockian publications. The BSI has published The Baker Street Journal, an "irregular quarterly of Sherlockiana", since 1946.

  • Dorothy L. Sayers's fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey employs a similar organization in the 1920s and 1930s known as the "Cattery" a secretarial agency that sends women on undercover assignments. Like Holmes, Wimsey makes use of a class of persons who can go anywhere without being suspected - in the case of post-World War I Britain, unmarried or widowed women between the ages of 20 and 60.
  • A 21 year-old Sherlock Holmes is inspired to use street urchins to form the Baker Street irregulars during an incident found in Enter the Lion: a Posthumous Memoir of Mycroft Holmes, a manuscript "edited" by Michael P. Hodel and Sean M. Wright (1979).
  • The irregulars appear in the animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, though these are teenagers, and presumably older than the ones of the Doyle canon. As in the stories, the unofficial leader is named Wiggins, an aspiring pugilist and soccer player. Holmes practically deduces his entire life story simply by noting his walk and the stains on his clothes during their first meeting. A self-styled cockney girl and a parapalegic computer nerd form the other members of the group.
  • The irregulars also appear as the main characters in Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars: The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas, a 2006 novel by Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin. Wiggins is again the leader of a gang of street urchins. Other major characters include Ozzie, a scrivener's apprentice; Rohan, an Indian boy; Elliot, from an Irish tailor's family; Pilar, a Gypsy girl; and little Alfie. The Irregulars help solve the mysterious deaths of three tightrope walkers at a circus.
  • In Justin Richards' Invisible Detective books, Art, Jonny, Meg and Flinch act as the Baker Street irregulars to private detective Brandon Lake, whom they made up to use as a cover for their own crime fighting egos, since nobody's going to trust four kids to solve mysteries.
  • Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels involve a parody of the irregulars, called the Cable Street Particulars, who serve as a special task force to Vimes' Night Watch. They're a revival of a rather more vicious task force employed by the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in darker times. The original Particulars had less in common with the Irregulars, and more in common with the sort of skulduggery the Irregulars might catch wind of during a bad month.
  • A similar concept is used in Fritz Lang's film M, in which criminals trying to catch a serial killer use the beggar's union - itself an idea Lang admitted to borrowing from The Threepenny Opera - to search for clues across the city, because the beggars won't draw attention since they're already omnipresent and generally ignored.
  • Chris Malloy has a magical version of the BSI called the Scheherazade Irregulars for his "Long Step" books in the Wizard Academies young adult series -- A Special Kind of Talent and Never Drop Your Wand. The stories involve juvenile delinquent wizards at a magical school in London who solve mysteries too magical for Scotland Yard.

References

  1. ^ Alexian Gregory. "Sherlockian.Net: Baker Street Irregulars investitures". Retrieved 2009-10-06
  2. ^ David Mehegan. "Guilt by association: For 65 years, a Boston club has made Sherlock Holmes mysteries a scholarly pastime." The Boston Globe. November 28, 2005. Retrieved 2009-10-06.
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