A Mouse Eye View: Basil of Baker Street

Hey. Want to hear about a secret world?

Humans seem to have a taste for the hidden. At its worst, this can result in individuals losing themselves to conspiracy theories like QAnon and the Satanic Panic. But there’s a good side to our searching for the hidden: it leaves us open to mystery, to magic, to — God help me — whimsy. Near my house there’s a painted message on a wall, pointing to what looks like a small, bricked-in doorway: To Narnia. 

Of course, children are particularly fascinated by these hidden words; they’re surrounded by them. Their friends disappear at the end of the school day, their parents go off and do strange tasks in unfamiliar places, and so much of the conversation they are surrounded by is about the unknown. (It’s no wonder kids ask so many questions. What is a barcode scanner and why do they use it at the grocery store? Why is that video game “too old” for me? What the fuck did Calgon do, and why was it for adults only?¹

Add to that the way that adults seem to want to know everything a child is thinking and doing², and it’s no wonder children want to keep a few secrets to themselves.

So hidden worlds are a hallmark of children’s media, from the miniature people in the Littles and Borrowers books, the animals in films like Ratatouille, or even the sewer-dwelling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles³. Eve Titus’s Basil of Baker Street books begin in this grand tradition, introducing us to the hidden world of mice. Specifically the mice who live in the basement of 221b Baker Street, just below Sherlock Holmes and his good friend Dr. John Watson. 

From 1958–1982, Eve Titus and illustrator Paul Galdone collaborated on five books about Basil, a mouse who is so inspired by his upstairs idol that he turns to solving mysteries himself. The books are gentle little stories; no one is in too much peril, and Basil and his physician sidekick Dr. Dawson are the kind of good-hearted protagonists who are easy to cheer for. The adventures are written for young children⁴ so there are no particularly twisty mysteries here, and they don’t focus on the details of hidden life the way, say, the Borrowers books do. The focus here is on the problem-solving and pint-sized adventures: think finding the right hansom cab to hitch a ride on, rather than trying to evade a sinister cat. (It should be noted, though, that Titus ends every chapter but the last with a cliffhanger, and she notes in the one brief interview I could find that she refused to talk down to children.)

Basil was much more an homage than an adaptation — there’s no slavish devotion to Doyle’s stories here, though there is a wink or two. Titus dedicated the first book to Doyle’s son, “in the humble hope that this book for boys and girls will be a bridge to Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself.” A member of both the The Baker Street Irregulars fan club and the Mystery Writers of America, Titus certainly created Basil out of love. (She loved mice, too; they’re protagonists in almost all of her books.)

Titus lived in Miami Beach; she collected miniature mice, and she was a talented pianist. That’s about what I have for her. She seems to have not wanted to share much about her personal life, which of course leaves the reader to wonder if she was some variety of queer or just very private. (There was certainly no shortage of queer children’s book creators in the mid-20th century, but there were plenty of straight ones, too.) She lived to see both her Anatole and Basil adapted to screen — the latter in 1986’s The Great Mouse Detective, a rather free-wheeling adaptation that includes elements of Titus’s books, Doyle’s work, and even those Basil Rathbone films that leant Titus’s protagonist his name.

In Basil of Baker Street itself, Paul Galdone’s illustrations do a lot of the work to create Basil and Dawson’s charming world. That’s no insult to Titus: her collaborator is just that good at creating a detailed, cozy world for Titus’s little mice to live in. It’s easier to find information about Galdone, who came to the United States from Budapest at 14. His 40-year career in illustration included almost all of Titus’s books, including the Anatole series, about another charming mouse. His website credits his wife Jannelise, herself the child of Dutch immigrants, for much of his success: she did a lot of the usually uncredited behind-the-scenes work the wife of a male creative was responsible for, but also read galleys for him, suggesting scenes to illustrate and cover designs.

After the success of Basil of Baker Street, Basil’s adventures took him in new directions: Titus even sent him to Mexico and the Wild West. But I’ll always think of Galdone’s cozy illustrations of the mice at home, in the 221b basement, listening to Sherlock Holmes play violin and waiting for the next mystery to stop by.

1. There’s a higher risk for urinary tract infections in kids, apparently. ↩︎
2. Parents do have a right to some nosiness, especially in the youngest ages. What is that you just put in your mouth is, for example, the kind of urgent question almost every parent finds themselves asking. ↩︎
3. In general, though, tiny worlds seem to have an edge. People love tiny food! ↩︎
4. 2nd or 3rd grade is the recommendation I’ve seen most often. ↩︎