News — book review

"The Amateur Executioner: Enoch Hale Meets Sherlock Holmes by Dan Andriacco and Kieran McMullen. MX Publishing. 2013. 180 pp. Enoch Hale, a native Bostonian, is a reporter for London’s Central News Syndicate (where, in 1920, Horace Harker is still a familiar figure, though far from revered) and a friend of Chief Inspector Wiggins of Scotland Yard. As it becomes evident that the apparent suicide of a Music Hall artiste was only the first of a series of murders by hanging, Hale’s determination to find the link between the victims is variously helped and hindered by a cast of remarkable characters that includes...

“This is an anthology of tales involving Holmes with conventional Nineteenth Century supernatural occurrences.  The ‘Holmes Agency’ has always stood firmly behind the motto, “Ghosts need not apply,” but any number of questionable events pop up in this collection. The lead story, a novella called “The Skull of Kohada Koheiji,” presents Holmes and Watson with ghostly happenings at a Japanese exhibition village in Knightsbridge.  The appearance of a Japanese specter in the midst of London does not promote amicable relations between the Japanese Empire and that of Great Britain. In the next novella, “The Ratcliffe Oracle,” an oracle has arisen that...

“The second novel about Holmes and Irene Adler by Amy Thomas, The Detective, the Woman and the Winking Tree (MX; £9.99), uses the same narrative technique as the first,The Detective and the Woman: Miss Adler’s chapters are told in the first person, and Holmes’s in the third person. It works well, not least because the woman emerges as a strong, intelligent and entirely credible character, whom Holmes rightly comes to admire. The subject of this new joint investigation is the apparently impossible disappearance of a Mr James Phillimore – who, as we remember from Dr Watson’s guarded remark, ‘stepping back into his own house to...

„There is the possibility of a Fenian attack also in The Amateur Executioner: Enoch Hale Meets Sherlock Holmes, the first collaboration between Dan Andriacco and Kieran McMullen (MX; £7.99). Hale, a native Bostonian, is a reporter for London’s Central News Syndicate – where, in 1920, Horace Harker is still a familiar figure, though far from revered. It becomes evident that the apparent suicide of a Music Hall artiste was only the first of a series of murders by hanging. Hale’s determination to find the link between the victims is variously helped and hindered by a cast of remarkable characters that...

“It has been quite a while since we have seen a Sherlockian story for children, David Ruffle’s SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE MISSING SNOWMAN fills the bill nicely; it’s a sentimental story with charming illustrations by Rikey Austin (London: MX Publishing, 2012; 32 pp.).  The publisher’s web-sites are at <www.mxpublishing.co.uk> and <www.mxpublishing.com>.” Sherlock Holmes and The Missing Snowman is available from all good bookshops including in the USA Barnes and Noble and Amazon , in the UK Amazon and Waterstones. For elsewhere Book Depository who offer free delivery worldwide. In ebook format it is in Kindle, Kobo, Nook and iPad.