Baker Street Irregulars

The Baker Street Irregulars are fictional characters who appear in various Sherlock Holmes stories, as street boys who are employed by Holmes as intelligence agents. The name has subsequently been adopted by other organizations, most notably a prestigious and exclusive literary society founded in the United States by Christopher Morley in 1934.

Background

The original Baker Street Irregulars are fictional characters featured in the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. The group of street urchins is led by an older boy called Wiggins, whom Holmes paid a shilling per day, with a guinea prize (worth one pound and one shilling) for a vital clue, to collect data for his investigations.

The group appears in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study In Scarlet (1887).^[1] They also appear in the next novel, The Sign of the Four (1890), in which one of the chapters is titled "The Baker Street Irregulars".^[2]

The Baker Street Irregulars ("my Baker Street boys") later appear in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893).^[3]

Cultural references

• The Special Operations Executive (SOE), tasked by Winston Churchill to "set Europe ablaze" during World War II, had its headquarters at 64 Baker Street and was often called "the Baker Street Irregulars"^[4] after Sherlock Holmes's fictional group.
• Hazel Meade's troop of children serve as couriers and lookouts in the "Baker Street Irregulars" during the lunar revolution of Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
• Terrance Dicks wrote The Baker Street Irregulars series of ten children's novels, starting in 1978.
• Two BBC television series have been made starring the Irregulars: The Baker Street Boys (1983) and Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars (2007).
• The sci-fi series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century features a trio of children who aid Holmes as the new Baker Street Irregulars, and are even led by a boy named Wiggins (who may or may not be a descendant of the original).
• The Irregulars appear as the main characters in Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars: The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas, a 2006 novel by Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin. Wiggins is again the leader. Other major characters include Ozzie, a scrivener's apprentice; Rohan, an Indian boy; Elliot, from an Irish tailor's family; Pilar, a Gypsy girl; and little Alfie. The Irregulars help solve the mysterious deaths of three tightrope walkers at a circus.
• Graphic novels featuring the characters include The Irregulars from Dark Horse Comics ( ISBN 978-1-59307-303-9),^[5] and Les Quatre de Baker Street ( ISBN 9782749304373)^[6] (republished in English as The Baker Street Four by Insight Editions).^[7] A series of four graphic novels by Tony Lee and artist Dan Boultwood was released in 2011.^[8]
• The group is mentioned briefly in the Doctor Who episode "Hide" as the Eleventh Doctor discusses the involvement of Professor Palmer in the Special Operations Executive.^[9]
• The Baker Street Irregulars are mentioned in Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Agent Pendergast novel, White Fire. During the plot of the novel, Agent Pendergast teams up with a fictional member of the group to find a "lost" Sherlock Holmes story entitled "The Adventure of Aspern Hall".
• Variations of the Irregulars can be found in the modern-day remakes Sherlock (set in London) and Elementary (set in New York). In Sherlock, the "Irregulars"—although never named as such—are various homeless people scattered around London, who provide Sherlock with information and observe his targets in exchange for money and food; they also assisted him in faking his death during his final confrontation with Moriarty. In Elementary, by contrast, the "Irregulars" are an assortment of experienced adults in certain fields that Holmes calls on for insight when his own knowledge of a subject proves inadequate to the current case; members depicted to date include a mathematician, a meteorologist, an expert in Greek myth and literature (Ms. Hudson, who is an "official" muse for wealthy men when not working with Sherlock) a man with a particularly keen sense of smell, and a teenage hacker (In Elementary, Sherlock also associates with a hacktivist group known as 'Everyone' when he needs to look up key information on short notice, but this interaction commonly involves him humiliating himself in exchange for a favour from Everyone, such as singing "Let It Go" on YouTube in a dress or defending the Jacob/Bella relationship at a Twilight convention).

References