RECENTLY “SHAKESPEARE’S BEHIND” CONCLUDED with my noting, “It was good fun researching this one.” And the “Laura D. Fair” piece had a similar conclusion: “It makes for a nice research project here at SimanaitisSays.”
This time around, I have unexpected but fascinating research encounters, all beginning with some Sherlockian sleuthing on my own part. By the time I had followed clues down several rabbit holes, I had increased my ken about the Baker Street Irregulars, rekindled an old hobby, learned who had written a favorite 1940 flick—and encountered a shared name whose life’s work would seemingly be part of Trump’s asinine retributions.
Talk about connecting the dots in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow!
The Standard Doyle Company: Christopher Morley on Sherlock Holmes. The flyleaf of this book reads, “The Anglo-American cult of Sherlock Holmes and its organizational centerpiece, The Baker Street Irregulars of New York, were products of the fertile mind of Christopher Morley (1890–1957), one of the most versatile and prolific writers of the first half of the twentieth century.”
The Standard Doyle Company: Christopher Morley on Sherlock Holmes, edited, and with an introduction by Steven Rothman, Fordham University Press, 1990.
It continues, “Novelist, essayist, columnist, founding judge of The Book-of-the-Month Club, poet, and panelist, Morley was an avid exponent of the literature he loved.”
Christopher Morley is no stranger to SimanaitisSays readers: See ” ‘The Compliments of the Season’ to Sherlock Holmes.” The Standard Doyle Company (an American pun; get it?) is filled with Sherlockiana worthy of research and repetition.
The Literary Clubable Mr. Morley. Wikipedia notes, “Morley was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. His father, Frank Morley, was a mathematics professor at Haverford College; his mother, Lilian Janet Bird, was a violinist who provided Christopher with much of his later love for literature and poetry…. In 1906 Christopher entered Haverford College, graduating in 1910 as valedictorian. He then went to New College, Oxford, for three years on a Rhodes scholarship, studying modern history.”
“Morley,” Wikipedia continues, “was one of the founders and a longtime contributing editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. A highly gregarious man, he was the mainstay of what he dubbed the “Three Hours for Lunch Club”. Out of enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes, he helped found The Baker Street Irregulars and wrote the introduction to the standard omnibus edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes.”
Baker Street Irregulars Fletcher Pratt, Christopher Morley, and Rex Stout (1944). Image by Herbert Gehr, Life magazine, Time Inc. via Wikipedia.
Saturday Review of Literature. Wikipedia describes, “Saturday Review, previously The Saturday Review of Literature, was an American weekly magazine established in 1924. Norman Cousins was the editor from 1940 to 1971. Under Cousins, it was described as ‘a compendium of reportage, essays and criticism about current events, education, science, travel, the arts and other topics.’ ”
I recall one of the other topics being the magazine’s Double-Crostic puzzles.
Tomorrow in Part 2, my research continues. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025