News — sherlock holmes society of london

“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...

“Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus by P C Martin. I suppose the combination of Sherlock Holmes and Steampunk was inevitable. Guy Ritchie’s first Holmes film had elements of Victorian super science, but the true hybrid flowering is in Steampunk Holmes. Full details are at www.steampunkholmes.com, but for the less elaborately electronically enabled, such as me, the first adventure is now available in its most accessible form: i.e. a book. Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus places Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in a world where electricity has yet to be developed, the internal combustion engine is irrelevant, and steam power...

“The Hound of Baskervilles: A Sherlock Holmes Play by Simon Corble. The Hound of Baskervilles doesn’t easily lend itself to the theatre, but dramatists seem unable to resist the challenge. I’ve not had the chance to see it performed, but Simon Corble’s play is pretty close to the top of my list of favourites. It was written to be performed out of doors, with the audience following the actors from place to place. Mr Corble boldly adapts the story rather than simply dramatising, and the result is clever, witty, exciting – and refreshingly intelligent. David Stuart Davies contributes an appreciative...

“56 Sherlock Holmes Stories in 56 Days by Charlotte Anne Walters. After submitting her novel Barefoot on Baker Street, Charlotte Anne Walters set herself the task of re-reading all the short stories in the Canon, one a day, and writing about each of them on the same day for her blog at http://barefootonbakerstreet.wordpress.com/. For the book publication she has added her observations on the four long stories. Her remarks are often amusing, occasionally thought-provoking (why so little protest about the uncanonical back-story for Mary Morstan in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes? I suspect it’s because so much else in the film is defiantly...