Robert Barr
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September 16, 1849 – October 21, 1912) was a British-Canadian short story writer and novelist, born at Glasgow, Scotland. Robert Barr emigrated with his parents to Upper Canada when he was four and was educated in Toronto at Toronto Normal School. Barr became a teacher and eventual headmaster of the Central School, Windsor, Ontario, from which position he began to contribute short stories - often based on first hand experienes - to the Detroit Free Press. In 1876 Barr quit his teaching position to become a staff member of that publication, in which his contributions appeared under the signature "Luke Sharp." In 1881 Barr decided to "vamoose the ranch", as he put it, and removed to London, to establish there the weekly English edition of the Free Press. In 1892 he founded The Idler magazine, choosing Jerome K. Jerome as his collaborator (wanting, as Jerome said, "a popular name"). He retired from its coeditorship in 1895. In London of the 1890s Barr became a more prolific author - turning out a book a year. Most of his literary output was of the crime genre, then quite in vogue. When Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were making their literary splash Barr published in the Idler the first Holmes parody, "The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs" (1892), a spoof that was continued a decade later in another Barr story, "The Adventure of the Second Swag" (1904). Despite the jibe at the growing Holmes phenomenon Barr and Doyle remained on very good terms. Doyle describes him in his memoirs Memories and Adventures as, "a volcanic Anglo - or rather Scot-American, with a violent manner, a wealth of strong adjectives, and one of the kindest natures underneath it all."