In this fictional biography of Sherlock Holmes, Baring-Gould makes his attempt at unraveling and chronicling Holmes' sometimes mysterious life. The book begins with a short history of Holmes' childhood and family, all of which comes from Baring-Gould's imagination and a few tantalising scraps of information from Canon. It matches nicely with what we already know of Holmes, fleshing out his character and adding motive for his eccentricities and habits as an adult.

Baring-Gould continues by covering Holmes and Watson's first meeting and Holmes' earliest cases, much of which is quoted directly from Canon. Baring-Gould also goes on to describe Holmes' brush with Jack the Ripper in 1888, an interesting but not wholly satisfying account.

The longest departure from Canon - and the silliest and most unlikely bits - come during Holmes' disappearance after his plunge over Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty. Baring-Gould tells of Holmes re-meeting Irene Adler, with whom he has a love affair and a son (who grows up to be the famous and corpulent American detective Nero Wolfe, no less!), travelling to Tibet, where he becomes a Buddhist under the discipleship of the Dali Lama, capturing the Abominable Snowman in Nepal, and nearly managing to scale Everest single-handedly, before finally returning to England to resume his detective practice.

The book concludes with an account of Holmes' final cases, before his retirement to the Sussex Downs to become a beekeeper, from whence he helps the British Government to win both World Wars and lives to the estimable age of 103 (thanks to his discovery of Royal Jelly!!).

Sarcasm aside, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street is an interesting read for any Holmes aficionado, and if one can overlook Baring-Gould's attempts to sensationalise, he has done an excellent job of detailing Holmes' life and sorting out the often-confusing dates and time lines of the Holmesian Canon.

It's simply fan fiction in its highest form, and as such I can't knock it.

from amazon.com

William Stuart Baring-Gould (1913–1967) was a noted Sherlock Holmes scholar, best known as the author of the influential 1962 fictional biography, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A life of the world's first consulting detective.

In 1955, Baring-Gould privately published The Chronological Holmes, an attempt to lay out, in chronological order, all the events alluded to in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Three years later, Baring-Gould wrote The Annotated Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Old and New, Arranged and Explained, with his wife, Ceil Baring-Gould. The book provides a wealth of information about nursery rhymes, and includes often-banned bawdy rhymes.

In 1967, Baring-Gould published The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, an annotated edition of the Sherlock Holmes canon, its subtitle promising "The four novels and fifty-six short stories complete". The following year, Baring-Gould published The Lure Of The Limerick, a study of the history and allure of limericks; it included a collection of limericks, arranged alphabetically, and a bibliography. The book was republished in 1974.

Baring-Gould also wrote Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street: The life and times of America's largest private detective, a fictional biography of Rex Stout's detective character Nero Wolfe. In this book, Baring-Gould popularised the theory that Wolfe was the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.

His major works:

The Chronological Holmes, 1955 (with revisions from an earlier edition that appeared in the Baker Street Journal in 1948)

Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, 1962

The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 1967

Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, 1969

from wiki