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LRK on: Sabine Baring-Gould and Mr. Sherlock Holmes

I met Sabine Baring-Gould some seventy years after his death, when I was thinking about writing a book set in Dartmoor. 

I am a crime writer, with a protagonist named Mary Russell who befriends, apprentices herself to, and eventually partners (and marries) one Mr. Sherlock Holmes.  When I was thinking about the fourth book in the series some years ago, having taken the characters to Sussex, Wales, and London in previous novels, I thought it might be interesting to travel fictionally Dartmoor, setting of that most evocative of Holmes novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

I live in California, but have a house and family in England.  In June, 1996, my teenaged daughter and I hired a car in London and drove across the southern end of the country to Dartmoor.  It was a stunningly beautiful summer’s day: genial sun, cloudless blue sky, green hills decoratively scattered with white sheep, long-haired ponies wandering cheerfully across the road to greet the swarms of hikers and picnickers.

Frankly, this wasn’t at all what I’d expected.  Would Arthur Conan Doyle have set a book here if he’d encountered the moor on a day like this?  Certainly he wouldn’t have come up with a story rife with fog, glowing dogs, escaped Princetown murderers, and pony-swallowing bogs.

No, I decided with regret, Dartmoor just wouldn’t do for the book I had in mind: It was far too cheerful.

Two years later I was back in England for a longer time, and I drove down to Devon with my literary agent, visiting from San Francisco, and both my teenagers.  Now it was September—and not a mellow Indian-summer kind of September, either.  The fog appeared as soon as our Land Rover breasted the moor, wisps blowing across the sodden earth.  And then the rain started, and the wind picked up—so hard, the rain hit us horizontally, causing the heavy car to dance and sway.  This time, the sheep were miserable grey mops; this time, the ponies eyed us glumly from beneath dripping forelocks, wondering perhaps how they might take possession of our dry vehicle.  The fog settled in more firmly—how could there be both wind and fog?—and we stopped the car to wrap ourselves in rain gear and examine some stubs that the map claimed were crosses. 

When I looked around, my agent had disappeared.  I planted the two kids firmly in the car, not wanting to lose them, too, and shouted my agent’s name; she responded, and we called out, back and forth, until she emerged, wind-eyed, from the gloom.

Ah: This was more like it.

Yes, Dartmoor was just the place to send my poor protagonist Mary Russell, who in eight books has yet to travel to a warm climate. 

So having had a personal experience of the place (Honest, it isn’t every day a writer simply loses her agent!) I then had to do the research.  Of course, as soon as I began to look into books about Dartmoor written in my period of the early Twentieth century, I stumbled across Sabine Baring-Gould, and fell in love.

I began, of course, with his guidebooks to the area, some of which I discovered in the library in Oxford, where I was staying.  In October I took a third trip to the moor (Oh, what my kids could tell you about the life of a novelist’s family!) to look at it in greater detail, and we stayed for a night at the Lewtrenchard Manor.  The owners were kind to put up with a trio of uncivilized Californians, and overlooked the fact that our dinner dress was by no means up to the requested formality.  But they allowed me to crawl all over the house, seeing the Baring-Gould study and bedroom, peeking into the lovely ball-room (closed for repairs at the time—I wonder if it’s open yet?) and finding all kinds of nooks and crannies in which one might dump a body, all of it serving to add colour to Russell’s adventure. 

Back home in California, the book research got under way.  I had been immensely pleased to find that Sabine Baring-Gould was still alive when my characters needed to visit Lew, in September and October, 1923—true, he would probably have been too ill to act as host to his visitors, but it is a novelist’s prerogative to twist the truth just a little, and I really wanted him to appear as an active character in the book, not as a man in his death-bed.

And what a character he was.  I worked my way through as many of the novels as I could bear, finding some of them actually readable, and laid my hands on such gems as his werewolf book and his canned biographies of various saints.  About this time, I realized that I already had a Baring-Gould in my personal library, a slim volume I’d picked up from a remainder table as an impoverished undergraduate on Curiosities of the Middle Ages. 

