The Statement of the Case

Not long ago I had the honor of speaking about Vincent Starrett to the Ribston Pippins of Michigan. It was their 35th anniversary celebration and the group was kind and encouraging. 

During a break, my table mate and fellow Irregular Scott Monty pulled out an album of items he had purchased at an auction several years back. Included was a flier from The Cliff Dwellers, promoting “An Evening with Sherlock Holmes and Vincent Starrett, a Founder of the famous Baker Street Irregulars.” The flier was inscribed “To Jim Montgomery— from Vincent Starrett.” 

I’ve seen another copy of this brochure but have not spent much time thinking about it. Scott’s willingness to share the image prompted me to think about Starrett and his relationships with one of the most influential arts clubs in his adopted city of Chicago.

Down the rabbit hole we go. 

Or perhaps, it’s a dive off a cliff.

Cliff Dwelling

Since it was a leaflet from The Cliff Dwellers that sparked this reverie, let’s start with that event. First, a bit of background.

The Cliff Dwellers was and is a private club for members who are either professionally engaged in literature, painting, music, architecture, sculpture, or one of the allied arts. Business folks who support the arts are equally welcome. The group still exists and has a healthy schedule of activities.

With a history that reaches back to 1907, the Cliff Dwellers enjoy a distinguished reputation in the city. Its facilities were in the heart of Chicago and, as its website notes: “Since its 1996 move from atop Symphony Center (formerly Orchestra Hall) next door, all the facilities of The Cliff Dwellers Club are located in the 22nd floor penthouse of the office building at the southwest corner of Michigan Avenue at Adams Street.” A fine location indeed.

As you can see from the accompanying letter by Charles Collins, Starrett was accepted as a member in 1944. Collins was Starrett’s good friend and not only helped get him into the Cliff Dwellers, but was instrumental in Starrett becoming a featured weekly columnist at the Chicago Tribune, where Collins oversaw a column of his own.

It’s worth noting that Collins, with Starrett, were two of the founding members of the Chicago branch of the Baker Street Irregulars.

You can see an example of the club’s membership card at the top of the page. Both the card and the Collins letter are in the University of Minnesota’s Anderson Library archive. 

Now let us turn to Mr. Monty’s leaflet. 

‘Sherlock Holmes and Vincent Starrett’

The event was called “An Evening with Sherlock Holmes and Vincent Starrett—a founder of the Baker Street Irregulars.” A notation on the back tells us the illustrations was done by one John Merryweather. We know from the brochure that the date was Wednesday, March 19.

But what was the year?*

From the title, it would need to be dated after the 1933 publication of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes AND after the first official dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars in 1934. And, since Scott’s copy is inscribed from Starrett to Jim Montgomery, it’s worth noting that Montgomery became a member of the BSI in 1949.

To me, that would seem to argue for a date in 1947, 1952 or 1958—all three years had a Wednesday, March 19. And we can rule out 1958 because Montgomery died in 1955, as Scot pointed out to me recently.

Of the options, I’m leaning in favor of 1952. As we will see, this slips in nicely between two other speaking engagements Starrett had before the Cliff Dwellers. (If there is other information that I’ve missed, please let me know. As Holmes says in the “The Adventure of The Golden Pince-Nez,” “Well, well, I don't insist upon it. No doubt I am wrong. And yet it seems to me to be suggestive.”)

The Chicago Tribune is not helpful in nailing down the date, as I can find no mention of Starrett speaking to the Cliff Dwellers about Holmes. And the University of Minnesota’s archives are also not helpful here, with nothing specifically identified as the text of Starrett’s talk to the Cliff Dwellers among its many documents. Which leaves us to wonder not only about the year, but about the content.

As we shall see, if my speculation is correct, it was not the first time Starrett had spoken to the Cliff Dwellers about Sherlock.

‘My Obsession’

It is likely that the flier Scott owns was not the first time Starrett and Holmes were the topic of conversation at the Cliff Dwellers. Tucked into the archives of the University of Minnesota’s Anderson Library archive is a much more helpful notice, advising members of a presentation entitled “ ‘My Obsession:’ A lecture on the imperishable detective, Sherlock Holmes by Mr. Vincent Starrett.”

