SOURCES AND METHODS: A companion volume to the novel Baker Street Irregular Published 2015 by Hazelbaker & Lellenberg, Inc. $20.00 postpaid in the United States, by PayPal to jonlellenberg@gmail.com, or from the publisher at P.O. Box 32181, Santa Fe NM 87594. From Randall Stock’s Best of Sherlock website’s listing of the best Sherlockian non-fiction books of the year: “This companion volume to Lellenberg’s historical espionage novel, Baker Street Irregular, provides a fascinating look into how he researched and wrote that story. It also offers a wealth of detail on American Sherlockians in the 1930s and 1940s, and thus a view into BSI history. Parts of it would be instructive to anyone thinking about writing historical fiction, but its core function is to annotate his novel and so is best read either in conjunction with the novel or shortly after finishing that book. The two work together to make the novel even more interesting.” Foreword I hoped to do this book before now, and I hope some will still be interested in the information in it — both about the Baker Street Irregulars’ history, and their world during the decade and a half the BSI took shape. It explains why Baker Street Irregular was written, and how. “Sources and Methods” is a term in the intelligence community that also took shape in those years, whose formative stages provide part of the novel’s story line. Sources and Methods are critical to collection of raw intelligence and its analysis into useful product to inform policy; and in wartime, strategy and operations. They normally must be kept secret —but not here. I want instead to disclose the sources and methods behind Baker Street Irregular for readers who’d like to know more about the personalities, institutions, and events in it. And for the sake of the historical record, since I spent thirty-five years in the kind of work that Woody Hazelbaker, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, goes to Washington in 1940 to do, in Ch. 12. (One must draw the line somewhere. Some sordid details behind the novel’s composition are stories for which the world is not yet prepared. “We also have our diplomatic secrets,” said Sherlock Holmes.) Some Irregulars in the novel are heroes of mine. But so are many of its other characters, real men and women also, who didn’t spare themselves in the struggle to preserve liberty at a time when democracy was in mortal peril—something Irregulars of the 1930s and ’40s realized as well. I was pleased when M. J. Elliott, reviewing the novel for the Sherlock Holmes Journal, said: “unlike many pieces of historical fiction, the book does not wear the author’s research on its sleeve.” Nonetheless, as this volume will show, a great deal of research did go into it, because I wanted the story to be real, and to tell real stories of those years. Baker Street Irregular is a work of fiction, but every word of it is true. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: “How Long Does It Take to Write One Damn Novel, Anyway?” The Book’s Apparatus New York in the ’30s and ‘40s Chapter 1: Mr. Bird and Mr. Madden Chapter 2: “Artists and Writers” Chapter 3: Christ Cella’s Speakeasy Chapter 4: Café Society Chapter 5: Converse Cloth Chapter 6: A Distant Goddess Chapter 7: Orange Blossom Limited Chapter 8: Into the Abyss Chapter 9: 46W47 Chapter 10: Good Men Must Dare Chapter 11: Harry Hopkins Chapter 12: The Phantom Squadron Chapter 13: Comrade Zimmerman Chapter 14: Cat and Mouse Chapter 15: Cloak and Dagger Chapter 16: Special Branch Chapter 17: Storey’s Gate Chapter 18: Fortitude Chapter 19: Walpurgis Night Chapter 20: Mister In-Between Chapter 21: “Journeys End in Lovers Meeting” Appendix : Edward F. Clark, Jr. ILLUSTRATIONS Preliminary cover sketch by Laurie Fraser Manifold Samuel Gottscho’s New York for the novel’s title page Owney Madden Frenchy DeMange Stanley Walker, Lucius Beebe Christopher Morley Elmer Davis The young Joe Alsop The Men’s Bar, Plaza Hotel El Morocco Basil Davenport Beer Parade Fletcher Pratt Alexander Woollcott Rex Stout Edgar W. Smith Information Please Whitney Shepardson, Francis Miller Herbert Agar The Century Association Elmer Davis at the Office of War Information Carter Clarke and Alfred McCormack Arlington Hall headquarters Aerial view of Arlington Hall Station Pentagon Irregulars George Rance, the Cabinet War Rooms commissionaire The London Controlling Section Colonel Alfred McCormack Meredith Gardner in the cooing dovecote Carter Clarke as a one-star How Long Does It Take to Write One Damn Novel, Anyway? When Bliss Austin died in 1988, prompting concern about the BSI losing its history, I thought to do something about it. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I set out to cover 1930-1960, concluding with Edgar W. Smith’s death, thinking I’d be able to find enough material for a decent 250 pp. book. I had no idea how much I’d actually find once I started looking, or that, a decade later, I’d have done five volumes and some shorter works for over 1500 pages —with the 1950s still to go. The five chronological volumes came out between 1989 and 1999. In the process, my literary interests and Pentagon life collided to give me an idea for an historical novel about the BSI. Not a cozy like others have written since Anthony Boucher broke that ground in 1940. A serious one, about life in the 1930s, the struggle over America’s course as Europe went to war, the war’s clandestine side after we entered, and afterwards the birth of the Cold War in which my own generation was born and grew up. The idea came unbidden, and proceeded to eat my brain until I started researching and writing it. I’d never cared to write fiction, and continued to bring out the fourth and fifth Archival History volumes. But I drew up a time-line for the novel as early as July 1994, and for the next several years was constantly writing it in my head: thinking out plot, choosing historical characters and inventing fictional ones, researching issues, and composing snatches of incident and dialogue in my mind. Finally one day in 1999, with Irregular Crises of the Late ’Forties out, and a bit bored with a wargame in which I was playing at U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., I suddenly started writing. I always overwrite, then go back and take stuff out, editing and re-editing. I sent some early chapters to a few Irregulars, drafts embarrassingly prolix compared to the final version. I didn’t receive much positive feedback, and one was honest enough to tell me to stick to nonfiction. I kept on nevertheless, and a surviving note says I was writing Ch. 16 in June 2000, having written obsessively since March. But industry like that came in spurts, alternating with obsessive editing instead, or just plain neglect. Despite its early shortcomings, I thought there was a genuine story that only required work to bring out. I sent second-draft chapters to Ronald Mansbridge, the novel’s only living