“At about the age of 11 I discovered a volume of collected Holmes stories on one of the large bookshelves in my Grandmother’s living room in Westfield, New Jersey. I devoured the volume during my short visit at her house over my Thanksgiving vacation from school. I have since read the canon many times over and have encouraged many of my literarily-minded friends to do so as well. I later discovered pastiche collections and Sherlockian scholarly writings and have enjoyed them very much.
During my graduate studies, the focus of which was Victorian literature, I was
pleased to be able to study the Canon and the life of Arthur Conan Doyle with
new understanding and purpose, to present several papers on the subject (which I
may begin to revise for possible future submissions), and to continue to get other people hooked. My thesis did not end up being specifically focused on Holmes, but on Poe and Hawthorne, and some of the similarities between some of their characters and Holmes’ reasoning and deductive abilities. More recently I’ve been teaching writing at the local university and a community college, and have been
incorporating Holmes stories in a variety of classroom exercises. I began receiving the Baker Street Journal in 2007, and I am extremely excited to be regularly receiving another periodical devoted to the study the Canon.
Thank you for inviting me to become a charter member. I am pleased and honored.
Please welcome “Monty” to membership with our greeting: “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”