Jack Tracy—Page 4

The Indiana University Press turned Tracy down. He continued working on the book, and in 1974 he offered it to McGraw-Hill, Dutton, Doubleday, and The Atlantic Monthly Press. McGraw-Hill rejected it, and Dutton did not respond. But both Doubleday and the Atlantic Monthly Press accepted it. Only then did Tracy learn that it is bad form to submit book proposals to multiple publishers without informing them that one is doing so. He was contrite in informing The Atlantic Monthly Press of his faux pas: “I sent out three identical queries to Atlantic, Dutton, and Doubleday, hoping to cut down on marketing time but never really dreaming that an unknown such as I would even get a positive response from one such prestigious company, let alone two of them! Since it was merely a query, I hope I did not commit any ethical breach; certainly none was intended, and I plead absolutely no experience at this sort of thing. At any rate, Doubleday responded first, so I am committed to them. I do apologize if I have committed an impropriety.”
            Tracy was similarly humble in his dealings with Doubleday, at least at first. But as the next several years went by, and publication of the encyclopedia was repeatedly delayed, the relationship grew increasingly strained. Tracy complained—apparently with some justification—of not having his letters answered or his telephone calls returned by his editor and about not receiving checks for his royalty advances on schedule. The latter complaint is interesting in view of the way he went on to conduct his own publishing business later. He went over the editor’s head and wrote to the president of Doubleday. He retained a lawyer, to whom he wrote that “I suffer from a number of stress-related conditions and have a poor heart as well due to rheumatic fever in childhood. I’m under a doctor’s care for chest pains, difficulty in breathing, and lower back pain, all directly attributable to Doubleday’s refusal to level with me. I’m taking tranquilizers for the first time in my life. If this affair results in any serious or permanent damage to my health, a breach-of-contract suit is only the beginning.” He was particularly incensed when Doubleday sent proofs of the book to Roger Hudson, who was apparently an editor at the John Murray publishing firm in London, for some fact checking by a British native. Hudson wrote back that he had not read the entire book but that on “dipping” into it he had found several errors. Hudson’s letter was forwarded to Tracy, who responded to his editor at Doubleday: “I don’t want to over-react, but I’m more than a little pissed at Roger Hudson’s (who is he, anyway?) remarks about supposed errors in The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana.

            “This Hudson fellow is shooting from the hip. Of seven ‘errors’ he’s missed the mark on six and a half, and his off-hand attitude I find offensive. In a book as complex as mine, there are bound to be some mistakes, but in each case he mentions, I am right and he is wrong. . . .”  One of the supposed errors was in the entry on Abergavenny, which is mentioned in “The Adventure of the Priory School.” Tracy defined it as “a town in the west of England, pop. 7,795.” Hudson pointed out that the town is actually in Wales. Tracy responded, “Abergavenny became part of Wales on April 1, 1974, with the passage of the new local government act, at which time the English county of Monmouthshire was transformed into the Welsh county of Gwent. Before that, since 1535, Monmouth was legally part of England. Its inhabitants are largely Welsh, and it was often claimed to be part of Wales, but there is not an atlas, gazetteer, guidebook, or encyclopaedia published before 1974 which says Abergavenny was in Wales. I checked all this out at great length, because I too found it a little incongruous for a city with such a flagrantly Welsh name to be in England. But it was.”

            Tracy was invited to attend the Baker Street Irregulars dinner that was held in January 1975, but he couldn’t afford to make the trip to New York. He asked if Doubleday would pay his way, but they declined. He was invested in the Baker Street Irregulars with the name “A Case of Identity” in 1976, but he didn’t attend the dinner that year, either. By 1977, according to a letter he wrote to Doubleday, he was no longer working as a telecommunications consultant.

            The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana was finally published in October 1977. Tracy had earned $36,000 in advances on it, which would be equivalent to $139,000 today, and continued to earn royalties on the sales of the book. I don’t know what he did with the money, since, as we’ll see, he died in poverty; he may have invested it in his own publishing business, which he started two years later. When the book came out, John Bennett Shaw wrote to Tracy, “Yesterday late in the afternoon I received my copy of your Encyclopaedia!!!! Excellent. I spent most of last evening going through it—in fact I called Jon Lellenberg’s attention to the fact that it was out and that it was Canonical and well done and valuable. Poor old Dr. Park, his Encyclopaedia no longer of use. Really, my congratulations on a monumental job. I will now have to add to the books I always say to my audiences are cornerstones—De Waal, Tracy and Baring-Gould’s ANNOTATED. Your Investiture [name] should be changed to The Encyclopaedia Britannica!” [“De Waal” refers to Ronald Burt De Waal’s massive World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, published in 1974. Since then it has been expanded to five volumes under the title The Universal Sherlock Holmes and put online at the University of Minnesota Libraries Web site, where it continues to be enlarged.]

            Tracy received the Morley-Montgomery Award from the Baker Street Irregulars for the best article to appear in The Baker Street Journal in 1977: “St. Saviour’s near King’s Cross,” about the church where Mary Sutherland was to have been married in “A Case of Identity” if her fiancé hadn’t turned out to be her stepfather in disguise. He was invited to the 1978 BSI dinner but, once again, said that he couldn’t make it; he asked that his friend Jim Berkey be allowed to attend in his place. Berkey was the coauthor with Tracy of Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson: Sherlock Holmes and the Cocaine Habit, which appeared in 1978. Berkey sent $20 for the ticket; but, mysteriously, it seems that it was Tracy and not Berkey who actually attended, since Tracy has been identified in the photograph taken of the group that year.