In 1934, the creator and first leader of the Baker Street Irregulars, Christopher Morley, declared that “The first meeting will be stag.” This refusal to allow women membership became a policy of the BSI, the first and most famous Sherlock Holmes society, until 1991, alienating and limiting the interactions of female Sherlock Holmes scholars and fans for almost sixty years. The Baker Street Irregulars has boasted the membership of famous authors from Rex Stout to Neil Gaiman, and a benefit of membership is participation in a special kind of writing exercise called “the game,” where it was assumed that Sherlock Holmes was an actual person. Although Laurie King’s Mary Russell series is an excellent example of the kind of writing required by “the game,” she faced harsh criticism for introducing a female protagonist to work alongside Holmes. In the last thirty years, the Baker Street Irregulars have worked to be more inclusive of both female writers and fans in general, but the larger fan culture is still catching up. Although Laurie King now has a membership in the Baker Street Irregulars, she and other female authors like her are constantly working against the boy’s club mentality provided by the early Baker Street Irregulars, which had significant impact on larger fan culture for the Sherlock Holmes books and can still be seen in some modern interpretations of the stories like the BBC’s Sherlock and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes film series.
