In 1948, Vernon Hall, Jr., a professor of English at Dartmouth, published a piece called “Sherlock Holmes and the Wife of Bath” in the organ of the so-called Baker Street Irregulars, a group of Holmes enthusiasts founded by the writer Christopher Morley. In this fanciful short story, Holmes remarks to Watson, “if the murder in the Wife of Bath's Prologue has not been discovered before, it is because I had never read that part of the Canterbury Tales until a fortnight ago.” Susan Crane wrote a tongue-in-cheek defense of the Wife arguing that not only was the evidence against her insubstantial (and would never hold up in a court of law), but also even the suspicion that she might have murdered her fourth husband was not justified. Crane's essay more or less demolished the case against the Wife of Bath.