William S. Baring-Gould

William Stuart Baring-Gould (1913–1967) 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.

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.

Writing

In 1955, Baring-Gould privately published The Chronological Holmes, 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. 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, its subtitle promising "The four novels and fifty-six short stories complete". The following year, Baring-Gould published 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. The book was republished in 1974.

Baring-Gould also wrote 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.

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