Canadian Lawyer

"I swear that another day shall not have passed before I have done all that man can do to reach the heart of the mystery." www.CANADIAN L a w ye r m a g . c o m September 2013 29 sANdrA strANgemore wyer B eside the name plate outside Hartley R. Nathan's 21st-floor downtown Toronto office is a small white ceramic plaque with the number 221B. 221B Baker St. is of course the London address of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. By day, the 74-year-old Nathan is a senior partner in Minden Gross LLP's business law group, but by nights, weekends, and whenever else he can squeeze it in, he writes and lectures about the legendary detective. Nathan is the co-author with friend and lawyer Cliff Goldfarb, of Gardiner Roberts LLP, of a new book set for a fall launch: Investigating Sherlock Holmes — The Jewish Connection and Other Inquiries. Together they've written more than 30 papers over the years on Holmes. Nathan also penned a monograph on Jack the Ripper (Who Was Jack the Ripper?) in 2011. He is, obviously, a fan of the Victorian era and many of its fiction writers. The first paper he wrote examined whether Holmes' sidekick Dr. John Watson ever lived in Toronto. Nathan found a Dr. John H. Watson who lived at 99 Avenue Rd. and in reviewing a title abstract he says it fit perfectly with Watson during the time period. "I had to figure out what he was doing in Toronto at that time and there is a gap in the stories then. I figured he came to Toronto during that time. I had to figure out why he came here. I said he committed an illegal operation in London and had to leave. It was written up in the papers and we built our reputation on that," he says. His passion for Holmes has been sustained for more than four decades. In 1971, a friend gave him a two-volume set of the annotated Sherlock Holmes — the complete 60 stories with notes by William BaringGould. That Christmas, there was a series of lectures on detective literature and the origins of Holmes at the Toronto Central Library when it acquired a substantial collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's writings. "Like all boys growing up we read Sherlock Holmes stories as cute detective stories," says Nathan. But the interest that day in the library (from Hound of the Baskervilles, went beyond amusing detective tales. "They Dr. Watson in his diary entry.) passed around a sheet to see if anyone wanted to start a Sherlock Holmes society," he recalls. He signed up and within two months the Bootmakers of Toronto was founded. The group's name is derived from the Hound of the Baskervilles (Nathan's favourite) in which Sherlock Holmes pulls a boot out of the Grimpin Mire and inside he finds the words: "Meyers, Toronto." The first president of the group was Derrick Murdoch, a mystery story reviewer for The Globe and Mail, the second was True Davidson, then-mayor of East York, and the third was Nathan. He also managed to recruit Goldfarb — who was also at Minden Gross at the time and is five years younger than Nathan — into the group, giving him the option back in 1971 of either becoming his right-hand man and taking on the role of assistant securetary at the Ontario Bar Association, or helping him set up the Bootmakers. "I chose Sherlock," says

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