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BY JOHN MATTHEW
Recently I've been working my way through all the Sherlock Holmes stories and long novels again, though I've yet to find a copy of His Last Bow. This naturally led to reading four of a new set of six paperbacks covering all the late August Derleth's Solar Pons pastiches, which are far better than those by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr,
Then, I found a curious book, .. the paperback edition of Samuel Rosenberg's Naked Is The Best Disguise-The Death & Resurrection Of Sherlock Holmes, in Penguin Books, This is NOT another of those interminable books trying to fill in Sherlock's adventures in the real world, but rather an intriguing attempt to prove that Doyle embellished the stories with characters’ names which give decided clues to various real personalities of his times. Rosenberg was at one time working at Warner Brothers trying to determine whether scripts they received were plagiarised from other people, or if in fact any two in contention had a common literary source that would negate any projected litigation. He is obviously a well-read man and he turns up direct passages where Doyle had cribbed from authors he had read prior to writing the Holmes stories, Also there are disquieting allusions to repressed sexuality lurking in the background.
However, Rosenberg in one passage of his book makes me think that either he got carried away by the case he was setting up, or else he ascribed someone else's words to Doyle. The reference is to a villain in the second Holmes story of 1892, The Red Headed League. He mentions about the character he travels with “a beskirted gunsel. " But, in Doyle's actual story, the reference to skirts is clearly to coat tails and the word gunsel does NOT appear at all, I have not yet had a chance to look the story up in the two-volume set of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Baring-Gould, which Rosenberg obviously also consulted, But the word gunsel rang a bell with me and I immediately leafed back through my recent Penny Dreadfuls to find the piece by Pete Harris in #350,
Pete ascribed the most famous use of this term to Dashiell Hammett in his Maltese Falcon and noted thathe was forever trying to slip offcolour words past magazine editors, Pete intimated too that the word doesn't necessarily mean gunman, Well, I wonder! My first thought was to consult the amazing microprintedononionskinpaper set which claims to condense the entire 14shelffilling volumes of the Revised Oxford Dictionary into two chunky volumes, Nothing! Which reinforced my belief that the word was in fact a bona-fide American slang term, Sure enough, there it is in my paperback edition of The Pocket Dictionary Of American Slang. The word comes from German or Yiddish (ganzel or gantzel=gosling) and since 1915 it was used in prisons in the U.S. or by hobos to refer to an inexperienced youngster who might be sexually victimised by an older man, Since 1925, in the underworld, it came to refer to a sly treacherous character and thirdly to a thief or criminal. So now we now. Need one add,..what a remarkable adjunct to education is the Penny Dreadful!