New Volume Shines a Global Light on Holmes and Australia
New Volume Shines a Global Light on Holmes and Australia is an article written by Doug Elliott published in The Passengers' Log (Vol. 12 No. 1, august 2008).
The article announces and promotes the publication of Australia and Sherlock Holmes, a Baker Street Irregulars volume edited by Bill Barnes and Doug Elliott that brings together decades of Australian Sherlockian scholarship for an international audience. It highlights the strong literary and cultural connections between Australia and Sherlock Holmes, outlines the book's contents and contributors, and presents the collection as a landmark effort to showcase the richness of Australian Sherlockian research beyond its traditional local readership.
New Volume Shines a Global Light on Holmes and Australia
The New Year will see the publication of a new collection of Sherlockian papers that firmly links the great detective with the great land down under.
Those of us who live in Australia well know that either Holmes visited here, or Watson was raised here. Or maybe both. And that the world's first organised Sherlockians were Australian. The Passengers' Log and other journals published here have amply demonstrated the depth and richness of the connection between Australia and the Holmes saga. Until now, however, we have largely kept that knowledge to ourselves. Only in the past ten years, with the international popularity of The Log, have Sherlockians who live elsewhere become aware of this association.
Fortunately, this wealth of scholarship has come to the attention of the powers who rule the grandfather of American Sherlockian societies, The Baker Street Irregulars (BSI), who have decided to bring some of the best of this writing together in a single volume for the first time.
The result is the upcoming Australia and Sherlock Holmes, edited by Passengers' Captain Bill Barnes and Anchor Watch Doug Elliott. It's the third title of the planned BSI International Series which has so far seen Japan and Sherlock Holmes (2004) and Scandinavia and Sherlock Holmes (2006). From the book's dust jacket we learn:
- This volume makes available the best non-fiction Holmesian writing of Australia for a larger audience than had previously been able to enjoy the distinctive Sherlockian voice from the land down under.
Over the past year Bill and Doug have pored over dusty copies of The Log, News from the Diggings and other sources, selecting an eclectic sampling of Sherlockian writing from the period from 1959 to 2007 that had previously only been published in Australia. The vein was a rich one: many excellent papers had to be rejected simply because of space limitations.
The volume features writers who will be familiar to readers of The Log, including Michael Duke, Arthur Williams, Rosane McNamara and Alan Olding; and its pages are enlivened with the drawings of Expedition Artist Phillip Cornell.
Back to the dust jacket for more on the book's contents:
- Australia and Sherlock Holmes contains many incisively-written scholarly essays including two about the larger-than-life Richard Hughes, an Australian journalist who had one of the scoops of the century by obtaining the first interview with the Cambridge spies, Burgess and Maclean. Hughes also was the inspiration for a character in a John le Carré novel and an Ian Fleming novel.
- Popular culture is well represented by a piece covering Sherlock Holmes films conceived, but never filmed, and accompanied by delightful, apocryphal movie posters. There are very well-reasoned papers about the linkage of Watson's childhood and the speckled band to Australia and a fine and perhaps definitive essay about "The 'Gloria Scott." Also included is an article which provides context for, and an introduction to, Sherlock Holmes in Australia.
The book's publication is planned for January 2009 in New York City at the annual BSI celebration of Holmes's birthday. Bill and Doug will be attending the events in New York and will be signing copies of the new book that will be available for purchase there for the first time.
In due course Australia and Sherlock Holmes will be available for ordering through the BSI's web site (http://www.bakerstreetjournal.com/itemsforsale/bsiinternationalseries.html) at a price of USD39.95 plus USD9.95 shipping (current prices).
We are trying to organise a bulk shipment to Australia in order to reduce the per-volume shipping costs. If you are interested in buying a copy through this bulk order, please contact The Captain no later that 30 December 2008. He will acknowledge each order: please contact him again before 30 December if you do not get an acknowledgment.
- Article courtesy The Sydney Passengers.
