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Welcome! Like the book of the same name, this blog is an eclectic collection of Sherlockian scribblings based on more than a half-century of reading Sherlock Holmes. Please add your own thoughts. You can also follow me on Twitter @DanAndriacco and on my Facebook fan page at Dan Andriacco Mysteries. You might also be interested in my Amazon Author Page. My books are also available at Barnes & Noble and in all main electronic formats including Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iBooks for the iPad.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

More Sherlock for Christmas!

Watson and Holmes Christmas ornaments

Philip K. Jones, whose scholarship has been lauded on this blog, wrote to complain about the paucity of my Sherlockian Christmas reading list. On this Christmas Eve, I'm happy to share his communication with you. Keep in mind that Phil maintains a mammoth database of Sherlockian pastiches with 10,205 entries.

Dear Dan:

I looked at your latest Baker Street Beat and I was appalled.  I thought you may have missed a number of Christmas tales, so I decided to check the database.  I had to give up when I was about halfway through because of the sheer number of items I was finding.  At that point I had identified forty short stories, three poems, two novels, four parodies, 2 Plays, two half-hour radio scripts, one full-hour radio script, one half-hour TV program, two extra-short short stories and two game scenarios.

There are at least two other anthologies with a high Christmas content; David Ruffle's Tales from the Stranger's Room and Gwendolyn Frame's Have Yourself a Chaotic Little Christmas.  There is also a second Solar Pons Christmas tale, "The Adventure of the Stone of Scone" from The Return of Solar Pons.  Another note;  Edward D. Hoch wrote a fifteen or sixteen Sherlockian-related tales and at least four of those are Christmas-based.  The Beaten's Christmas Annual, which is produced every year by The Sound of the Baskervilles, generally includes several pieces of Christmas fiction, which, over the years, has come to some twenty or thirty tales.

I finally gave up as I was running out of space to take notes.  I enter "XMAS" in Column D for Christmas tales, just as I enter the Christ codes for tales including elements of the Canonical tales or those telling "Untold Tales."  Check the data base if you are curious.  I expect the number will easily exceed a hundred.
Fortunately, Dec. 12 is just the first day of Christmas. We have 12 more to read all that!

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