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. In 1969 was published posthumously 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