Episode Details

We've received a lot of correspondence from listeners asking us about some of the basics of the Sherlockian world – thank you for taking the time to contact us and let us know what's on your mind. In order to ensure that we're all working from the same level of knowledge, we'll cover some of the fundamentals of "the Game." Since this is such a broad topic, this will be a two-part show – and rather than make you wait two weeks for the second part, we'll release it next week.

Show topics:

• Listener mail - how do I get into a Sherlockian society?
• What do we mean by Canonical?
• Which are the best Sherlock Holmes stories to read? Where should I begin?
• Holmes and Watson as real people - the beginnings of Sherlockian scholarship
• Some details about Baker Street - particularly 221B
• How we use short-hand to refer to the stories
• Close connection with and nostalgia for the Victorian/Ewardian era when the Baker Street Irregulars was founded in 1934
• You say Sherlockian / I say Holmesian

• The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (William S. Baring-Gould)
• The leading problems of chronology
• A table of major events in the stories
• The Date Being -- ? (Andrew Jay Peck)
• Christopher Morley
• Ronald A. Knox's Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes
• Letters to Sherlock Holmes
• Jay Finley Christ's list of four-letter abbreviations of the 60 stories
• Writings about the writings - the Harry Potter & Sherlock Holmes phenomena
• Discovering Sherlock Holmes (Stanford University)
• The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (Leslie S. Klinger)
• The best Sherlock Holmes stories, from Randall Stock and originally in the Baker Street Journal