Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 2. Whole No. 822, February 2010

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

The year just past has been an unusually strong one for Baker Street aficionados. The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library added a volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s extra-canonical writings, The Apocrypha of Sherlock Holmes (Gasogene, $19.95), edited and fulsomely annotated by Leslie S. Klinger. Included are two brief comic vignettes, two tales in which Holmes arguably appears as an anonymous writer of letters to the editor, three stage plays, and an unrealized plot outline that may not (per Daniel Stashower’s introduction) be an authentic work of Watson or Doyle.

The two-CD set Voices from Baker Street (Wessex Press, $18.95) re-issues rare recordings of Sherlockian events from the 1950s to early 1980s, high-spirited and humorous for the most part, including the voices of such luminaries as Vincent Starrett, Anthony Boucher, Rex Stout, Isaac Asimov, and Basil Rathbone. A mock radio broadcast of Silver Blaze’s Wessex Plate race by famed sportswriters Red Smith and Joe Palmer is especially memorable.

Non-British pastiche writers sometimes relocate Holmes to their own countries. Among the writers given that patriotic assignment in Sherlock Holmes in America (Skyhorse, $24.95), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower, are Texan blog columnist Bill Crider and your Californian juror. Coincidentally, we both brought Holmes to (where else?) Chicago. Sherlock Holmes in Russia (Robert Hale/Trafalgar, $24.95), edited and translated by Alex Auswaks, presents seven early-20th-century tales by Russian writers.

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Night Shade, $15.95) gathers editor John Joseph Adams’s picks of the best pastiches of the past thirty years, a mixed bag with a little too much supernatural stuff for some tastes but a distinguished roster of contributors, including Stephen King, Anne Perry, Sharyn McCrumb, Laurie R. King, and Michael Moorcock. The 65-page “Watson!” and Other Unauthorized Sherlock Holmes Pastiches, Parodies, and Sequels (Wildside, $4.99) consists of the title story by Captain A.E. Dingle, and other early-20th-century takeoffs by G. F. Forrest, Bret Harte, O. Henry, and John Kendrick Bangs.

The first of the great book-length pastiches, H.F. Heard’s 1941 novel A Taste for Honey, in which Sherlock takes up beekeeping under the alias Mr. Mycroft, has been reprinted in a new edition (Blue Dolphin, $16.95), with a foreword by Stacy Gillis and an afterword by John Roger Barrie, Heard’s literary executor. Joining this classic as one of the best dozen or so extra-canonical novels is the first from a new star on the scene.

**** Lyndsay Faye: Dust and Shadow, Simon & Schuster, $25. Of the many attempts to involve Holmes with Jack the Ripper, this is probably the best. Dr. Watson, whose narrative style is well captured, is happily depicted as more heroic than comic, and the sleuth himself is at his most intellectually keen and personally complex. The facts of the crimes are depicted in careful, scholarly fashion, and the well-managed ending reprises a viable theory of how the Ripper might have avoided detection. (Faye also leads off Sherlock Holmes in America, referenced above, with a fresh look at “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness.”)

**** Donald Thomas: Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil, Pegasus, $25. Supreme among the pastiche writers, Thomas includes more history and detailed detective work, often from physical evidence, than almost anyone. Most of the stories have their origin in real events, culminating in World War I cryptography and espionage in “The Case of the Zimmermann Telegram.” Other stories concern forged manuscript detection, lighthouse management, and fingerprint evidence, which gets an unusual treatment in “The Case of the Tell-Tale Hands,” based on Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.”

**** Gyles Brandreth: Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile, Touchstone, $14. Speaking of Wilde, his third outing as fictional detective concerns a series of murders, some borderline locked rooms, in the circle of a French theatrical family. Though the principal events occur in the early 1880s, a framing story set a decade later invites his friend Conan Doyle’s participation in the detection and includes the speculation that Wilde was the model for Mycroft Holmes. The prose and dialogue are first rate, and Oscar’s final summing up is as close in spirit and intricacy to one of Ellery Queen’s as you’ll find in the current market.

** Paul D. Gilbert: The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, Robert Hale/Trafalgar, $24.95. These seven stories reflect love and respect for the canon in their fresh takes on such untold cases as the vanishing of James Phillimore, the aluminum crutch, the red leech, and the remarkable worm unknown to science. On the downside, narrative and dialogue are appallingly wordy; some anachronisms creep in (most glaringly, “cut to the chase” in the 1890s!); and the lead-off story has the most unconvincing of the many deaths of Moriarty recounted on page or screen.

**** Martin Edwards: Dancing for the Hangman, Five Star, $25.95. In one of the finest fictionalizations of a classic criminal case I’ve ever read, Hawley Harvey Crippen, hanged in 1910 for the murder of his wife Cora (known on the music hall stage as Belle Elmore), tells the story of his life, her death, and his unsuccessful flight from justice with mistress Ethel Le Neve disguised as a boy. An American practitioner of medical quackery living in Britain, he insists he is not a murderer, and that the real murder in the case was never even recognized as such. Edwards, inventing freely without contradicting any of the settled facts of the case, credits his sources in a closing note titled (in homage to John Dickson Carr) “Notes for the Curious.” One example of the excellent and sometimes amusing writing: “To ask a man and a woman to describe a person is akin to commissioning a portrait from painters of different schools.”

*** Colin Harrison: Risk, Picador, $13. Manhattan insurance company lawyer George Young is asked by the elderly and ailing widow of the firm’s founder to find out what her late son was doing the night of his apparently accidental death outside a bar. Though most readers will probably see the main secret coming, this shortish novel (originally a New York Times Magazine serial) offers good writing, an intriguing story, engaging characters, and a vivid rendering of the Manhattan scene.

*** H. R. F. Keating: Inspector Ghote’s First Case, Minotaur, $24.99. The series that began with The Perfect Murder (1964) and seemingly ended with Breaking and Entering (2000) is happily revisited in this prequel. In 1960, newly promoted to full inspector in the Bombay Police Crime Branch, Ghote receives an assignment that will take him away from the city as wife Protima awaits their first child: to find out why the wife of an English friend of the Indian police commissioner killed herself. Character touches, quirky dialect, and Hamlet references support a plot more complex than first appears.

*** Gladys Mitchell: The Longer Bodies, Rue Morgue, $14.95. The first American publication of this 1930 detective novel is remarkably timely, since its plot sounds like a TV reality show: a rich old lady wants to choose the heir to her fortune by having the candidates compete to be the first to represent England in an athletic event (discus, long jump, high jump, pole vault, javelin, shotput). All the Golden Age greats had some humor, but Mitchell was the most determinedly comic, and this elaborate structural edifice could almost be a parody of the classical time-table mystery.

Copyright © 2010 Jon L. Breen