The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories by Otto Penzler

Author:Otto Penzler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

The Adventure of the Second Swag

ROBERT BARR

(Writing as Luke Sharp)

BORN IN SCOTLAND, Robert Barr (1850–1912) moved to Canada with his family when he was four years old. While a teacher and later headmaster of the Central School of Windsor, Ontario, he wrote short stories that he placed with the Detroit Free Press. When he was twenty-six, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing and moved to Detroit to become a staff writer on that paper, eventually becoming its news editor.

His contributions to the newspaper were published under the pseudonym Luke Sharp, an amusing name but not one that Barr invented. As a schoolboy in Canada, he had regularly passed a storefront sign that proclaimed “Luke Sharpe, Undertaker,” which he found too memorable to resist.

Barr’s first Sherlock Holmes parody, “Detective Stories Gone Wrong: The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs,” published in May 1892, is often described as the first Holmes parody (it is early, yes, but not the first) and has been often anthologized, including in this collection. However, the present story, published more than a decade later and far more obscure, is an even funnier send-up of the great detective.

“The Adventure of the Second Swag” was first published in the December 1904 issue of The Idler Magazine; its first book appearance was as a chapbook limited to two hundred copies, The Adventure of the Second Swag (London, Ferret Fantasy, 1990).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.