There are Sherlock Holmes fans, and then there are people who happily disappear down every foggy little side street of the Holmesian universe just to see where it leads.
David Foster is very much the latter.
In Baker Street: The Curious Case Files of Sherlock Holmes, David takes readers far beyond a simple introduction to the world’s most famous consulting detective. This is a sprawling exploration of Sherlock Holmes, beginning with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the original stories and following Holmes and Watson as they move through more than a century of books, pastiches, films, television adaptations, parodies, and reimaginings.
Because Sherlock Holmes has never really stayed put.
Conan Doyle may have created him in the late nineteenth century, but Holmes quickly became something much bigger than one author or one collection of stories. Every generation seems to find its own version of Baker Street, whether through Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Jeremy Brett and David Burke, or more contemporary interpretations such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.
And David follows those trails wherever they go.
That includes the familiar figures surrounding Holmes: Dr. Watson, Irene Adler, Professor Moriarty, Mycroft Holmes, Mrs. Hudson, the Baker Street Irregulars, and the detectives of Scotland Yard. But Baker Street also wanders into some of the stranger corners of Holmes history and the life of the man who created him.
There’s Conan Doyle’s complicated relationship with his enormously popular detective, whom he famously killed off only to resurrect years later after public demand. There’s Doyle’s deep interest in spiritualism. There are the Cottingley Fairies photographs he publicly defended as genuine. And there’s even the enduring speculation surrounding his possible connection to the infamous Piltdown Man hoax.
Then there are all the places Sherlock himself has traveled since leaving Conan Doyle’s pen.
Holmes has appeared in comedy, romance, horror, dark fantasy, science fiction, espionage, children’s stories, and even zombie narratives. Writers and filmmakers have reinvented him endlessly while somehow keeping enough of the original detective intact that we still recognize the man from 221B Baker Street.
That enduring fascination is at the heart of David’s book.
At 284 full-color pages, Baker Street: The Curious Case Files of Sherlock Holmes is the kind of book made for browsing as much as reading straight through. You can follow Holmes chronologically across generations or simply open it and tumble down whichever Baker Street rabbit hole catches your attention.
For longtime Sherlockians, there is plenty here to revisit and discover. And for readers who know Holmes mostly through a favorite film or television adaptation, David offers a doorway into just how enormous—and wonderfully strange—the world surrounding the Great Detective has become.
More than 130 years after Sherlock Holmes first began examining clues and noticing what everyone else overlooked, we’re apparently still not finished following him.
Fortunately, neither is David Foster.
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Ready to venture deeper into the world of Sherlock Holmes?
Baker Street: The Curious Case Files of Sherlock Holmes explores the original Conan Doyle tales, more than a century of pastiches, and Holmes’ long journey across film, television, and popular culture—all in a 284-page, full-color celebration of the Great Detective.
Baker Street: The Curious Case Files of Sherlock Holmes
