I get that and agree that everyone should be treated with respect in that regard, but I’m confused how the BSJ was disrespectful. Was it something in that article?

I am confused by what started the issue here. How did a pronoun cause so much trouble?

I finished The Napoleon of Crime today and really enjoyed it. For anyone that’s interested in the biography of a master criminal, it’s worth a definite read. The author discusses at length Adam Worth’s influence on Moriarty, he also claims that Baron Gruner was based off of the master criminal, which I found to be a bit of a stretch.

Yes! There are so many poorly written pastiches out there, good ones are always worth hearing about.

I found a play from a Scholaatic magazine that adapted Spec. The copyright was a little iffy, so I found a play version of The Red Headed League to take its place next year.

It’s definitely the snake. Roylott and Holmes bending the poker was cool for them too. When we did the play, kids fought over who got to be Roylott because they wanted to be a dead guy with a snake on their head.

We do brief overviews of Spec, blue carbuncle, red headed league and silver blaze on the first day. We spend a day each on speckled band, blue carbuncle, copper beeches, and red headed league. And then the kids perform plays of blue carbumcle and speckled band. We talk about literary elements and media representations with each one and cap it off…[Read more]

The whole unsnakey behavior can ruin the story. I think it’s a testament to how good of a story it truly is that most of us are able to look past it and enjoy the story as a whole. When I taught Sherlock Holmes to my fifth graders in November, The Speckled Band was the favorite story we read for most of them.

Great article. As soon as I finished it, I bought the biography of Adam Worth off of ebay.

Things like the made up snake make me feel like ACD was a lazy writer. I get not caring about the continuity because he felt that Holmes stories were beneath him, but do some research! Once I learned that a carbuncle couldn’t be blue, sloppy mistakes like the swamp adder really started to get to me.