In Sherlock Holmes and the Molly-Boy Murders, Margaret Walsh manages quite the feat: she combines the traditional feel of a classic Holmes pastiche with a modern sensibility when it comes to characters and motivations, enlivened with flashes of dry humor. Someone is killing and mutilating young men who dress as women. The variety of characters include a well-meaning woman who runs a safe house for young men of this type, a young baronet and his private secretary, and a medical […]

(I have begun reviewing Sherlock Holmes books for the website belonging to I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, the premier Sherlock Holmes podcast. This review originally appeared there.) Sherlockians know that “playing the game” means considering Arthur Conan Doyle’s role as Dr. John Watson’s literary agent. Doyle couldn’t have been the author, as Watson, of course, wrote those stories about his friend Sherlock Holmes. In Sherlock Holmes: Playing the Game , Cenarth Fox takes this approach to ludicrous but amusing extremes. […]

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! […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

I wasn’t the right age for Ghostwriter, which is a shame, cause it sounds like I would have loved it. The original TV show ran 1992-1995, and it featured a group of kids solving mysteries with the aid of a ghost. Apple TV+ brought the series back a year and a half ago, as part of its service launch. To solve mysteries, the Ghostwriter team has to read books and meet characters from the stories, which is a great idea. […]

Over My Dead Body by Dave Warner has an irresistible concept (at least for me): what if Sherlock Holmes was frozen in his plunge over the Reichenbach Falls and woken in the current day? And what if he wound up working with a female descendent of Dr. Watson? It’s not an original idea, of course — there are at least two TV movies with the same premise. (The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) also uses cryogenics; the better Sherlock Holmes […]