character, with lots to say about the 1930s BSI and Irregulars like Christopher Morley, Basil Davenport, and Peter Greig. Ronald’s encouragement kept me writing and cutting and revising, over and over, until I had only three chapters to go. And then, one or two pages into the first of those, September 11th occurred. My special ops colleagues and I were on the Pentagon’s first floor about eighty feet from the impact point. We were all unharmed, but I witnessed other people brought out of the burning building badly injured, horribly burned, or dead. In the days that followed, the Pentagon courtyard was turned into a field morgue, and the end of North Parking was turned into a crime-scene lab where Army graves-registration personnel, medical technicians, FBI agents, and corpse dogs sifted through every cubic inch of debris from the building for evidence and body parts. This went on several months, smelling like an open grave. It was the first thing I saw upon arriving in the morning, and the last thing I saw when I went home at night. I didn’t do any further writing in the bloody-minded mood in which my colleagues and I set to work for the year and more that followed. Three times in my Pentagon years, when great events occurred, I had the good fortune to be exactly where I’d want to be in order to take part in them. This was one of them. 9/11 pushed special operations out of the shadows of U.S. military planning into center-stage, and we became insanely busy. But the unfinished manuscript at home nagged at me. Eventually I resumed periodically editing what I’d already written, and at some point showed it to a fellow Washington BSI, Daniel Stashower, with whom I collaborate on Conan Doyle projects. Dan writes fiction as well as nonfiction, and was enthusiastic about the novel— enough to think it might be of interest beyond the BSI itself. The question was whether the arcane Irregular side of the story was told in a way that interested other readers. He thought it was. The acid-test was someone outside the BSI: Caleb Carr, whom I knew not because of his fiction (e.g. The Alienist) so much as his work as a military historian. When I mentioned the novel to him in June 2003, he asked to see a sample. I sent him Ch. 9 (“46W47”). After he read it, he wanted to see the entire thing. I sent what I’d done, and he more or less demanded that I finish it, and he talked to his high-powered literary agent in New York about representing me. In July ’04, I started writing the three final chapters in Vermont, in the house where the Prologue takes place. I now knew what I wanted to happen in the final chapters; it was a case of willing myself to write them. By the time I returned to Washington, I’d finished the first and all but two pages of the second. Soon I finished it and the third as well. I delivered the manuscript to Caleb’s agent on January 7, 2005, the day of that year’s BSI annual dinner. Several months later, I went back to New York to hear what she thought. She spent an hour with me, a lot of her time for a novice like me, and impressed me with her analytical ability as she dissected the novel and identified things it needed: more about the BSI (I was glad to hear), and about how Woody feels when his marriage goes bad. She asked if I’d had any other novel in mind as a model. While I’d never consciously thought about it before, what popped into my mind was Armageddon, Leon Uris’s epic about the birth of the Cold War, which I’d read multiple times. But then, near the end of the hour, and as if an afterthought, she remarked: “Of course, you need to get rid of the last two chapters.” Get rid of them? I couldn’t believe my ears. Why? They’re when Woody finally understands what really happened in his personal life, and resolves everything! Because, she said, people don’t know about the Cold War stuff in those chapters. What they know about, from countless movies etc., are Nazis. So end the novel at Ch. 19, after more build-up to Hans-Dieter Eckhardt getting it in the neck. But that’s not the whole story, I protested for a tense quarter-hour. Her view, reasonable for a literary agent, was that keeping the novel focused on what readers of World War II thrillers expect greatly increased the chance of a big sale to a publishing house, maybe even a bestseller. Save the last two chapters for the sequel, she told me. There isn’t going to be any sequel, I retorted. The session ended with me saying I’d rather have a 5000-copy edition of my story than a bestseller that wasn’t, and her pointing out that the publishers she’d like to take the novel to aren’t in business to bring out 5000-copy editions. There we left it, as I returned to Washington. I started on other things she wanted, and she continued encouraging me to get rid of those two chapters and make it a “Nazis dunnit” story. A colleague of hers read the manuscript, and she sent me his advice, including “re-framing” the story by re-introducing at intervals the young man interviewing Woody in the Prologue, to create a “thru thread.” (But losing me with an exhortation to “Think Interview with a Vampire.”) And there it was again: “I think the end section on the cold war could be dropped.” I didn’t. I did some work on the novel through the end of the year, but it was now getting close to February 7, 2006, when I’d be retiring from government and leaving Washington. I spent the two weeks after that in snowbound Vermont turning out a revised draft I sent her on the 20th. “Enclosed is as much as I can do with it for now,” I told her; “I haven’t removed the last two chapters, I cannot rpt cannot do that without ripping my heart out, but I’ve added stuff leading up which ties them more closely to the development of the story.” “Right now, I’m exhausted with it, and the Conan Doyle book is pressing,” I concluded. The latter was the one published two years later as Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. It needed to be my first big project after leaving Washington, and it kept Dan Stashower and me busy the rest of 2006 and 2007, in fact into 2008 with its post-publication aftermath. Throughout those next two years, Baker Street Irregular sat on a shelf in her office as I worked on the Conan Doyle book, and she waited for me to come to my senses. I never did, though. [Continued] Chapter 1: Mr. Bird and Mr. Madden pp. 19-34 New York, February to September, 1933 Synopsis: In February 1933, Woody Hazelbaker, a young lawyer in the Wall Street firm of Emery, Bird & Thayer, is headed for unemployment in the firm’s lay-offs as the Depression deepens. To his surprise, the senior partner, Mr. Bird, gives him an uneasy choice: he can not only stay, but win promotion to partner years ahead of the usual time, if he discreetly acts for bootlegger-mobster Owney Madden, who wants to cash out of his illicit empire and retire. After Woody’s initial meeting with Madden and his henchman Frenchy DeMange, he gets started on it, acquiring along