Jack Tracy—Page 5

Tracy founded Gaslight Publications in Bloomington in 1979. Its first book was a new edition of his own Conan Doyle and the Latter-Day Saints. He edited Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Associated Hands in 1980 and Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard, Return of Gerard, and Masterworks of Crime & Mystery, all in 1982, but none of them were published by Gaslight. Books put out by Gaslight included The Sherlock Holmes Book of Quotations, edited by Bruce R. Beaman in 1980; “For the Sake of the Trust”: Sherlock Holmes and The Musgrave Ritual, by Edward A. Merrill, in 1982; The Sincerest Form of Flattery: An Historical Survey of Parodies, Pastiches, and Other Imitative Writings of Sherlock Holmes, 1891–1980, by Paul Herbert, in 1983; and The Game Is Afoot: A Travel Guide to the England of Sherlock Holmes, by David L. Hammer, also in 1983. The firm also published the Conan Doyle Centennial Series of editions of Doyle’s non-Sherlock Holmes works, including The Mystery of Cloomber, The Firm of Girdlestone, and A Duet: With an Occasional Chorus (with an afterword by Peter Blau).

            The Game Is Afoot was the first in a series of books about David L. Hammer’s travels with his wife to locations mentioned, either explicitly or in disguised form, in the Sherlock Holmes stories. One of the few discussions of Tracy’s personality I had been able to find online was an interview of Hammer by Gael Stahl on the Web site of the Nashville Scholars of the Three Pipe Problem. Hammer explained how the first book had come about: “every year, we spent part of the year, Audrey and I, going to England. I’d work during the winter evenings to find what I could about where the sites were. It was sort of stupid, in a way, looking for actual sites of a fictional character. But, on the other hand, many of them were there, and they were there because Doyle had gone there. . . . One year, we went to England a couple of times. We were at dinner with some friends. [One of them] was chairman of the board of a British publishing company. . . . He said his editors might be interested [in my travels to the Sherlock Holmes sites]. Why don’t I write something on Sherlock Holmes?

            “I still have what I wrote. It was pretty bad. All I did was give all the conclusions as to where the places were and why they were the ones selected. I thought that to do anything else, that is, to put yourself in it, was a horribly arrogant and unnecessary thing to do.

            “He wrote back, ‘My editors just don’t feel there is enough interest in Sherlock Holmes.’ I accepted that as true. He was a good friend letting me down easily. I’d written a bad book.”

            Here the interviewer interjects, “A book that lacked the famous idiosyncratic, personal Hammer voice.” 

            Hammer goes on, “Somebody put me in touch with John [Bennett] Shaw. . . . And Shaw . . . got me in touch with Jack Tracy, a Sherlockian publisher. Tracy was a lousy publisher. Some say dishonest. My experience with Jack was that he wasn’t dishonest by choice but by necessity. I never got paid for the book he did publish [The Game Is Afoot]. But nobody ever got paid. The only one who came out ahead was Paul Herbert [the author of The Sincerest Form of Flattery], who took a lot of books instead of money and sold them.

            But “Tracy was an excellent editor. Excellent. I remember one of his criticisms was, ‘Your wife [must have] a first name. What is it?’ I figured out that what I had to do was a write a story about how you got there, fill in the background, and the travail, and so forth. That’s what he finally published. [By the way, in that book Hammer identifies the fictional Saxe-Coburg Square in “The Red-Headed League” as Charterhouse Square. He goes on:] Through Tracy, I met someone who became a very good friend of Audrey and me—Michael Harrison. He lived on his social security as there wasn’t much coming in from his books. He probably was the finest Sherlockian scholar I ever met. What we would do is give money through various institutions, which is deductible, with the understanding that they would bring Harrison over to be an artist or writer in residence. . . . At about that time, Tracy had not paid Harrison for a book he’d written—which is probably the most distinguished book in all Sherlockian history: A Study in Surmise [: The Making of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1984]. The book came out at a prominent conference in Dubuque[, Iowa]. Sherlockians came from all over because Harrison was there. Tracy never paid him for that book. He never paid me, but I didn’t live on what I wrote.

            “So I formed a publishing company [in Dubuque] called Gasogene Press, which was as deceptively similar to Gaslight as I could find. My thinking was that if there was an honest press that published people and paid them, then the bad press would disappear.—Well, I was quite wrong. It didn’t work. And, I couldn’t stay mad with Jack Tracy as he was an engaging fellow. . . .

            “Tracy did a beautiful book. No question about that. He was just besieged by penury and the only way he could respond to it was dishonorably.

            “I have a picture of Tracy that someone took at one of the BSI dinners. Tracy is sitting by himself. That suggested to me the title, ‘Tracy and his friends.’ Well, two of the guys said they were going to beat the bejesus out of him; one was a lawyer. Tracy had charged them $80 each for a special edition of Harrison’s book (that was never published).”