Canadian Lawyer

Goldfarb with a laugh, adding it "sure as hell" sounded more interesting than the other option. Goldfarb also has a 221B plaque outside his office door and it became a stop on the firm tour given to prospective hires. While he and Nathan are "good friends," their personalties are quite different. He describes their relationship as "tolerant" with each fulfilling a different role in their writing relationship. "Somehow we have never had an argument." Goldfarb founded the Friends of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Metro Reference Library. "It's been a lifelong interest. I'm probably the kind of personality who needed to have something like this to distract myself when I'm not happy being a lawyer," he says. Nathan's interest in Sherlock Holmes eventually expanded into peripheral areas such as Jack the Ripper because the characters share the same time in history — 1887/1888. There are at least two or three movies where Holmes and Jack the Ripper are involved — including the 2001 Johnny Depp flick From Hell. In Nathan's opinion, the best film version of the books is 1979's Murder by Decree with Christopher Plummer and James Mason. For the record, he favours the British Jeremy Brett Sherlock TV series over the BBC's new take with Benedict Cumberbatch. Much like other literary societies, Nathan says the Bootmakers looks at the Holmes stories and prepares analytical papers on various elements. "Dorothy Sayers, who was a mystery story writer in England, called it 'playing the game,'" says Nathan. "The idea being that you look at Sherlock Holmes as a real person, Dr. Watson as the one who wrote up the stories, and Conan Doyle who had them published. We try and identify the characters in the stories with real people and real events in history. Conan Doyle was a man of his times and he often wrote about events of that period and put them into the stories. The idea is to figure out who he is talking about." Most of his papers have been published in the Baker Street Journal, the journal of the Baker Street Irregulars, or Canadian Holmes, the Bootmakers' magazine that has been going since the early '70s. The Baker Street Irregulars was established in 1934 and together with the Sherlock 30 September 2013 www.CANADIAN Holmes Society of London, England, they are the two pre-eminent groups of Sherlock enthusiasts. In 1982, Nathan was invited to become a member of the BSI and given the nom de plume "the Penang lawyer." It is a reference from the Hound of the Baskervilles when the story opens with Holmes and Watson examining a walking stick called a Penang lawyer. "They were trying to identify who the stick was left by and it appears Dr. Mortimer left it the night before, and he came to collect it," says Nathan. "On the Penang lawyer were the words 'to Dr. John Mortimer from his friends at the CCH, 1884.'" Nathan was asked to present a paper at the BSI meeting held the first Friday in January, which commemorates Sherlock Holmes' birthday. The paper he gave was: "Who was John Mortimer and why 1884?" "Sherlock Holmes says CCH means Charing Cross Hospital and it was given (to Mortimer) as a departing present by the staff. 1884 was the year of the Irish Outrages in England where they were bombing buildings including Charing Cross Station trying to gain independence from Britain," says Nathan adding his research revealed Mortimer was asked to leave because he was Irish. Together Nathan and Goldfarb have written nine papers on the Holmes-Jewish connection, which is the basis of their new book. "We've become the specialists in any Jewish connection with the stories," he says. For example, in the Musgrave Ritual, Holmes catches some jewel thieves and they say, "Ikey has peached," meaning he has gone to the police. "We posed the question who was Ikey? We examined where he would have got the name and it was no question it came from Ikey Solomon, who was a jewel thief and general scoundrel in the early 1800s." A paper they wrote in 2012 was called "Sherlock Holmes in the Hands of the Jews" and they analyzed a number of Conan Doyle's stories. In The Silver Blaze it is noted that Sir Robert Norberton "is in the hands of the Jews." They analyzed British literature from Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe through Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist in his characterization of Fagin to H.G. Wells and examined them for any anti-Semitic language. "We determined that in Conan Doyle using terms like 'in the hands of the Jews' he was not anti- L a w ye r m a g . c o m Semitic but using clichés of the day." While Nathan enjoys the detective work involved in uncovering details about literary characters, he prefers his chosen field of the law over any aspirations to become a sleuth himself. "I like the research because you learn a lot about history and it's not that different from researching legal papers," he says. "You need to find an interesting topic, you have to go through the cases and consider the arguments on both sides. I admire the different detectives portrayed in the various stories, but I don't think I have those qualities. In writing about literature you have to make sure your scholarship is right in the same way you research a legal problem. I found my legal training to be very useful." His legal practice has been primarily focused on corporate law with an emphasis on director and shareholder governance. With new not-for-profit legislation in Ontario and federally he has been doing more work with not-for-profit corporations. He is currently updating Nathan's Company Meetings along with Goldfarb, who specializes in not-for-profit law, and will be integrating material related to nonprofits into the 10th edition. He is also co-author with Mihkal Voore of Carswell's Corporate Meetings: Law and Practice on the law of company meetings in Canada. "It's definitely a burgeoning area," says Nathan. Between his love of the law and all things Sherlockian, his time is often consumed by research and writing. "I have a very patient family," he says of his wife Marilyn, a travel agent, their children Cindy and Brand, and two grandchildren Shawn and Erin. "I work on it mostly at night and on the weekends and holidays, but it's not so much a chore as a pleasure. One gets motivated by deadlines," he says. "I find I can work at night watching the Blue Jays or holidays and still have time for family." His love of Holmes might be closely matched by baseball. He coaches his grandson Shawn in midget hardball and sports an impressive looking ring on his right hand featuring a baseball — a ring from a game that means a lot to him. "I've been playing fast pitch softball since 1995," says Nathan who plays first base. "In 1996, we won the championship. It was the 1996 B'nai B'rith Pioneer Division Champions.

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