Wednesday, February 4, 2015


Out at last, as a new volume in the BSI Archival History series.


Regarding the novel, in 2010 military historian Thaddeus Holt Jr., 
a member of The Five Orange Pips, wrote:

You may assume many of this book’s adventures, and many of the people Woody Hazelbaker meets, to be the product of the author’s imagination. You will usually be wrong. With a kaleidoscope of real events both famous and little known, of real people both prominent and obscure, this readable book shows how true is Sherlock Holmes’s observation that “Life is infinitely stranger than any-thing which the mind of man could invent.”

Thaddeus Holt, author of The Deceivers: Allied 
     Military Deception in the Second World War


from the Companion Volume's FOREWORD:
I hoped to do this book before now, and hope that some will 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 the novel's Ch. 12.
    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.

xxiii + 154 pp., 32 pictures, in BSI Archival History format.

$20.00 postpaid in the U.S., from
Hazelbaker & Lellenberg Inc.
P.O. Box 32181
Santa Fe, N.M. 87594

or by PayPal to jonlellenberg@gmail.com.