Obviously I read the Sherlock Holmes canon before I had started this blog, but — or, perhaps, so — it’s interesting how vague my recollections about so many of the stories are.
Continue readingWe know that Holmes was inspired by C. Auguste Dupin, of course, but it’s surprising how much the canon continues to owe to the vagaries of Edgar Allan Poe even when it was already a well-established phenomenon in its own right.
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A storm strands nine guests on a small Greek island — “[l]ike in some Agatha Christie novel” — and everyone is shocked when one of the group is found dead in a hut on the beach. Thankfully, one of those present is the actor Ormond ‘Hopalong’ Basil, now an ageing and fading presence, but best known for what is seen as the representation of Sherlock Holmes on the screen in 15 films. With the police unable to reach the island until the storm dies down, might Basil be convinced to investigate the crime? Given “the powerful force that fiction can exert on the human psyche”, it would certainly make everyone feel a bit happier to know that something is being done…
Sherlock Holmes is back, baby, back! And I bet the first proper case following his return is an absolute belter.
Continue readingI’ve looked at this before, but I took life much more seriously back then. Let’s all just relax, shall we?
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We started this month of Minor Felonies Tuesdays with one Sherlock Holmes pastiche, so let’s wrap it up with another before next month takes us back into Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. Thus, Black Ice (2011), the third entry in Andrew Lane’s series charting the development of a teenage Holmes into the resident of 221B Baker Street we all know and love.
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It was over three years ago that I read The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006), the first of Nancy Springer’s books featuring Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister Enola, and while I didn’t hate it I also clearly didn’t feel the need to rush back to the series. So here with are with a belated look at second title The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (2007).
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Fourteen alternative takes on the Great Detective — editor Sebastian Wolfe is unable to distinguish “parodies, pastiches and burlesques” from each other — fill out The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1989). No, not the Ellery Queen one. This is different.
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I thoroughly enjoyed the very readable set of stories collected in Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018), which gave a variety of almost crossover mystery interpretations to the Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson pastiche. So I’m back for the original volume in this brace to see what other twists have been put on that classic and enduring setup.
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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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