The Kids Who Did Holmes’ Dirty Work
This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on August 31, 2006 Sign up now!
by James Bickers, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 8/31/2006
The 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet is a landmark in detective fiction—it was, after all, the world’s introduction to Sherlock Holmes, the greatest of all detectives, and his faithful friend and chronicler John Watson.
Scarlet also contains another debut, one that gets less attention than the residents of 221B Baker Street themselves—it is where we first meet young Wiggins and the Baker Street Irregulars, “half a dozen of the dirtiest and most ragged street Arabs that ever I clapped eyes on,” Watson wrote. Although they are mentioned just a handful of times throughout the “canon,” the Irregulars were a crucial part of Holmes’ deductive strategy. They were his eyes and ears in the underworld, going places where only dirty, unwashed street urchins could go.
Next month, Sherlock Holmes buff Michael Citrin and Scholastic editor Tracy Mack, a husband-and-wife team, will see the publication of their Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars (Orchard Books), the first in a series that shines light on the kids that, at least some of the time, did the great detective’s dirty work.
“Here is a group of children that aided the greatest detective of all time, and yet so little has been shared about them,” Citrin says. “We wanted to remain loyal to Holmes and his world, and at the same time open it up to younger readers without washing away any of the character or color of the canon.”
Citrin has spent his entire life steeped in that canon; his father gave him a copy of the Holmes stories when he was 11, and he said it was “love at first read.” Like most Holmes buffs, he began collecting “Sherlockiana”—so much so that by the time he went to college, with deerstalker and pipes in tow, he had earned the nickname “Holmsey”; friends would later hand-paint “221B” on his dorm room door.
Mack, though, never encountered Sherlock until she met Michael (Citrin recalls her first introduction to his passion, via his collection, the day she came across a pair of handcuffs and wanted to know what they were for). But mysteries were not new to her, since she spent her childhood absorbing Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown, and she took to the Doyle stories with ease. “I loved how what seemed at first like magic was actually completely scientific,” she said, “and available to anyone willing to take the time to painstakingly train her mind to work the way Holmes’s does.”
 The husband-and-wife writing team. |
Then one day, Citrin came home from work excited, suggesting that he had found their topic: the Irregulars. “We reread the two short stories and two novels in which they appear, and we both knew instantly that we had hit upon our subject,” Mack said. “We saw so much potential for new, original stories from the Irregulars’ point of view.”
When the couple began to move on the idea, they were pleased to discover that there were relatively few books about the Irregulars, and most of those were out of print. Citrin said he and Mack talked about the series, and talked through the personalities of the characters, for about four years. “And then one day, it seemed as though they all suddenly emerged fully formed,” he said. “They felt like surrogate children to us.”
In Citrin and Mack’s Victorian London, Wiggins is still the leader of the gang, but he now has a singing voice, and has been made a rat catcher in addition to being an amateur sleuth. Wiggins is the only Irregular named in the canon; to his ranks, the authors have added Ozzie, an intelligent and brooding boy who will, over time, come to impress Holmes himself.
“It was also important to us that the gang be ethically diverse, but only if we could do so authentically to the time and place,” Citrin said. “Research showed us that we could.”
That research involved a lot of reading about late Victorian England, and careful study of photographs from the period. But according to Mack, the biggest inspiration for their Irregulars came from a trip the couple took in 1997 to Mexico, where they met a boy of six or seven named Raul.
“By the third night, Raul and about seven other kids toured us all around the village,” she recalled, “introducing us to various relatives and explaining the symbolism of the paintings on the local church’s ceiling. In spite of their obvious poverty, they were all so beautiful and dynamic and full of life, as well as bonded to one another. It’s the spirit of these kids that we tried to capture and that continues to guide as we write.”
Not every married couple is capable of working on such a project together, but Citrin said in their case it was a great deal of fun, particularly since their “day jobs” are so different (Citrin is an attorney). “As a starting point, this was another level on which to connect,” he said.
The couple, currently expecting their second child, would frequently take driving trips in the evening; Citrin said that while their daughter dozed in the back seat, they sat up front planning out stories and dreaming up characters. Mack took notes, and when the trip was over the two of them would sit down to do the formal writing.
“It was a really fun way to go about this, different from how writing usually occurs—sitting at your desk by yourself, sweating out the details,” he said. “We do that too, but at least we were able to share that struggle while it was going on.”