We know this is an event from Friday, October 16, 1942 because it says so on the card. No chronological speculation needed, thank goodness. And it argues against Starrett’s return on the same topic in 1947, affirming the speculation of 1952 for the talk promoted in Scott’s leaflet.

The Holmes illustration this time is a dandy. I also love the description of the talk, which sounds like Starrett wrote it himself: 

The Sage of Baker Street has been an idée fixe with Mr. Starrett for a quarter of a century, he confesses; hence the title of his talk, which he says will be informal and interminable. He has spoken so often, and written so much, about the imperishable detective, he says, that there is nothing new left from him to say; but he promises to say a lot of old things until his audience tires of the subject. If there is time, he will discuss other aspects of the detective-story; and he will positively refrain from naming the Hundred Best Books in this field. 

There were about 75 folks in attendance that night. How do I know? Charles Collins said so.

Take a look at the first few paragraphs from Collins’s “A Line O’ Type or Two” column from the November 21, 1942 Tribune. Collins claims he was given an important assignment by Vincent Starrett “who slipped us the word secretly, in the presence of 75 witnesses.”

While Collins never says this was at the Cliff Dwellers, I feel certain he is talking about Starrett’s “informal and interminable” remarks of a month before. 

Starrett’s assignment to Collins was to determine which Chicago secret society Sherlock Holmes joined as he worked his way up the spy network to eventually bring down the German spy Von Bork. The end of this process was described in “His Last Bow,” but we don’t know much about the earlier specifics of the case. 

At any rate, Collins states with authority that “The secret society was, no doubt, the Clan-na-Gael, and Holmes came to Chicago to wheedle his way into the confidence of the circle that had guilty knowledge of the murder of Dr. (Patrick Henry) Cronin, May 4, 1889.” 

The details of Dr. Cronin’s death and the subsequent trial of his murderers I shall leave for you to unravel. The Wikipedia link behind Dr. Cronin’s death will get you started. The point here is that Collins was clearly present on the 1942 talk. It is, sadly, the only mention of the talk that I can find in the Tribune.

One wishes we had Starrett’s notes on the subject, but it’s unlikely they exist. Nothing by that name is found in the Cliff Dwellers folder at the University of Minnesota. But I suspect that if you’ve read The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes you have a good idea of the subject matter that Starrett would have been comfortable talking about during this period of his life. 

We have one more known talk Starrett gave at the Cliff Dwellers. 

‘Chicago Literary Lions, 1907-57’

By 1957, Starrett had drafted his memoirs. We know this because he discussed the mammouth 750-page, 250,000-word unedited manuscript during a talk in late 1952, as reported by Tribune columnist Fanny Butcher on Sunday, January 4, 1953. The mountainous manuscript would be shuttled from one publisher to another before being printed, at a substantially reduced size, by the University of Oklahoma press in 1965. 

Nonetheless, the topic of Starrett’s engagement with Chicago’s best-known literary figures was high on his mind during this time. The opportunity to share his observations would have been enticing. So it’s no surprise that he was invited to appear before the Cliff Dwellers on Friday, May 24, 1957. 

According the card, “Vincent Starrett, Cliff Dweller and Dean of Chicago writers, will, as he puts it, ‘ramble through the past fifty years,’ giving us a personal view of Chicago authors and their works.”

It was, no doubt, the kind of talk Starrett loved: anecdotal, connected by a thin line of literary thread, and just long enough to leave the audience satisfied without looking at their watches too often.

Once again, we don’t have the text of his remarks, but we can speculate that they were taken from Born in a Bookshop, his memoir.

Any excuse to pull this well-thumbed volume off the nearby shelf is a good one. I hope you can do the same. 

Enjoy.

*I have in the past rolled my eyes about the extraordinarily intricate debates of Sherlockian chronologists. This is a notice to them that I acknowledge my own dating debate makes some of theirs seem as simple as Dr. Watson’s reasoning process. I get it.