William S. Baring-Gould

William Stuart Baring-Gould (1913 – 10 August 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 was the son of William Drake Baring-Gould (1878–1921), a grandson of Sabine Baring-Gould and a descendant of John Baring.

He married Lucile "Ceil" Marguerite Moody (1914–2010) in 1936. They had a son William (d. 1966) and a daughter Judy.

He was creative director of Time magazine's circulation and corporate education departments from 1937 until his death.

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. Baring-Gould also wrote The Lure of the Limerick, a study of the history and allure of limericks, published in 1967; it included a collection of limericks, arranged alphabetically, and a bibliography. Posthumously published in 1969 was 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 New Chronology of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (The Baker Street Journal 1948, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 107–125 and Vol. III, No. 2, pp. 238–251) The Chronological Holmes (self-published in 300 copies, 1955) Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (Bramhall House, New York, 1962) The Annotated Mother Goose (Bramhall House, New York, 1962) The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1967) The Lure of the Limerick (Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1967) Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street (Viking Press, New York, 1969)