But when my local research library unearthed his two-volume autobiography, I began to feel a distinct sense of familiarity: Where had I read some of these events before?  It took me some time, but I finally tracked it down.  His grandson, William Stuart Baring-Gould, was an eminent scholar of Sherlock Holmes, and had written a biography of Sherlock Holmes.

And, when I put W. S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street next to the first volume of Sabine Baring-Gould’s autobiography, Early Reminiscences, I found a number of, shall we say, quite striking similarities:

From Early Reminiscences

Sabine Baring-Gould was born on the 28^th of January, 1834.  “My father had been a cavalry lieutenant in the East Indian Company’s service—uniform blue and silver.  He met with an accident: whilst driving a stout friend in his dog-cart, the vehicle was upset and the friend fell on him and dislocated his hip.  He was not carefully treated, and was sent home invalided.” And later, “On 6 July, 1837, we left England in the steam vessel, Leeds, for Bordeaux….From Bayonne the whole party moved for the winter to Pau, where we took a flat on the Grande Place.”

In the summer of 1838, the Baring-Gould family moved on to Montpellier where, as young Sabine’s mother wrote, “We were not a little glad to find a delightfully snug and pretty little house…in the best part of the town” which had “a piece of water in the middle (very shallow) and railed around to the height of Sabine’s waist, full of gold fish, which serve to delight the little ones.”

“In October, 1840…we crossed to Rotterdam….We remained for some time at Cologne, as the weather was breaking up and winter setting in, so that it was not convenient for travelling.

“One drawback to going abroad had been the publication in numbers of Nicholas Nickleby, that was begun in 1839, and odd as it may seem, I think that really one reason for inducing my father to spend the winter at Cologne was that he might be more certain to obtain the issues of that story as they came out.”

From Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street

Sherlock Holmes was born twenty-two days and twenty years later, on 6 January, 1854, to “a young cavalry lieutenant in the services of the East India Company—uniform blue and gold—[who] had offered, one evening, to drive a friend home from the company mess.  Perhaps the dinner had been an exceptionally good one.  Certainly both the cavalry lieutenant and his friend were heavy men, each weighting in the neighborhood of fourteen stone.  In any case, it followed that the dogcart shortly turned over.  The friend fell upon his companion, the cavalry lieutenant.  The friend was unhurt, but the hip of the cavalry lieutenant was dislocated, and he was invalided home without delay.”

When Sherlock was a year old, his father, the retired officer, “led his entire family aboard the steamship Lerdo on July 7, 1855.  They were bound for Bordeaux, across the Bay of Biscay.  From Bordeaux they traveled to Pau, and there they wintered, taking a flat in the Grande Palace.”

In May, 1858, the family removed to Montepellier, where “they took a snug and pretty little house in the best part of town…with a goldfish pool to delight Sherlock and his brothers.”

And “in October 1860 they crossed to Rotterdam.  Two months later this wandering family, these genteel gypsies, pitched tent in Cologne.  The Rhine in that winter of 1860-61 was frozen over, and the while family had several months of peace during with Siger Holmes [the father] continued his studies.”

And there you have it: Take your grandfather’s story and add twenty years and a touch of decorative detail, change the steamship from Leeds to Lerdo, and interpret a passion for Nicholas Nickleby as “studies,” and you have quite a nice childhood for a detective.  You also provide a novelist, decades later, the opportunity to reveal that a certain famous misanthropic detective is in fact the god-son of the squire of Lew Trenchard.

I like to believe that the old curmudgeon might have been mildly amused at my novelist’s impertinence.

Perhaps both old curmudgeons.

Laurie R. King is the author of eight Mary Russell novels, in print in the United States and returning to print in the UK.  She has also written four stand-alone novels, and her 2006 addition to the contemporary Kate Martinelli series, The Art of Detection, introduces that San Francisco homicide detective to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

The Russell books

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor (with Sabine Baring-Gould)

O Jerusalem

Justice Hall

The Game

Locked Rooms