the way a first-hand understanding of the New York underworld he has previously been only vaguely aware of. Sources and Methods: Woody is the only Baker Street Irregular in the novel who’s fictional. His Kansas City, Mo. hometown is mine too, but he is not me. My family background and life were quite different. Then I went West, not East, for college, and instead of Law studied International Relations for a career in government. I might have been more like Woody if I’d grown up in Kansas City when he did, during Prohibition. His K.C. was not yet the genteel place it seemed to me in the 1950s. Its long-time machine-boss Tom Pendergast finally went to prison the year before I was born, making a big difference in local corruption and vice— even though in the 1950s “the Factions” (the machine’s remnants) still ran K.C. in cahoots with the Mafia. But this was barely visible to me as a kid. Kansas City’s scofflaw side was far more evident to Woody’s generation. Making him a lawyer, something rare in the 1930s and ’40s BSI, was for something entirely different, though. In World War II I wanted him to become part of a particular U.S. intelligence organization whose chief, a lawyer in civilian life, recruited other lawyers for it almost entirely. (See ch. 16 herein about this.) Once that was decided, it made sense to make Woody Owney Madden’s diffident lawyer early in the novel, a big part of his real-life education, including getting him over some (though maybe not all) of his insecurities from a lower-middle-class Midwestern upbringing as he makes his way through professional life in New York, dealing principally with different kinds of people. While I’m not Woody, it was a jolt when one of the novel’s readers called him a “Mary-Sue character.” This term, I gathered, originated in Star Trek fan fiction, meaning “usually written by a beginning author.” [ok, noted.] “Often the Mary Sue is a self-insert with a few ‘improvements’ (e.g., better body, more popular, etc). The Mary Sue is almost always beautiful, smart, etc. In short, she is the ‘perfect’ girl. The Mary Sue usually falls in love with the author’s favorite character(s) and winds up upstaging all the other characters in the book/series/ universe.” Translated into male terms, that did seem uncomfortably familiar. So I took an online “Is your character a Mary Sue?” test, being Woody as closely as I could, scoring a 24 with these results: “Borderline-Sue (21-35 pts.): Your character is cutting it close, and you may want to work on the details a bit, but you’re well on your way to having a lovely original character. Good work.” And if my own insecurities hadn’t been a factor in the test’s “Your Character and You” section, Woody would have scored a 20: “The Non-Sue: Your character is a well-developed balanced person, and most certainly not a Mary Sue. Con-gratulations!” I’m not sure Woody’s that “balanced” as a person, and nobody describes me that way either, but I take what I can get. A screenwriter friend jocularly remarked that I needed to start thinking about what to say when Hollywood asked who I saw playing Woody in the movie. I told him I did sometimes see Timothy Hutton as he’d been playing Archie Goodwin in the Nero Wolfe television series on Arts & Entertainment network at the time. There was a silence at the other end, and then, explosively: “Timothy Hutton stole the best girlfriend I ever had!” Ok, he’s out of the movie. But he’s still in my mind’s eye as Woody, in the opening and closing scenes of The Golden Spiders especially. Woody sees movies incessantly, and admits that he gets too many of his ideas about life from them. (Especially from screwball comedies. We’re alike in that way, and share a lot of our tastes in movies.) He saw Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar when it came out in 1931, but his reference to King Kong must have been based on previews, because his remark comes in February ’33 and the movie’s New York premiere wasn’t until March 7th. Unnamed in Ch. 1, but contributing a reference by way of tribute, is The Blue Dahlia starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, for which Raymond Chandler received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, 1946. The reference is to the “campaign table with bottles and glasses” in Madden’s apartment (p. 28). I noticed one in the gangster’s apartment in The Blue Dahlia, the first time I watched it eons ago, and it’s always stuck in my mind. Some readers have asked why Woody never goes by his Christian name Kenneth. I don’t know. There are some matters he won’t discuss with me. People Mr. Bird: pp. 20-24. Mr. Bird is based on Edward F. Clark, Jr. (“The Matter of the French Government,” BSI) as I knew him in his late years. (Ed was recognized as Mr. Bird’s model by the Hon. Albert M. Rosenblatt, BSI.) Born in 1907, Ed was Harvard Law himself from Woody’s era, and a Wall Street lawyer I got to know well in the BSI and The Five Orange Pips. His son Andrew’s moving talk about him, at the Pips dinner following Ed’s death in 1996, began: “My father was born by gaslight when Theodore Roosevelt was President,” and is an appendix in this book. Ed also appears as himself later on in the novel, so there will be more to say about another role he played in history. Ed was one of the princes of the realm in the BSI I entered in 1973; there are few like him left in it, and I don’t deceive myself that I’m one of them. He was an exemplar of a bygone era, and it was a privilege and delight to know him. Owney Madden: pp. 26-28, passim. Not your commonplace gangster. I have trouble not seeing Bob Hoskins as him, thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 movie The Cotton Club. But Baker Street Irregular’s Madden is based primarily on the chapter about him in The Night Club Era (1933) by Herald Tribune city editor Stanley Walker (a character in the novel himself), who knew Madden in person; and secondarily on Graham Nown’s 1980 book The English Godfather (though I doubt the very Irish Madden, despite having been born in Leeds, would have cared to be called an Englishman). His obituary is in the April 24, 1965, New York Times. George DeMange: pp. 28, 32. In The Cotton Club Frenchy DeMange was played memorably by Fred Gwynne, but as endearing as that was, it’s less in my mind than Bob Hoskins’ Madden. Most of my depiction of Frenchy comes from the sources above for Madden. Mrs. Griffith, the Grim Reaper: p. 20, Mr. Bird’s secretary. Another K.C. touch: I was terrified (unnecessarily) of my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Thelma Griffith, may she rest in peace. Places and Things Emery Bird Thayer: p. 19. Woody’s law firm in the heart of Wall Street’s legal mills, and its routine, are based on Louis Auchincloss’s stories of that era in Powers of Attorney (1963), and Ed Clark’s history of his own firm: A Brief History of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, Including Some