Independent Opinions, News, and Reviews of Graphic Novels, Manga, and Comic Books
It’s said that success has many parents, while failure is an orphan. It’s also true that success, these days, has many children, as a positive response to, say, a movie leads to more related product. Which is my lead-in to the news that there’s a new Enola Holmes novel, out now. The original six volumes by Nancy Springer were published from 2006-2010, but given the success of the Netflix movie, they’re back, and there’s a new book in the series! […]
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Eight Faces at Three is the latest in the reprint line of American Mystery Classics curated by Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Bookshop. It’s the first of a series of mystery novels by Craig Rice starring hard-drinking, hard-boiled lawyer John J. Malone, of which there were around fourteen, eventually. Holly Inglehart is found, having fainted, in the same room as her dead, disliked aunt, with all the clocks in the house stopped at 3:00. She’s arrested for the murder, but […]
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Modern-day coffee table books like DC: Women of Action, in addition to being fun reads on their own, pleasantly remind me of how much things have improved over the past few years. When I started this gig, a book full of pretty pictures celebrating the female superheroes of DC Comics would have been drawn by men and full of anatomically impossible come-hither poses and smutty innuendo. Now, it’s written by a woman, Shea Fontana, who has also written Batman and […]
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I’ve just finished a rip-roaring adventure/romance trilogy that I loved reading. The Will Darling Adventures by K.J. Charles is set in 1920s London. Will Darling has returned from the War and wound up running a bookshop, inherited from his uncle, as he had few other choices. The first book, Slippery Creatures, introduces him and the trouble he falls into when competing mysterious organizations want something that had been hidden in the shop. Then the charming Lord Arthur “Kim” Secretan shows […]
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The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes is short, silly fun. It’s got almost 30 stories in about 90 pages, and as you can see from the math, most are only two or three pages. Some involve Holmes being surprised or not exactly distinguishing himself in deduction, but the jokes around settings and details of life in his times are amusing. Guest stars include Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Irene Norton. Holmes solves mysteries involving the queen’s dogs, a missing ambassador, […]
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I’ve greatly enjoyed reading A Curious Collection of Dates: Through the Year With Sherlock Holmes, one day at a time. It’s an almanac, where every day of the year has one or more entries related to Sherlock Holmes. Some are capsule biographies of people who’ve played Holmes, or John Watson, or a Moriarty, noted on their birthdays. Or those who were significant to the publishing of the Canon. Some are dates from the Arthur Conan Doyle stories when cases began […]
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The Baker Street Babes, a group of women who are Sherlock Holmes fans, put out this short essay collection in 2017, the last year the BBC Sherlock TV show aired. It’s a terrific idea. Typical of his time, Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t always pay a lot of attention to the women in his Sherlock Holmes stories. Of course, there’s Irene Adler, who’s been given too much attention over the years. The first essay here is about her, and it smartly […]
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If you’d like to read five classic Arthur Conan Doyle mystery stories, modernized in tawdry, tabloid fashion, Charlie Milverton and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories by Charlotte Anne Walters is the book for you. For me, it was an excellent piece of evidence that putting a present-day Holmes story in print doesn’t automatically make it better than the free fic you can read on AO3. In fact, I would have enjoyed this more online, as there I would have been more […]
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