News

“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...

The Investigating Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes Colloquium and donation of the third largest private collection of Sherlockiana in the world were supposed to produce a weekend of great publicity for tiny St. Benignus college in Erin, Ohio. But when theft and murder come to campus, college public relations director Jeff Cody finds himself knee-deep in Sherlockian suspects, besieged by an aggressive reporter he loves but no longer dates, and competing with his eccentric brother-in-law, Sebastian McCabe, to solve the crimes first. The mess worsens when Jeff and his ex-girlfriend, Lynda Teal, themselves fall under suspicion of murder –...

Nothing’s ever easy when Sherlock Holmes is involved. Joanna Watson needs sports and academic scholarships if she is going to make it all the way to med school. That means keeping out of trouble, and her school record squeaky clean. But upon befriending the mysterious New Girl, Joanna has her perfect record ruined, skips school for the first time in her life, and finds a blackmailer aiming a gun in her direction. All she knows is that she’s going to get grounded… if they get out of this alive. “The Twisted Blackmailer is a beautifully-written book that tells an engaging...

“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...