Advanced Reading Copy, 408 pages Trade Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-55246-922-4 For Review: Not for sale
Hard Cover, 408 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-87954-186-5 @ $39.95
plus shipping
Baker Street Irregular is a mystery and espionage tale told by a member of a whimsical Sherlock Holmes club born in a speakeasy, as Woody Hazelbaker undergoes America’s political struggles in the 1930s and Second World War in the ’40s, stretching from the Great Depression’s worst year to the beginning of the Cold War. A young New York lawyer, Woody gets a cold dose of reality from a gangster client he keeps secret from the world, then puts stratagems he learned to use when he and other Baker Street Irregulars react to Hitler’s war against Europe’s democracies. Not only the Irregulars but Woody’s marriage are strongly divided over isolationism when Churchill’s Britain fights on alone. But Woody and his friends join British Intelligence in a covert campaign to circumvent America’s neutrality laws, leading eventually to treason, espionage and murder. In a series of wartime intelligence missions, Woody wages a clandestine war of his own to solve the disappearance of a woman he loved the day after Hitler’s invasion of Russia. His quest takes him from the White House to London’s Cabinet War Rooms, and finally Germany’s battlefields, then back again to the nerve center of America’s cryptologic campaign against both the Axis and Soviet Union. The mystery’s solution turns him inside out—and how he brings his bitter quest to an end is a masterpiece of ruthlessly satisfying deviousness.
Baker Street Irregular is "torn from the front pages" where its historical personalities and events are concerned, and "at last we know!" about the secret world of wartime intelligence. Some secrets, the product of deep research in long-classified archives, will be unfamiliar even to professional intelligence agents. And throughout, the tale is underpinned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic Sherlock Holmes stories, and the eccentricities and passions of their most gleefully perverse fans: the Baker Street Irregulars, "perpetuating the myth that Sherlock Holmes is not a myth."
The Author is an alumnus of USC’s School of International Relations, the U.S. National War College, and the National Senior Intelligence Course. He retired from the Pentagon in 2006 as director of its special operations bureau’s policy and strategy office. Much of his knowledge of the novel’s diplomatic, military and intelligence matters was acquired in the course of his duties, and he continues to be active in several professional national security forums.
As the Baker Street Irregulars’ historian, his work has won their highest awards. His 2007 book Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters was a BBC Book of the Week in Britain, and in America won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best critical work. Besides other nonfiction about Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, he has co-edited and contributed to seven collections of new Sherlock Holmes tales by mystery writers, most recently Sherlock Holmes in America (2009). He divides his time today between Chicago and an undisclosed secure location in Vermont.
The Baker Street Irregulars was founded in 1934 by writer-critic Christopher Morley, and named for the street urchins in Conan Doyle’s stories who were Sherlock Holmes’s secret eyes and ears throughout London. Composed of writers, artists and professional people, over the decades they have created an immense mock-scholarship to prove the stories true. Some real-life Irregulars in this novel, besides Morley, are world heavyweight champ Gene Tunney, military historian Fletcher Pratt, General Motors vice-president Edgar W. Smith, mystery writer Rex Stout, Office of War Information director Elmer Davis, and bookman Vincent Starrett. Recent Irregulars have included science-fiction master Isaac Asimov, Nobel Prize winner Paul Hench, cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, writers Nicholas Meyer and Neil Gaiman, and Arkham House’s founder August Derleth. The author is "Rodger Prescott of evil memory" in the BSI since 1974.
Arkham House was founded in 1939 by writers August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish work by their late mentor H.P. Lovecraft, naming the press after the eerie New England village where Lovecraft’s stories take place. Since then Arkham House has published the best horror and supernatural fiction in the world. In 1945 Derleth created its Mycroft & Moran imprint to publish mystery titles as well.
The novel’s star-crossed lovers, from a preliminary sketch by dustjacket artist Laurie Fraser Manifold.