News — book review

Sherlock Holmes Society of London "The Hound of the Baskervilles, adapted and illustrated by Petr Kopl is clever, funny, beautiful and brilliant. It’s the first in Mr Kopl’s Victoria Regina series (A Scandal in Bohemia is the fourth). Don’t be surprised to find the narrative intersecting with the events of Dracula, The Lost World, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and even Rossum’s Universal Robots, as well as other exploits of Holmes and Watson. Look closely at the illustrations and you’ll see all sorts of unexpected details — though you may be too engrossed in the story on first reading.”     Amazon USA   Amazon UK ...

Sherlock Holmes Society of London "A handsome hardback novel by Diane Gilbert Madsen. The Conan Doyle Notes: The Secret of Jack the Ripper is the third DD McGil Literati Mystery, the first two being published by Midnight Ink. Some of the characters bear canonical names, but this is set in present-day America. An apparently routine fraud case for insurance investigator DD McGil interweaves with a more curious matter, a murderous assault on a friend of hers and the theft of an old diary that hints at a momentous discovery – Arthur Conan Doyle’s own notes on the Whitechapel murders and the identity...

Nick Cardillo “The Cotswolds Werewolf and Other Stories is yet another in a long line of pastiches which finds the world’s greatest detective investigating what seem to be supernatural goings-on. While the concept may not be the most original, I freely admit that I enjoy it. Reading any pastiche which finds Sherlock Holmes in an atmospheric setting, investigating an unusual crime makes for a fun experience. The question is, does this collection of short stories live up to the high standard of its predecessors? The main attraction of this collection is the eponymous story, “The Adventure of the Cotswolds Werewolf.” It...

Sherlock Holmes Society of London This excellent book is the eagerly awaited third and final volume in Alistair Duncan’s study of the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It deals with the last twenty three years of the great author’s life from the year of his second marriage to Jean Leckie until his death in 1930. These years saw his move to Windlesham, the birth of three children, more literary success, the discovery of a new faith, the final stories of Sherlock Holmes and, of course, the First World War. This meticulously researched book gives us an impartial account of...

Sherlock Holmes Society of London “The Shoso-in Bulletin, published in English between 1991 and 2004, was the most truly international Holmesian periodical of all. It was founded by our distinguished Japanese member Hirayama Yuichi, whose own contributions alone justified the Bulletin’s existence. East Wind Coming: A Sherlockian Study Book by Yuichi Hirayama and John Hall gathers twenty-eight of Dr Hirayama’s essays, from The Shoso-in Bulletin, The Baker Street Journal, The Ritual and elsewhere, along with four written jointly with a leading English Holmesian, John Hall. Yuichi has discovered, in a Japanese detection manual of 1940, the simple means by which Holmes determined the direction Herr Heidegger’s bicycle travelled on the moor. In...