Having recently been unimpressed by both the sole novel in Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy corpus, Too Many Magicians (1967), and a pastiche novel by Michael Kurland, The Infernal Device (1978), the obvious next step is to read a pastiche novel in the Lord Darcy universe by the author of The Infernal Device, right?
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Hand on heart, I honestly believed I had read The Infernal Device (1978), the first of five books about Professor James Moriarty written by Michael Kurland, before now. Hell, I have talked about this book at length with various people, recommending it to them in very strong terms. So to pick it up and discover that, nope, I have never encountered this particular story — and that it’s so dull I was forgetting swathes of it as I read it, not that it mattered — was something of a shock.
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Lately I’ve read an unusually high concentration of Holmes pastiches — Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary (not good), Stephen King’s ‘A Doctor’s Case’ (not terrible), Colin Dexter’s ‘A Case of Mis-Identity’ (extremely good), Michael Kurland’s The Infernal Device (loadsa fun), Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range (fabulous) and a superb piece of unpublished fan fiction sent to me via email — and it’s made me realise that while Watson, and specifically the Watsonian voice, is vital in undertaking Holmes, no-one can quite agree what Watson is, how he should be written, and this makes him far and away the more interesting of the two men when it comes to analysis.