Whimsical Tales About the Firm and Its People (1988). But the name is a Kansas City in-joke: Emery Bird Thayer was a genteel department store for ladies there, from the Civil War until 1968. It was a fixture in town when I was growing up, with its Country Club Plaza branch just up the block from my mother’s business. My schoolmate John Stapleton Altman, co-founder of The Great Alkali Plainsmen of Greater Kansas City in 1963, blew me a raspberry by email about the name. But to all from outside Kansas City, it sounds like a law firm. Down Town Association: p. 20; founded 1860, and residing at its 60 Pine Street clubhouse since 1887. You wouldn’t be surprised to find C. Aubrey Smith dozing in an armchair there. It’s only referred to, and I wish a scene could have been set there, after seeing it when Thomas Kavaler Esq., from a firm just down the street, took me to lunch there so we could talk about Wall Street law firms then and now. Owney’s apartment hotel: pp. 24-25; 440 West 34th Street, halfway between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Hell’s Kitchen; still there, last time I looked. Amusingly, Nero Wolfe’s house was in the next street up. While Woody in his comings and goings wouldn’t have run into him on the sidewalk, I imagine he bumped into Archie Goodwin more than once. They seem like kinsprits to me. “the father of a future President”: p. 30; the vile Joseph P. Kennedy. “the Coasties had radio gear of their own”: p. 31; Listening to the Rumrunners by David P. Mowry, Center for Cryptologic History, U.S. National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Md. (n.d.) “‘you think that’s funny, do you?’ I stopped laughing fast.”: p. 33, Owney Madden to Woody. Inspired by a passage in Rex Stout’s Before I Die, when a gangster named Dazy Perrit reacts to a flippant remark of Archie Goodwin’s: “That’s funny, is it?” Archie brakes fast: “The words weren’t much, but I admit that for the first time his tone hit me in the spine. It put him down on a lower level, and at the same time brought him a lot closer and a lot meaner. . . . It was the voice of the killer.” Same with Owney Madden, something Woody’d begun to forget. In 1933 Madden may have been the Second Most Dangerous Man in New York. Maybe even the First. On the Back Cover: A Soundtrack for the Novel Opening theme: Long Ago (and Far Away) – Jo Stafford, 1944. Ch. 1: Button Up Your Overcoat – Helen Kane, 1929. Ch. 2: Cotton Club Stomp, Ring Dem Bells, Mood Indigo – Duke Ellington, 1930s. Ch. 3: Minnie the Moocher – Cab Calloway, 1933. Ch. 4: Sophisticated Lady – Duke Ellington, 1933. Ch. 6: I Can’t Get Started – Bunny Berigan, 1937. Ch. 7: Down in the Depths (On the Ninetieth Floor) – Ethel Merman, 1936. Ch. 7: Sing Sing Sing – Benny Goodman, 1937. Ch. 7: Moonglow – Benny Goodman Quartet, 1936. Ch. 10: American Patrol – Glenn Miller, 1942. Ch. 14: Moonlight Serenade – Glenn Miller, 1939. Ch. 14: Troubled – Benny Goodman with Bunny Berigan, 1935. Ch. 14: Black Coffee – Sarah Vaughan, 1949. Ch. 14: Any Old Time – Artie Shaw with Billie Holliday, 1938. Ch. 18: Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer – Anne Shelton, 1943. Ch. 18: Where or When? – Benny Goodman Trio, 1937. Ch. 19: Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans – Noel Coward, 1943. Ch. 20: Accentuate the Positive – Johnny Mercer, 1944.   Ch. 21: Illusions – Marlene Dietrich, 1948. Closing theme: I’ll Be Seeing You – Jo Stafford, 1943. Two Reviews and a Reader Comment. Baker Street Irregular is a fascinating portrait of the BSI in its early years, a revelatory picture of America at a crucial time in world history, and a riveting account of intelligence work in World War II. It’s also an important novel. In The District Messenger I said, “Fact and fiction sit so easily together that it’s often hard to tell which is which. Real people, including those early Irregulars, come vividly and credibly to life. And through the sometimes extraordinary experiences of one man, Mr. Lellenberg helps us to understand why things in America were as they were. Baker Street Irregular is an ambitious novel and a very considerable achievement.” This new volume, unexpectedly but appropriately, forms part of the BSI Archival History Series. If you’ve read Baker Street Irregular you’ll find that the facts behind it add depth to your appreciation. If you haven’t, I hope it will inspire you to acquire a copy. Like the novel, Sources and Methods follows Lord Reith’s policy for the BBC: it informs, it educates, it entertains. Capital! — Roger Johnson, Sherlock Holmes Journal, Summer 2015. In 2010, the Mycroft & Moran imprint of Arkham House published an outstanding historical espionage novel by eminent Sherlockian and retired Pentagon special operations official Jon Lellenberg. At the time, a companion volume elaborating on its sources and methods was promised, and that book is finally here as part of the author’s BSI (Baker Street Irregulars) Archival History Series. Any browser interested in the history of American Sherlockians (including such well-known figures as Rex Stout, Christopher Morley, and Elmer Davis), or in a realistic view of espionage from pre-World War II through the Cold War, will find much of interest here and be prodded to seek out the parent novel. Lellenberg reports that an agent who represented the novel for a time thought it could have sold to a major publisher and become a bestseller if the author would have dropped the final two postwar chapters, which would have been a bad decision artistically if not commercially. — Jon L. Breen, Mystery Scene, Spring 2015. From Susan Rice, ASH, BSI, March 26, 2015: If I were to describe vividly my reaction to reading Baker Street Irregular side by side with your volume of explanation, you would accuse me of gushing. It was a thoroughly engrossing experience, and now I want other authors to supply me with a side volume for my favorite books, though many of them are dead. It was something like being inside the novel and inside your head at the same time. First of all, you will be amused and proud to learn it was difficult to maintain my method of alternating chapter and notes. I have read the novel twice already, but several times in this reading I noticed I was in the second or even third chapter before I returned to the notes -- your well known plot still pulled me insistently along. This time, perhaps because I was reading with intent, I noticed how well you delineated among the Irregulars in the tone and rhythm of their speech. You had hinted that there were many facts among the fiction, but I was still surprised by the extent of the truth of the story. Most of your men were real, even the bit players. I was also impressed by the extent you used real events from the OWI and two types of cryptanalysis, sliding Woody into them neatly. As much as that, I liked reading about the reasons that emerged for some of your choices -- it all made the novel much richer.

