Little quests are always a fun part of Sherlockian life, and my friend Don has taken that to levels I’d never attempt. Every now and then, something catches my fancy, though, and the hunt is on. This time, it’s a Bama Sherlock.

Today I picked up a lovely art book called James Bama, American Realist by Brian M. Kane. I’ve enjoyed James Bama’s art for years, almost entirely through his work on the Bantam paperbacks featuring Doc Savage. He also did a really great poster of Doc Savage that I framed while in college and have always found a place for. Like many an artist, I associated him with his most prominent subject, but that was it. Little did I know that James Bama had painted most of the universe of my early years.

Thanks to James Bama, American Realist, I now know that Bama also created the box art for every one of those Aurora monster models that I bought and built as a kid. He did the cover art for the first James Blish adaptation of Star Trek episodes into short stories that both the good Carter and I owned in our youth, and still do. And when I started collecting William Goldman novels when I was just out of college, there were James Bama covers on novels like The Thing of It Is . . . and Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow.

James Bama seems to have been nearly omnipresent on Bantam paperback covers, from classics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to John Dickson Carr mysteries. He has painted Nero Wolfe and Horatio Hornblower, James Bond and Hitler.

There has to be James Bama art of Sherlock Holmes out there. There has to be.

I turned to my bookshelves and started scanning paperback spines for the old Bantam logo. Michael and Mollie Hardwick’s adaptation of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes quickly came to the fore, but the art seemed a little more stylized that the typical Bama cover and probably from some movie poster painter. Did Bantam do any reprints of Doyle’s works during the period of Bama’s work? One would hope.

So out I go on another Sherlockian quest. Feel free to join!

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver