Whatever Happened to the Gloria Scott?

Over the years, people have reimagined Sherlock Holmes in all sorts of ways - plays, films, poems and paintings, and many others. For my latest project, I decided to reimagine one of his cases, ‘The Adventure of the Gloria Scott’, as a sea shanty!

The annual journal from Belanger Books, Steel True, Blade Straight, provides an opportunity to focus on Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the past, I have explored his family life (The Ascent), and adventures in the margins of his own stories (Doyle’s Dinosaur). This time, I wondered where he might got one of his ideas.

As a writer, I get inspiration from all sorts of unlikely places, and I’m sure it was the same for Conan Doyle. And so I pictured him sitting down to write his latest story and remembering a song he had heard — a sea shanty about the Gloria Scott, a ship lost under mysterious circumstances. So began a new case for Sherlock Holmes. But what of the sea shanty? How might that have gone?

You can find The Taking of the Gloria Scott, along with many other fascinating examinations of Conan Doyle’s life and works, in the Steel True, Blade Straight: 2025/6 Annual. It will be released next year, but you can pre-order your copy now on Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/belangerbooks/steel-true-blade-straight-2025-6-plus-blue-carbuncle.