SOURCES AND METHODS:

A companion volume to the novel Baker Street Irregular

Published 2015 by Hazelbaker & Lellenberg, Inc.

$20.00 postpaid in the United States,

by PayPal to jonlellenberg@gmail.com,

or from the publisher at

P.O. Box 32181, Santa Fe NM 87594.

From Randall Stock’s Best of Sherlock website’s listing of

the best Sherlockian non-fiction books of the year:

“This companion volume to Lellenberg’s historical espionage novel, Baker Street Irregular, provides a fascinating look into how he researched and wrote that story. It also offers a wealth of detail on American Sherlockians in the 1930s and 1940s, and thus a view into BSI history. Parts of it would be instructive to anyone thinking about writing historical fiction, but its core function is to annotate his novel and so is best read either in conjunction with the novel or shortly after finishing that book. The two work together to make the novel even more interesting.”

Foreword

I hoped to do this book before now, and I hope some will still be interested in the information in it — both about the Baker Street Irregulars’ history, and their world during the decade and a half the BSI took shape. It explains why Baker Street Irregular was written, and how. “Sources and Methods” is a term in the intelligence community that also took shape in those years, whose formative stages provide part of the novel’s story line. Sources and Methods are critical to collection of raw intelligence and its analysis into useful product to inform policy; and in wartime, strategy and operations. They normally must be kept secret —but not here. I want instead to disclose the sources and methods behind Baker Street Irregular for readers who’d like to know more about the personalities, institutions, and events in it. And for the sake of the historical record, since I spent thirty-five years in the kind of work that Woody Hazelbaker, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, goes to Washington in 1940 to do, in Ch. 12.

(One must draw the line somewhere. Some sordid details behind the novel’s composition are stories for which the world is not yet prepared. “We also have our diplomatic secrets,” said Sherlock Holmes.)

Some Irregulars in the novel are heroes of mine. But so are many of its other characters, real men and women also, who didn’t spare themselves in the struggle to preserve liberty at a time when democracy was in mortal peril—something Irregulars of the 1930s and ’40s realized as well. I was pleased when M. J. Elliott, reviewing the novel for the Sherlock Holmes Journal, said: “unlike many pieces of historical fiction, the book does not wear the author’s research on its sleeve.” Nonetheless, as this volume will show, a great deal of research did go into it, because I wanted the story to be real, and to tell real stories of those years. Baker Street Irregular is a work of fiction, but every word of it is true.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION:

“How Long Does It Take to Write One Damn Novel, Anyway?”

The Book’s Apparatus

New York in the ’30s and ‘40s

Chapter 1: Mr. Bird and Mr. Madden

Chapter 2: “Artists and Writers”

Chapter 3: Christ Cella’s Speakeasy

Chapter 4: Café Society

Chapter 5: Converse Cloth

Chapter 6: A Distant Goddess

Chapter 7: Orange Blossom Limited

Chapter 8: Into the Abyss

Chapter 9: 46W47

Chapter 10: Good Men Must Dare

Chapter 11: Harry Hopkins

Chapter 12: The Phantom Squadron

Chapter 13: Comrade Zimmerman

Chapter 14: Cat and Mouse

Chapter 15: Cloak and Dagger

Chapter 16: Special Branch

Chapter 17: Storey’s Gate

Chapter 18: Fortitude

Chapter 19: Walpurgis Night

Chapter 20: Mister In-Between

Chapter 21: “Journeys End in Lovers Meeting”

Appendix : Edward F. Clark, Jr.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Preliminary cover sketch by Laurie Fraser Manifold

Samuel Gottscho’s New York for the novel’s title page

Owney Madden

Frenchy DeMange

Stanley Walker, Lucius Beebe

Christopher Morley

Elmer Davis

The young Joe Alsop

The Men’s Bar, Plaza Hotel

El Morocco

Basil Davenport

Beer Parade

Fletcher Pratt

Alexander Woollcott

Rex Stout

Edgar W. Smith

Information Please

Whitney Shepardson, Francis Miller

Herbert Agar

The Century Association

Elmer Davis at the Office of War Information

Carter Clarke and Alfred McCormack

Arlington Hall headquarters

Aerial view of Arlington Hall Station

Pentagon Irregulars

George Rance, the Cabinet War Rooms commissionaire

The London Controlling Section

Colonel Alfred McCormack

Meredith Gardner in the cooing dovecote

Carter Clarke as a one-star

How Long Does It Take to Write One Damn Novel, Anyway?

When Bliss Austin died in 1988, prompting concern about the BSI losing its history, I thought to do something about it. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I set out to cover 1930-1960, concluding with Edgar W. Smith’s death, thinking I’d be able to find enough material for a decent 250 pp. book. I had no idea how much I’d actually find once I started looking, or that, a decade later, I’d have done five volumes and some shorter works for over 1500 pages —with the 1950s still to go.

The five chronological volumes came out between 1989 and 1999. In the process, my literary interests and Pentagon life collided to give me an idea for an historical novel about the BSI. Not a cozy like others have written since Anthony Boucher broke that ground in 1940. A serious one, about life in the 1930s, the struggle over America’s course as Europe went to war, the war’s clandestine side after we entered, and afterwards the birth of the Cold War in which my own generation was born and grew up.

The idea came unbidden, and proceeded to eat my brain until I started researching and writing it. I’d never cared to write fiction, and continued to bring out the fourth and fifth Archival History volumes. But I drew up a time-line for the novel as early as July 1994, and for the next several years was constantly writing it in my head: thinking out plot, choosing historical characters and inventing fictional ones, researching issues, and composing snatches of incident and dialogue in my mind. Finally one day in 1999, with Irregular Crises of the Late ’Forties out, and a bit bored with a wargame in which I was playing at U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., I suddenly started writing.

I always overwrite, then go back and take stuff out, editing and re-editing. I sent some early chapters to a few Irregulars, drafts embarrassingly prolix compared to the final version. I didn’t receive much positive feedback, and one was honest enough to tell me to stick to nonfiction. I kept on nevertheless, and a surviving note says I was writing Ch. 16 in June 2000, having written obsessively since March. But industry like that came in spurts, alternating with obsessive editing instead, or just plain neglect.

