Australia and Sherlock Holmes is the third title in The Baker Street Irregulars’ International Series, which brings the best non-fiction Holmesian writing from around the world to a larger audience. The history of Australian Sherlockians can be traced back over 100 years to a photograph of a group of miners printed in The Strand Magazine in 1904.
Australia and Sherlock Holmes captures the distinctive Sherlockian voice from Down Under. Editors Bill Barnes and Doug Elliott provide context for, and an introduction to, Sherlock Holmes in Australia. They gathered materials written between 1959 and 2007, mostly from News from the Diggings and The Passengers’ Log. These incisively written scholarly essays includes two pieces about the larger-than-life Richard Hughes, an Australian journalist who made one of the scoops of the (last) century by obtaining the first interview with the Cambridge spies Burgess and Maclean. (Hughes was a real-life inspiration for novelists John le Carré and Ian Fleming.) Popular culture is well represented by a piece covering Sherlock Holmes films conceived but never filmed, and accompanied by delightful, apocryphal movie posters. Well-reasoned papers link both Watson’s childhood and the speckled band snake to Australia; a fine, perhaps definitive essay addresses “The Gloria Scott.”
There is much more in this volume attesting to the continuing remarkable popularity of the great detective around the globe, and particularly in Australia, and the creative whimsy with which Holmesian scholars play “The Game.”
