#31: Mycroft Holmes (2015) by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

Things are going a bit Holmesian here at The Invisible Event for the next week or so: a post every other day on something Sherlock-oriented.  Why?  For the simple reason that I feel like doing it.  I should probably wait for the BBC special at Christmas to theme it up a bit more, but Christmas is a busy time and so I’m doing it now instead.

Mycroft HolmesI wouldn’t call myself die-hard Sherlockian enough to immediately sign of up for anything produced in that universe – material enough to consume more than one lifetime – but the character and context retain so much potential that I will dip in where I believe someone might do something worth checking out.  The reference-filling short stories written by Adrian Conan Doyle both with and without the help of John Dickson Carr, the entertaining Professor Moriarty books by Michael Kurland, the tales by short story specialist Ed Hoch, Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell books, Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary, and Anthony Horowitz’s Holmes pastiche The House of Silk and universe-widening Moriarty (among others like Colin Dexter’s sole Holmes story ‘A Case of Mis-Identity’) all testify to the presence of life in the old dog yet, and Arthur Porges wrote a couple of pastiches I’d like to track down, so there’s still more to try.

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#3: The Smiling Corpse (1935) by Philip Wylie and Bernard A. Bergman

Smiling Corpse, TheThe use of real figures in fiction, and particularly crime fiction, usually goes one of two ways.  Philip Kerr has enjoyed tremendous success with his Bernie Gunther novels set in and around Nazi Germany and tying in all manner of historical figures, but his earlier Dark Matter – utilising Isaac Newton as a detective – was less successful.  And at least Kerr has the freedom of those real people being long departed (conspiracy theories aside) and so largely free to do with as he pleased.  When Philip Wylie and Bernard A. Bergman originally published The Smiling Corpse, the four very real detective writers at its centre (plus sundry background artists) were still very much alive, so one can understand their caution in wanting to keep their names of the final manuscript.  Imagine a novel published today in which Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell and one of James Patterson’s co-writers solved a crime and you get some idea of what we’re talking about.

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