Despite its early shortcomings, I thought there was a genuine story that only required work to bring out. I sent second-draft chapters to Ronald Mansbridge, the novel’s only living character, with lots to say about the 1930s BSI and Irregulars like Christopher Morley, Basil Davenport, and Peter Greig. Ronald’s encouragement kept me writing and cutting and revising, over and over, until I had only three chapters to go. And then, one or two pages into the first of those, September 11th occurred.

My special ops colleagues and I were on the Pentagon’s first floor about eighty feet from the impact point. We were all unharmed, but I witnessed other people brought out of the burning building badly injured, horribly burned, or dead. In the days that followed, the Pentagon courtyard was turned into a field morgue, and the end of North Parking was turned into a crime-scene lab where Army graves-registration personnel, medical technicians, FBI agents, and corpse dogs sifted through every cubic inch of debris from the building for evidence and body parts. This went on several months, smelling like an open grave. It was the first thing I saw upon arriving in the morning, and the last thing I saw when I went home at night.

I didn’t do any further writing in the bloody-minded mood in which my colleagues and I set to work for the year and more that followed. Three times in my Pentagon years, when great events occurred, I had the good fortune to be exactly where I’d want to be in order to take part in them. This was one of them. 9/11 pushed special operations out of the shadows of U.S. military planning into center-stage, and we became insanely busy. But the unfinished manuscript at home nagged at me. Eventually I resumed periodically editing what I’d already written, and at some point showed it to a fellow Washington BSI, Daniel Stashower, with whom I collaborate on Conan Doyle projects.

Dan writes fiction as well as nonfiction, and was enthusiastic about the novel— enough to think it might be of interest beyond the BSI itself. The question was whether the arcane Irregular side of the story was told in a way that interested other readers. He thought it was.

The acid-test was someone outside the BSI: Caleb Carr, whom I knew not because of his fiction (e.g. The Alienist) so much as his work as a military historian. When I mentioned the novel to him in June 2003, he asked to see a sample. I sent him Ch. 9 (“46W47”). After he read it, he wanted to see the entire thing. I sent what I’d done, and he more or less demanded that I finish it, and he talked to his high-powered literary agent in New York about representing me.

In July ’04, I started writing the three final chapters in Vermont, in the house where the Prologue takes place. I now knew what I wanted to happen in the final chapters; it was a case of willing myself to write them. By the time I returned to Washington, I’d finished the first and all but two pages of the second. Soon I finished it and the third as well.

I delivered the manuscript to Caleb’s agent on January 7, 2005, the day of that year’s BSI annual dinner. Several months later, I went back to New York to hear what she thought. She spent an hour with me, a lot of her time for a novice like me, and impressed me with her analytical ability as she dissected the novel and identified things it needed: more about the BSI (I was glad to hear), and about how Woody feels when his marriage goes bad. She asked if I’d had any other novel in mind as a model. While I’d never consciously thought about it before, what popped into my mind was Armageddon, Leon Uris’s epic about the birth of the Cold War, which I’d read multiple times.

But then, near the end of the hour, and as if an afterthought, she remarked: “Of course, you need to get rid of the last two chapters.” Get rid of them? I couldn’t believe my ears. Why? They’re when Woody finally understands what really happened in his personal life, and resolves everything!

Because, she said, people don’t know about the Cold War stuff in those chapters. What they know about, from countless movies etc., are Nazis. So end the novel at Ch. 19, after more build-up to Hans-Dieter Eckhardt getting it in the neck. But that’s not the whole story, I protested for a tense quarter-hour. Her view, reasonable for a literary agent, was that keeping the novel focused on what readers of World War II thrillers expect greatly increased the chance of a big sale to a publishing house, maybe even a bestseller. Save the last two chapters for the sequel, she told me. There isn’t going to be any sequel, I retorted.

The session ended with me saying I’d rather have a 5000-copy edition of my story than a bestseller that wasn’t, and her pointing out that the publishers she’d like to take the novel to aren’t in business to bring out 5000-copy editions. There we left it, as I returned to Washington. I started on other things she wanted, and she continued encouraging me to get rid of those two chapters and make it a “Nazis dunnit” story. A colleague of hers read the manuscript, and she sent me his advice, including “re-framing” the story by re-introducing at intervals the young man interviewing Woody in the Prologue, to create a “thru thread.” (But losing me with an exhortation to “Think Interview with a Vampire.”) And there it was again: “I think the end section on the cold war could be dropped.”

I didn’t. I did some work on the novel through the end of the year, but it was now getting close to February 7, 2006, when I’d be retiring from government and leaving Washington. I spent the two weeks after that in snowbound Vermont turning out a revised draft I sent her on the 20th. “Enclosed is as much as I can do with it for now,” I told her; “I haven’t removed the last two chapters, I cannot rpt cannot do that without ripping my heart out, but I’ve added stuff leading up which ties them more closely to the development of the story.”

“Right now, I’m exhausted with it, and the Conan Doyle book is pressing,” I concluded. The latter was the one published two years later as Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. It needed to be my first big project after leaving Washington, and it kept Dan Stashower and me busy the rest of 2006 and 2007, in fact into 2008 with its post-publication aftermath.

Throughout those next two years, Baker Street Irregular sat on a shelf in her office as I worked on the Conan Doyle book, and she waited for me to come to my senses.

I never did, though.

[Continued]

Chapter 1: Mr. Bird and Mr. Madden

pp. 19-34

New York, February to September, 1933

Synopsis: In February 1933, Woody Hazelbaker, a young lawyer in the Wall Street firm of Emery, Bird & Thayer, is headed for unemployment in the firm’s lay-offs as the Depression deepens. To his surprise, the senior partner, Mr. Bird, gives him an uneasy choice: he can not only stay, but win promotion to partner years ahead of the usual time, if he discreetly acts for bootlegger-mobster Owney Madden, who wants to cash out of his illicit empire and retire. After Woody’s initial meeting with Madden and his henchman Frenchy DeMange, he gets started on it, acquiring along the way a first-hand understanding of the New York underworld he has previously been only vaguely aware of.

Sources and Methods: Woody is the only Baker Street Irregular in the novel who’s fictional. His Kansas City, Mo. hometown is mine too, but he is not me. My family background and life were quite different. Then I went West, not East, for college, and instead of Law studied International Relations for a career in government.

