Type of bind: Hardcover
EAN num: 9780317300970
ISBN number: 0317300970
Label: Vanguard Press
Manufacturer: Vanguard Press
Printing Date: 1988-12
Publishing house: Vanguard Press
Sale Popularity Level: 4616752
Studio: Vanguard Press
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Jack Tracy was a bit of a mystery himself -- publisher of books on Sherlock Holmes, he even owned by a press in my current residence of Bloomington, Indiana, called Gaslight, dedicated to keeping the Sherlock Holmes legacy alive. Tracy himself died under mysterious circumstances a few years after his mother also died under questionable circumstances -- there was no Holmes to put all the things together into the package needed to find and convict the criminal in the latter case; Tracy left Bloomington for Las Vegas and died there a few years later. So ended a strange career, one that was nonetheless a significant one in the annals of Sherlock Holmes scholarship.
Sherlock Holmes is one of the best known detectives in the world -- so famous in fact, that 221B Baker Street in London continues to get mail adddressed to this fictional character almost a century after he would have died had he been a real person. There are groups of people -- Sherlockians and Holmesians, the distinction between which is rather subtle -- who delight in retelling the tales; it has become somewhat traditional to try to fill in the gaps, things left out of the 'canonical' stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- 56 short stories and 4 novels. The official tales allude to happenings beyond them -- some authors take up the point there, and others create fanciful tales altogether.
In this volume, 'Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha', Tracy has edited several works beyond the canonical 60 that were actually penned (or at least outlined and inspired) by Conan Doyle himself -- hence the term 'apocrypha'. These are not parodies or pastiches as such, but rather the product of the original author himself, which, for various reasons, are not part of the main corpus.
One great inclusion in this text is the play, 'Sherlock Holmes', perhaps one of the greatest vehicles for Holmes' early sucess in America - the authorship credits go both to Conan Doyle and William Gillette, who played Holmes a remarkable 1300 times on the stage. There is a shorter piece included here by Gillette himself, after he received a famous message from Conan Doyle that, with regard to Holmes, he can 'Marry him, Murder him, or do whatever you want with him.' Conan Doyle himself developed Holmes as drama; two are included here -- a dramatic version of 'The Speckled Band', and 'The Crown Diamond', later made into short-story form as a 'The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone', considered by some (including Tracy) as the worst of the official Holmes stories.
There are some parodies of the Holmes style that Conan Doyle penned himself, as well as one by J.M. Barrie included here. There are two 'legitimate' short stories that involve an unnamed 'amateur reasoner' -- 'The Man with the Watches' and 'The Lost Special', which some have argued should be included in the official canon. The very short 'How Watson Learned the Trick' was written specifically for the Queen's Dollhouse (1920), in which small, handwritten books appropriate to the size of a doll hosue were made by the greatest living authors of the age. Rather than contribute an already-published extract, Conan Doyle penned this little delightful piece.
There is also a 'fake' Holmes story, at one time believed to be (and passed off as) original to Conan Doyle. Tracy recounts in his introduction the details of the case surrounding 'The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted', declaring it as good as many Conan Doyle stories, even better than some.
This is a worthy volume for any Holmes fan.
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