News — book review

"This little book is a delightful adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, told with only twenty-six words, and slightly fewer images.  Macaluso has taken Lego figures and replicated approximately two dozen scenes from the classic novel, and the photographs illustrate each page.  Each scene is summed up in either one, or occasionally two words.  For example, a Lego version of the titular character appears under the words “Gigantic Hound.”  Despite the extreme brevity, Macaluso manages to summarize the entire novel with words and pictures, stretching only once, with the letter “X.”  It’s a really fun work, and one which ought...

“...The story winds through the poetry, to Baskerville Hall, to a confrontation on the moors with a beast like none they had seen, to the inquest on Will Abernathy, (which enrages Holmes,) back to 221B, and thus to the Sussex Downs where Holmes trains as a apiarist and solves a crime, and back to Baker Street for the shock ending I didn’t see coming! The story is really good and the Herculean effort it must have been to write it all in verse—well, my hat is off to you, Mr. Allan Mitchell! I wouldn’t dream of seeing such work get...

“Finally!As a writer of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, I’ve been waiting years for a book like Nicko Vaughan’s “The Adventure of the Wordy Companion: An A-Z Guide to Sherlockian Phraseology.” A glossary of selected terms, phrases, and references from the original canon of Sherlock Holmes stories, this collection offers writers and readers alike a treasure of Holmesian information. Oh, sure, most of the alphabetical listings appear in the annotated versions of the Holmes stories (if you own such collections), but specific references are most difficult to locate if you don’t know the exact place to look. Want to know what a...

“It is wonderful having these stories collected in one volume. What a pleasure to traipse through them again, each previously encountered separately, all gathered in a single splendid cornucopia, with all of Victor’s brilliances on full display, an exquisite end-piece to the Sherlock Holmes & The American Literati series. As with Victor’s novels, each of these stories pairs Sherlock Holmes with a notable (though not exclusively American) author and, as is Victor’s forté, captures, with pitch-perfect accuracy, the distinct voices of the literary figures depicted as well as the verbal tropes of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes himself. Whether Guy...

“Did Dr. Watson’s published accounts of Holmes’s cases affect future investigations? Has the Ripper returned to slaughter prostitutes in Whitechapel years after his Autumn of Terror ended? Was a stolen manuscript about Sir Lancelot and King Arthur actually a lost Shakespeare play? Those are just three of the striking plot lines in this standout anthology of 21 short stories written in the spirit of Conan Doyle’s originals. Marcum’s own “The Carroun Document,” perhaps the first among equals, supposes that Holmes’s popularity as a result of the publication of his adventures in the Strand Magazine has resulted in unsought-for celebrity, complete...