I might have been more like Woody if I’d grown up in Kansas City when he did, during Prohibition. His K.C. was not yet the genteel place it seemed to me in the 1950s. Its long-time machine-boss Tom Pendergast finally went to prison the year before I was born, making a big difference in local corruption and vice— even though in the 1950s “the Factions” (the machine’s remnants) still ran K.C. in cahoots with the Mafia. But this was barely visible to me as a kid. Kansas City’s scofflaw side was far more evident to Woody’s generation.

Making him a lawyer, something rare in the 1930s and ’40s BSI, was for something entirely different, though. In World War II I wanted him to become part of a particular U.S. intelligence organization whose chief, a lawyer in civilian life, recruited other lawyers for it almost entirely. (See ch. 16 herein about this.) Once that was decided, it made sense to make Woody Owney Madden’s diffident lawyer early in the novel, a big part of his real-life education, including getting him over some (though maybe not all) of his insecurities from a lower-middle-class Midwestern upbringing as he makes his way through professional life in New York, dealing principally with different kinds of people.

While I’m not Woody, it was a jolt when one of the novel’s readers called him a “Mary-Sue character.” This term, I gathered, originated in Star Trek fan fiction, meaning “usually written by a beginning author.” [ok, noted.] “Often the Mary Sue is a self-insert with a few ‘improvements’ (e.g., better body, more popular, etc). The Mary Sue is almost always beautiful, smart, etc. In short, she is the ‘perfect’ girl. The Mary Sue usually falls in love with the author’s favorite character(s) and winds up upstaging all the other characters in the book/series/ universe.”

Translated into male terms, that did seem uncomfortably familiar. So I took an online “Is your character a Mary Sue?” test, being Woody as closely as I could, scoring a 24 with these results: “Borderline-Sue (21-35 pts.): Your character is cutting it close, and you may want to work on the details a bit, but you’re well on your way to having a lovely original character. Good work.” And if my own insecurities hadn’t been a factor in the test’s “Your Character and You” section, Woody would have scored a 20: “The Non-Sue: Your character is a well-developed balanced person, and most certainly not a Mary Sue. Con-gratulations!” I’m not sure Woody’s that “balanced” as a person, and nobody describes me that way either, but I take what I can get.

A screenwriter friend jocularly remarked that I needed to start thinking about what to say when Hollywood asked who I saw playing Woody in the movie. I told him I did sometimes see Timothy Hutton as he’d been playing Archie Goodwin in the Nero Wolfe television series on Arts & Entertainment network at the time. There was a silence at the other end, and then, explosively: “Timothy Hutton stole the best girlfriend I ever had!” Ok, he’s out of the movie. But he’s still in my mind’s eye as Woody, in the opening and closing scenes of The Golden Spiders especially.

Woody sees movies incessantly, and admits that he gets too many of his ideas about life from them. (Especially from screwball comedies. We’re alike in that way, and share a lot of our tastes in movies.) He saw Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar when it came out in 1931, but his reference to King Kong must have been based on previews, because his remark comes in February ’33 and the movie’s New York premiere wasn’t until March 7th. Unnamed in Ch. 1, but contributing a reference by way of tribute, is The Blue Dahlia starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, for which Raymond Chandler received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, 1946. The reference is to the “campaign table with bottles and glasses” in Madden’s apartment (p. 28). I noticed one in the gangster’s apartment in The Blue Dahlia, the first time I watched it eons ago, and it’s always stuck in my mind.

Some readers have asked why Woody never goes by his Christian name Kenneth. I don’t know. There are some matters he won’t discuss with me.

People

Mr. Bird: pp. 20-24. Mr. Bird is based on Edward F. Clark, Jr. (“The Matter of the French Government,” BSI) as I knew him in his late years. (Ed was recognized as Mr. Bird’s model by the Hon. Albert M. Rosenblatt, BSI.) Born in 1907, Ed was Harvard Law himself from Woody’s era, and a Wall Street lawyer I got to know well in the BSI and The Five Orange Pips. His son Andrew’s moving talk about him, at the Pips dinner following Ed’s death in 1996, began: “My father was born by gaslight when Theodore Roosevelt was President,” and is an appendix in this book. Ed also appears as himself later on in the novel, so there will be more to say about another role he played in history. Ed was one of the princes of the realm in the BSI I entered in 1973; there are few like him left in it, and I don’t deceive myself that I’m one of them. He was an exemplar of a bygone era, and it was a privilege and delight to know him.

Owney Madden: pp. 26-28, passim. Not your commonplace gangster. I have trouble not seeing Bob Hoskins as him, thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 movie The Cotton Club. But Baker Street Irregular’s Madden is based primarily on the

chapter about him in The Night Club Era (1933) by Herald Tribune city editor Stanley Walker (a character in the novel himself), who knew Madden in person; and secondarily on Graham Nown’s 1980 book The English Godfather (though I doubt the very Irish Madden, despite having been born in Leeds, would have cared to be called an Englishman). His obituary is in the April 24, 1965, New York Times.

George DeMange: pp. 28, 32. In The Cotton Club Frenchy DeMange was played

memorably by Fred Gwynne, but as endearing as that was, it’s less in my mind than Bob Hoskins’ Madden. Most of my depiction of Frenchy comes from the sources above for Madden.

Mrs. Griffith, the Grim Reaper: p. 20, Mr. Bird’s secretary. Another K.C. touch: I was terrified (unnecessarily) of my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Thelma Griffith, may she rest in peace.

Places and Things

Emery Bird Thayer: p. 19. Woody’s law firm in the heart of Wall Street’s legal mills, and its routine, are based on Louis Auchincloss’s stories of that era in Powers of Attorney (1963), and Ed Clark’s history of his own firm: A Brief History of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, Including Some Whimsical Tales About the Firm and Its People (1988). But the name is a Kansas City in-joke: Emery Bird Thayer was a genteel department store for ladies there, from the Civil War until 1968. It was a fixture in town when I was growing up, with its Country Club Plaza branch just up the block from my mother’s business. My schoolmate John Stapleton Altman, co-founder of The Great Alkali Plainsmen of Greater Kansas City in 1963, blew me a raspberry by email about the name. But to all from outside Kansas City, it sounds like a law firm.

