Irregular Lives: The
Untold Story of Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars is now AVAILABLE!
This new book as been described as a “multi-layered
mystorical novel” —a way of saying that, within the larger thriller plot, there
are five short stories set within a historically accurate post-WWI setting in
the U.K.
As the title promises, the novel centers on a gang of
adolescent boys and girls whom Holmes recruited from the slums of London to
become his investigative allies. Doyle only referenced three or four cases
where he engaged the irregulars, but there were many others.
Wiggins you know, if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan. But,
until now, other members of Wiggins’ backstreet brigade were never mentioned by
name. Now you can meet them: Ugly, Snape, Kate, Ruck, Rumpty, Archie, Benjie
and little Tessa.
Some of Sherlock Holmes’s most bizarre cases involved the
irregulars: a hideous execution of a man who had been strapped to the barrel of
cannon, a fiend who hoped he could live forever on the blood of others, and the
largest jewel robbery in Britain.
Irregular Lives
shines light on a hidden side of an older and more compassionate Sherlock
Holmes, and illuminates “darkest England” —the abysmal backstreets, slums, and tenements of Victorian
London that the irregulars called home.
The tale begins with a cryptic invitation and note:
Photographer S.P. Fields
invites
you to the debut of THE collection:
Irregular Lives.
Saturday, March 15, 1919.
35, Russell Square, London.
A note was enclosed in the envelope:
The
lives of the well-off have an arc, with significant achievements posed near the
peak. The lives of the deprived hover barely off the ground. Their
accomplishment lies at the bitter end—the fact that they survived at all.
Please
help me honour and eulogize those that served us both so well.
— S. P. F.
A
wave of recollections—of people, places, faces and voices from the past, swept
over Holmes’s mind like a tidal wave: his many encounters with the band of
juveniles that bore his appellation “the Baker-street irregulars.”
If you are curious about how Holmes shaped and changed the irregulars,
and how they changed his life . . . this is the book for you!
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