The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Review: The fifth volume in The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, edited by Leslie S Klinger, is The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which comes with a thought-provoking introduction by David Stuart Davies.

Depending on whether or not the editor intends to cover the Doylean apocrypha, the project is now at or past the half-way stage, and we can safely dismiss any doubts about its surpassing Baring-Gould’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Les Klinger has clearly spent many hours trawling the writings about the writings for relevant material (and there’s far more now than was available to Baring-Gould), and probably as many hours again sifting it, finding the exact quotation or summarising several pages in one sentence. It’s a marvellous job, and the result is surely essential for every serious Holmesian.

I spotted just two errors in the notes to The Return: Lord Gore-Booth, diplomat, was not the same person as Lord Donegall, journalist, though I think both would have been amused at the thought. And a map at 1 to 500 is actually very large scale, not small. That’s not bad among the hundreds of annotations, not to mention the appendices and the rest, and it’s nice in a way to know that Mr Klinger isn’t infallible. (*Many now accept the identification of the Grange at Bacton as Ridling Thorpe Manor as original to Philip Weller, who wrote it up in 1997, but Bernard Davies was there first (I was there in 1984 when he announced it, as was Philip). Leslie Klinger can’t be blamed for not knowing that, as Bernard never committed it to paper.*)

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 230, 2003]