Down Town Association: p. 20; founded 1860, and residing at its 60 Pine Street clubhouse since 1887. You wouldn’t be surprised to find C. Aubrey Smith dozing in an armchair there. It’s only referred to, and I wish a scene could have been set there, after seeing it when Thomas Kavaler Esq., from a firm just down the street, took me to lunch there so we could talk about Wall Street law firms then and now.

Owney’s apartment hotel: pp. 24-25; 440 West 34th Street, halfway between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Hell’s Kitchen; still there, last time I looked. Amusingly, Nero Wolfe’s house was in the next street up. While Woody in his comings and goings wouldn’t have run into him on the sidewalk, I imagine he bumped into Archie Goodwin more than once. They seem like kinsprits to me.

“the father of a future President”: p. 30; the vile Joseph P. Kennedy.

“the Coasties had radio gear of their own”: p. 31; Listening to the Rumrunners by David P. Mowry, Center for Cryptologic History, U.S. National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Md. (n.d.)

“‘you think that’s funny, do you?’ I stopped laughing fast.”: p. 33, Owney Madden to Woody. Inspired by a passage in Rex Stout’s Before I Die, when a gangster named Dazy Perrit reacts to a flippant remark of Archie Goodwin’s: “That’s funny, is it?” Archie brakes fast: “The words weren’t much, but I admit that for the first time his tone hit me in the spine. It put him down on a lower level, and at the same time brought him a lot closer and a lot meaner. . . . It was the voice of the killer.” Same with Owney Madden, something Woody’d begun to forget. In 1933 Madden may have been the Second Most Dangerous Man in New York. Maybe even the First.

On the Back Cover:

A Soundtrack for the Novel

Opening theme: Long Ago (and Far Away) – Jo Stafford, 1944.

Ch. 1: Button Up Your Overcoat – Helen Kane, 1929.

Ch. 2: Cotton Club Stomp, Ring Dem Bells, Mood Indigo – Duke Ellington, 1930s.

Ch. 3: Minnie the Moocher – Cab Calloway, 1933.

Ch. 4: Sophisticated Lady – Duke Ellington, 1933.

Ch. 6: I Can’t Get Started – Bunny Berigan, 1937.

Ch. 7: Down in the Depths (On the Ninetieth Floor) – Ethel Merman, 1936.

Ch. 7: Sing Sing Sing – Benny Goodman, 1937.

Ch. 7: Moonglow – Benny Goodman Quartet, 1936.

Ch. 10: American Patrol – Glenn Miller, 1942.

Ch. 14: Moonlight Serenade – Glenn Miller, 1939.

Ch. 14: Troubled – Benny Goodman with Bunny Berigan, 1935.

Ch. 14: Black Coffee – Sarah Vaughan, 1949.

Ch. 14: Any Old Time – Artie Shaw with Billie Holliday, 1938.

Ch. 18: Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer – Anne Shelton, 1943.

Ch. 18: Where or When? – Benny Goodman Trio, 1937.

Ch. 19: Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans – Noel Coward, 1943.

Ch. 20: Accentuate the Positive – Johnny Mercer, 1944.

Ch. 21: Illusions – Marlene Dietrich, 1948.

Closing theme: I’ll Be Seeing You – Jo Stafford, 1943.

Two Reviews and a Reader Comment.

Baker Street Irregular is a fascinating portrait of the BSI in its early years, a revelatory picture of America at a crucial time in world history, and a riveting account of intelligence work in World War II. It’s also an important novel. In The District Messenger I said, “Fact and fiction sit so easily together that it’s often hard to tell which is which. Real people, including those early Irregulars, come vividly and credibly to life. And through the sometimes extraordinary experiences of one man, Mr. Lellenberg helps us to understand why things in America were as they were. Baker Street Irregular is an ambitious novel and a very considerable achievement.” This new volume, unexpectedly but appropriately, forms part of the BSI Archival History Series. If you’ve read Baker Street Irregular you’ll find that the facts behind it add depth to your appreciation. If you haven’t, I hope it will inspire you to acquire a copy. Like the novel, Sources and Methods follows Lord Reith’s policy for the BBC: it informs, it educates, it entertains. Capital!

— Roger Johnson, Sherlock Holmes Journal, Summer 2015.

In 2010, the Mycroft & Moran imprint of Arkham House published an outstanding historical espionage novel by eminent Sherlockian and retired Pentagon special operations official Jon Lellenberg. At the time, a companion volume elaborating on its sources and methods was promised, and that book is finally here as part of the author’s BSI (Baker Street Irregulars) Archival History Series. Any browser interested in the history of American Sherlockians (including such well-known figures as Rex Stout, Christopher Morley, and Elmer Davis), or in a realistic view of espionage from pre-World War II through the Cold War, will find much of interest here and be prodded to seek out the parent novel. Lellenberg reports that an agent who represented the novel for a time thought it could have sold to a major publisher and become a bestseller if the author would have dropped the final two postwar chapters, which would have been a bad decision artistically if not commercially.

— Jon L. Breen, Mystery Scene, Spring 2015.

From Susan Rice, ASH, BSI, March 26, 2015:

If I were to describe vividly my reaction to reading Baker Street Irregular side by side with your volume of explanation, you would accuse me of gushing. It was a thoroughly engrossing experience, and now I want other authors to supply me with a side volume for my favorite books, though many of them are dead. It was something like being inside the novel and inside your head at the same time.

First of all, you will be amused and proud to learn it was difficult to maintain my method of alternating chapter and notes. I have read the novel twice already, but several times in this reading I noticed I was in the second or even third chapter before I returned to the notes -- your well known plot still pulled me insistently along. This time, perhaps because I was reading with intent, I noticed how well you delineated among the Irregulars in the tone and rhythm of their speech.

You had hinted that there were many facts among the fiction, but I was still surprised by the extent of the truth of the story. Most of your men were real, even the bit players. I was also impressed by the extent you used real events from the OWI and two types of cryptanalysis, sliding Woody into them neatly. As much as that, I liked reading about the reasons that emerged for some of your choices -- it all made the novel much richer.