Sherlock Holmes

October 11, 2004
Kurland (My Sherlock Holmes
) scores again in this lively all-original anthology chronicling the "Great Hiatus," that period when Sherlock Holmes was believed dead following a tumble into Reichenbach Falls with archfiend Professor Moriarty. In Peter Beagle's engaging "Mr. Sigerson," the best of several tales featuring Holmes under his Sigerson alias, Holmes investigates a case of marital infidelity and fraud. An amnesiac Holmes finds himself in the midst of European high society in Rhys Bowen's "The Case of the Lugubrious Manservant," an appealing tale marred only by a surfeit of characters including Sigmund Freud and the Prince of Wales. Holmes is a bystander throughout most of Bill Pronzini's delightful novella "The Bughouse Caper," in which rival Victorian detective John Quincannon searches San Francisco for a serial burglar, only to be upstaged in the end by "the bloody Englishman." In Kurland's own contribution, "Reichenbach," the "Napoleon of Crime," Moriarty, narrates an imagination-stretching version of the duo's mock deaths as part of a counterplot to foil a "dastardly scheme" to discredit Britain's navy. Stories by Baker Street veterans Gary Lovisi, Carolyn Wheat and Richard Lupoff, plus others newer to the world of Holmes pastiche, round out this enjoyable volume. Agent, Jack Scovil at Scovil, Chichak, Galen. (Nov. 18)

FYI:
Kurland is the author of
The Great Game (2001) and two other Professor Moriarty novels.

November 9, 2009
The 10 all-original tales in Edgar-finalist Kurland’s lively third Sherlock Holmes anthology (after 2004’s Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years)
chronicle the exploits of the fledgling sleuth in America, before he settled in Baker Street. Richard A. Lupoff gets the volume off to a strong start with “Inga Sigerson Weds,” in which the adolescent Sherlock’s cash-strapped parents send him and his jealous sister across the Atlantic to a distant cousin’s New York City wedding. In Darryl Brock’s witty “My Silk Umbrella,” Holmes encounters Mark Twain at a Hartford “base ball match.” The detective meets another Connecticut luminary, P.T. Barnum, in Michael Mallory’s droll “The Sacred White Elephant of Mandalay.” Dr. Watson appears once, in a postscript to Gary Lovisi’s improbable “The American Adventure,” in which the normally emotionless Holmes falls hard for a beautiful stage actress. Other contributors include Steve Hockensmith, Peter Tremayne, and Rhys Bowen.