Jack Tracy—Page 3

            So, who was Jack Tracy? Well, to begin with, he wasn’t Jack Tracy. He was born on February 13, 1945, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Charles W. and Marjorie A. Horner and was named Jack—not John, apparently, but Jack—Horner. Yep, just like the guy who sat in the corner eating a Christmas pie. He seems to have been an only child.

            Jack Horner first became interested in Sherlock Holmes at the age of thirteen, when he discovered the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes in his school library. He said later that he “read it at white heat. I went to the trouble of assembling a list of untold tales and constructing a floorplan of 221B—both dismally inadequate.” He also purchased his own copy of the collection, but it was stolen while he was in college.

            By 1962 Horner was living in Indiana; according to the Social Security Death Index, his Social Security number was issued in that state that year. He attended Indiana University in Bloomington from 1963 to 1967; by then his mother was living in Frankfort, two counties north of Bloomington. The Rodens speculate in The Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual that she may have separated from her husband, since her name is the only one that appears on her son’s university registration. On the other hand, when the father died some twenty years later, he left his whole estate to the mother; if they had been estranged that long, that would seem an odd thing to do. [Note: I have since learned that the parents were divorced and that Charles Horner almost immediately married a woman with whom he had been having an affair. Also, he left his estate to the second wife, not to Jack’s mother.] Jack Horner and his father didn’t get along, and he may have left the father’s name off the university records. He later claimed to have a B.S. in radio and television; the claim itself is BS, because he left the university in his senior year without a degree and went to work as a film producer for an Indianapolis television station.

            Jack Horner changed his surname to Tracy in 1969. It’s not clear why. At the same time he also adopted the middle initial W., which is how he is listed in the Library of Congress catalogue; like the “S.” in Harry Truman’s name, the “W.” didn’t stand for anything. He doesn’t use the initial on the covers or title pages of his books. I assume that he must have had his name legally changed, rather than just adopting a pseudonym, because the Social Security Death Index lists him as Jack W. Tracy, not as Jack Horner.

            During the summer of 1969 Tracy’s interest in Sherlock Holmes was rekindled when his book club offered William S. Baring-Gould’s The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, published in 1967, for $6.00. He later said, “I ordered it and discovered to my delight and dismay the lunatic world of Sherlockiana. I tracked down the remnants of Indianapolis’ defunct [Baker Street Irregulars scion society, the] Illustrious Clients and subscribed to The Baker Street Journal. This may sound a bit weepy, but for the first time I feel that I’ve become associated with a group to which I really belong.”

            He became a long-distance member of a New York scion, The Priory School, in 1970 by passing their entrance exam with a score of 94 percent. He wrote to the head of the scion, “Your test, I’m bound to say, was a snap. I used no reference books. I don’t own any reference books. All I have is The Annotated Sherlock Holmes and Baring-Gould’s awful biography.  But I do have a tremendous memory for trifles. I call it my ‘Xerox memory’—it’s not ‘photographic,’ but it’s the next best thing. My head forever buzzes with dates, names, details—everything I’ve ever read. It can be a hell of a distraction at times, but in Sherlockiana it’s a definite asset.“ The biography he was referring to is Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: The Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective, published in 1962. I don’t know why he calls it “awful”; maybe it’s because Baring-Gould claims that Holmes had an affair with Irene Adler and that they had a son who inherited Mycroft Holmes’s fat genes and became the American detective Nero Wolfe.

            Tracy quit his television job at the end of May 1971 because, he said, he was tired of having to cover the Indianapolis 500 auto race every year. He moved back to Bloomington and became a telecommunications consultant for the city. In September 1971 he and another man founded a scion called The Unanswered Correspondents (taken from Sherlock Holmes’s practice of impaling his unanswered correspondence on the mantelpiece with a jackknife). In December 1971 he wrote to the great collector of Sherlockiana John BennettShaw: “We have no membership classifications or responsibilities, no dues, no Constitution, and no problems. We have officers and the offices of Coal-Scuttle, Persian Slipper and Jack Knife, but we’re not certain who holds which position . . . to join you need only leave this letter Unanswered, and you remain a member as long as we remember who you are.” (The scion isn’t included in a May 2013 list of active Sherlockian societies around the world put together by Peter Blau.)         

            It was around this time that Tracy came up with the idea for what would become the Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana. He offered the as-yet-unfinished book to the Indiana University Press in September 1971 in a lengthy letter that I’ve already quoted from. In his characteristically immodest way he said that his work would be a vast improvement over Orlando Park’s Sherlock Holmes, Esq. and John H. Watson, M.D.: An Encyclopaedia of Their Affairs, published in 1962, which he described as “very incomplete, inconsistent, and shockingly inaccurate, and it is further marred by personal comments and a tone which apparently attempts to be ‘cute’ or ‘in’ and succeeds only in being obscure and ridiculous, pathetic, or angering, depending upon one’s own temperament. Most importantly, despite its title, it contains no descriptions or explanations of what is entered, and consists entirely of a list of references to the stories in the saga.” (The Park book has been republished with the shorter title of The Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia. The Sherlockian scholar and Baker Street Irregulars historian Jon L. Lel­lenberg, who is also the American representative of the Doyle estate, has pointed out that “Latter-day criti­cism of Orlando Park’s encyclopedia, notably by the not entirely disinterested Jack Tracy, overlooked how much easier it was to compile a truly comprehensive one after William S. Baring-Gould’s An­notated Sherlock Holmes than it had been before then, when Park compiled and published his. We were all very glad to have it for quite a long time.”