Encyclopedia Sherlockiana : an A-to-Z guide to the world of the great detective

If you ever host a Sherlock Holmes trivia night, be sure to bring this book along.

This is a thoroughly useful reference to the Holmes canon. For instance, every Conan Doyle story is included here, with a setting and a list of major characters -- but without telling the solution to the case; you'll rarely have to worry about spoilers. All those major characters also have their own entries, as do places involved in the tale. In addition to that, there is a lot of information about peripheral material. So you'll find information about pastiches and parodies, as well as movie tie-ins (so, e.g., there is information not only about The Hound of the Baskervilles, the novel, but about related movies, and about actors such as William Gillette, show more the original stage Holmes, and of course Basil Rathbone, among many others). There is also a chronology, though this strikes me as too dependent on William S. Baring-Gould, with too little discussion of alternatives.

The one thing the book doesn't cover very well is all the sources that Conan Doyle used. The example that struck me was Birdy Edwards and the Scowrers of The Valley of Fear. The Scowrers are based on a real group, the Molly Maguires (though the Scowrers are worse and have far fewer excuses than the Mollies), and Edwards is an avatar of the man who broke up the Mollies, James McParlan(d) (though here again, Conan Doyle distorts things, making Edwards a very good man, whereas McParland proved to be a less-than-wonderful character in real life). But author Bunson never so much as mentions either the Mollies or McParland.

And some of Bunson's citations are a little off. For example, in his entry on "Shakespeare," he accuses Holmes of mis-quoting the line from "Twelfth Night" -- cited by Holmes as "Journeys end in lovers' meetings." Bunson is right that the final word should probably be "meeting," not "meetings," but he makes much too much of the orthography -- we use apostrophes and standardized spellings, but such things were much more fluid in Shakespeare's time.

These are nitpicks, or, rather, they are differences in emphasis. I would have preferred a slightly different book. But if you accept its scope, this is a very solid, and often amusing, book. show less