William Stuart Baring-Gould (1913–1967) was a noted Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...

 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 married Lucile "Ceil" Marguerite Moody in 1937.

He was creative director of Time magazine

Time (magazine)

Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

's circulation and corporate education departments from 1937 until his death. His paternal grandfather was Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould

Sabine Baring-Gould

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould was an English hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist and eclectic scholar. His bibliography consists of more than 1240 publications, though this list continues to grow. His family home, Lew Trenchard Manor near Okehampton, Devon, has been preserved as he had it...

.

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, its subtitle promising "The four novels and fifty-six short stories complete". The following year, Baring-Gould published The Lure Of The Limerick, a study of the history and allure of limericks; it included a collection of limericks, arranged alphabetically, and a bibliography. The book was republished in 1974.

Baring-Gould also wrote Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street: The life and times of America's largest private detective, a fictional biography of Rex Stout

Rex Stout

Rex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. Stout is best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe, described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of detectives." Wolfe's assistant Archie Goodwin recorded the cases of the...

's detective character Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe is a fictional detective, created in 1934 by the American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe's confidential assistant Archie Goodwin narrates the cases of the detective genius. Stout wrote 33 novels and 39 short stories from 1934 to 1974, with most of them set in New York City. Wolfe's...

. In this book, Baring-Gould popularised the theory that Wolfe was the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler

Irene Adler

Irene Adler is a fictional character featured in the Sherlock Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in July 1891...

.

Major works

• The Chronological Holmes, 1955 (with revisions from an earlier edition that appeared in the Baker Street Journal in 1948)
• Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, 1962
• The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 1967
• Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, 1969
• The Lure of the Limerick, Panther Books, London, 1968