Ms Holmes of Baker Street: The Truth About Sherlock

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

When this book by two University of Saskatchewan professors first
appeared in 1988, it was the subject of international debate. Surviving
author Alan Bradley recalls in an afterword for this first Canadian
edition, “[a]lthough we were shaken at the time, we tended to remember
rather fondly in retrospect the elderly lady who attacked us with a wet
umbrella in a Toronto supermarket.” The reason for what Bradley calls
the “cold outrage” the book inspired was not its assumption that
Sherlock Holmes was a real person and Dr. Watson his biographer; that is
the starting point for what Sherlockians have called “the Game” for
nearly a century. The thesis of this meticulously researched and wittily
argued book is that Sherlock Holmes was in fact born Charlotte Holmes
and chose to live as a man in a Victorian society that harshly
restricted women’s potential. Not only that, but she was three times
pregnant.

The authors read through the 60 Holmes adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle
“an estimated thirty eye-popping times” over 10 years to marshal
evidence, and their notes and sources take up 13 pages. They examine the
tales in what they argue is their chronological order, and in a 13-page
appendix they challenge chronologies suggested by other scholars.
Another appendix deals with the detective’s biorhythms; this is
important to one of the book’s principal arguments, which concerns the
regular moody periods that disappeared as Holmes reached middle age. The
authors confront with wit and skill many obvious problems, such as the
fact that Dr. Watson, a physician who shared a flat with Holmes from
March 1881, did not become aware of Holmes’s gender until, the writers
postulate, November 1885.

The authors of this endearingly preposterous study suggest that the
first 11 chapters are for readers knowledgeable about the Holmes canon
and that others proceed to the last chapter, a 27-page biography in
which they switch to the female pronoun. In reality, this whole
tongue-in-cheek book is strictly for Sherlockians.