Hedunit

The letter was addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street, London, England; it was postmarked Cleveland, Miss. Wrote 19-year-old Coed Laquita Joyce Bell of Delta State Teachers College: "Dear Mr. Holmes: My English teacher told me something would happen if I wrote you. He refused to tell me what. This aroused my curiosity, so here I sit, feeling rather silly, writing to you! . . ."

At 221B Baker Street something did happen that not even Miss Bell's English teacher had foreseen. The first issue of the London Mystery Magazine, a high-brow whodunit monthly, was published from that address, and 40,000 copies were on sale last week (at 50-c-) on newsstands all over Britain. Soon, London Mystery will invade the U.S. market, to match its wits against Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (circ. 150,000), which now dominates the mystery-magazine field.

Yours Sincerely. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began writing his Sherlock Holmes stories in 1887, he picked 221B Baker Street because there was no such address; the numbers stopped short of 200. But in 1931, an eight-story office building was put up at 220-223 Baker Street by the Abbey National Building Society. Ever since, the London post office has turned over to the company an average of five letters a month addressed to Holmes at 221B, and the company has dutifully answered them.

The man who signed these replies "Yours very sincerely, Sherlock Holmes" was Samuel William Gibson Morton, a top company official. An old Holmes fan himself, Morton sent advice to farmers in Minnesota who were troubled by cattle thieves, to old ladies in Massachusetts who heard strange noises at night, and several times actually helped solve cases from clues supplied in the letters.

From now on, all letters to 221B will "be delivered to 32-year-old Editor Michael Hall of the London Mystery Magazine. An ex-reporter on the Manchester Guardian and a British army veteran, Hall got the idea for his magazine one day when he was strolling along Baker Street. The post office agreed to recognize the mythical 221B as a real address and assign it to the magazine, although Hall and his staff of four have had to set up temporary offices two miles away on Lower Belgrave Street.

Singular Cases. To Editor Hall, it is elementary that intelligent people all over the world are mystery-story fans, and that many serious writers have a secret hankering to try their hands at mystery fiction. In the neat, literate first issue of his magazine, Hall has brought the intelligent readers and writers together.

The New Statesman and Nation's Sagittarius (Olga Katzin Miller) has written a dedication in verse ("Hedunit") to the hawk-nosed man in the deerstalker cap who "started a mania for singular cases, started a craving few addicts restrain, started a saga of amateur aces, whimsical, taciturn, dashing, urbane . . ." Holmes Addict Christopher Morley (see BOOKS), who helped found the Baker Street Irregulars in the U.S., contributed a satire on espionage in Washington and the atom bomb. Oldtime (80) shudder man Algernon Blackwood wrote a story of horror in a child's nursery that was reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw. Said Editor Hall: "We want to produce the Rolls-Royce of detective magazines."

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