It takes a devil to make a saint

A while ago I read Otto Penzler’s The Great Detectives: The World’s Most Celebrated Sleuths Unmasked by Their Authors. It was a wonderful book, with essays from various authors describing the birth of their detectives. And one of the most fascinating essays of the bunch came from a man named Leonard Holton. I’d never heard of him before, but apparently in the 70s, he was known as the creator of Father Joseph Bredder, a detective well-known enough to be included in The Great Detectives.

Immediately I went to the Kindle store. After all, nearly every other author included in The Great Detectives is Kindle-available. But I was met with a blank: as far as Amazon was concerned, Leonard Holton had never existed, and Father Bredder also turned up a blank. So I went on a mission to find something written by Leonard Holton. The mission ended surprisingly early: my ever-reliable local used bookstore, Paperbacks Unlimited, had two Holton novels on the racks inside the store. A few dollars later, I walked out of the store eagerly clutching The Saint Maker and Deliver us from Wolves.

Tale as Old as Time

Inspector Alan Grant is sick in a hospital bed, through the magic of a plot device. (I believe it was a broken leg, but I don’t know why this would require such an extended stay in hospital.) Anyways, he is bored, bored, bored… with nothing to do, he is encouraged to take a look at some famous historical riddle and try to solve it from his bed. And so he becomes fascinated with the figure of Richard III, and decides to investigate whether the king really was the heinous killer of the Princes in the Tower.

It seems that everyone everywhere is in love with this book, and with Josephine Tey in general. Interest in Tey and this book surged with the discovery of Richard III’s bones. Because the ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler was still active in the blogosphere at the time, the news story hit just a few days after I’d finally purchased a copy of this book, intending to read it. But because a lot of people who had no idea what they were talking about suddenly became authorities on King Richard, Tey, and GAD in general, I decided to wait for a while.

Mr. Holmes Goes To The Vatican

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Sherlock Holmes canon is, for me, all the untold adventures that Dr. Watson alludes to but which are never given the full-length short story treatment. And I’m not alone in thinking this. Many, many authors, from Anthony Boucher to William L. DeAndrea, have taken cues from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and come up with their own original Sherlockian adventure, based on a reference Dr. Watson made in the canon. And one of the newer efforts has come from Ann Margaret Lewis, author of Murder in the Vatican: The Church Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes.

Published in 2010, this book brings Sherlock Holmes to the Vatican, at the time of Pope Leo XIII’s reign. This is a brilliant idea because, well, Pope Leo was an extraordinary man in many ways. He made it crystal clear to critics that the Catholic Church was not opposed to science and indeed co-existed with it, and Sherlock Holmes is infamous for his scientific mind. The meeting of these two men is very, very appropriate and the author manages to spin three tales out of their encounters.

I'm Just Wild About Harry

Meanwhile at the Internet State Penitentiary...

The clock struck four A.M.  and the moonlight shone dimly through the window of the prison cell, the one on death row at the Internet State Penitentiary. Inside, four men – of which I was a part! – were contemplating the inevitable destruction of three of their members within a few hours. The Irishman got up and addressed the group:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “if I know yew as I t’ink I dew, it seems probable that ye’re all contemplatin’ yer inevitable destruction in a few hours. But perhaps we’d best be getting’ on with yer contest?”

“Of course,” said I, “but before we do so perhaps it is best we review the circumstances under which we found ourselves here.”

Verdict of Nine

They called Michel Delupas “The Surgeon”. He was a medical student turned serial killer, and he murdered his victims with the aid of a scalpel. Fortunately, he was caught and justice prevailed: a jury of his peers brought in a verdict of “Guilty” and The Surgeon has been behind bars ever since. That is, until he was finally released…

Delupas is a deranged psychopath on a mission. According to his twisted worldview, society has done him wrong and he needs to shift the balance back onto his side. And what better way to do that than by killing off the members of the jury that convicted him, one by one? It’s what happens in René Reouven’s Mort au jury (Death to the Jury).

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust...

A while back I went on a lengthy tirade against the Edgar Awards and Agathas, lamenting how far they have sunk and how they have become little more than a reflection of bestseller lists. It was a controversial post, generating more comments than any other post in the history of this blog. Out of all these comments, one I remembered particularly recommended Lyndsay Faye’s Dust and Shadow, a Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper yarn. This came about because Faye had been nominated for Best Novel for The Gods of Gotham.

I generally stay away from Holmes vs. the Ripper novels. It’s a tired idea with little novelty behind it, and it seems that every other such book concludes that the Ripper murders were the result of a ridiculous conspiracy centered around Prince Albert Victor. This is based on a highly flawed idea proposed by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, but it somehow has gotten to be the most popular theory in the realm of fiction. I don’t get it – I thought it was a stupid solution the first time I heard it, and when I recently read up on the Ripper case I found out just how stupid a solution it really is.

The Adventure of the Distraught Doctor

"Ha! You put me off, do you?" said our new visitor, taking a step forward and shaking his hunting-crop. "I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler."
My friend smiled.
"Holmes, the busybody!"
His smile broadened.
"Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!"
Holmes chuckled heartily. "Your conversation is most entertaining," said he. "When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught."

– The Adventure of the Speckled Band

I have a confession to make: I got a little sidetracked. I was intending to review a bunch of books where Sherlock Holmes meets Count Dracula. As it turns out, this is not going according to plan. I’ve already made side trips into Holmes meets Poe territory and Holmes vs. the Ripper lore. The next book I’ll review is another Holmes vs. the Ripper novel. And today’s book is another one by Loren D. Estleman in which Sherlock Holmes is inserted into a famous Victorian story. It’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes. (Oddly enough, Jekyll and Hyde were featured in another Sherlockian story I recently read, but in a very different capacity.)

This book in many ways mirrors the spirit of Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula. Here, Holmes is contacted by Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer and a friend of Dr. Henry Jekyll. Utterson is concerned about his friend, because Dr. Jekyll has just drafted up a will leaving all his property to the young scoundrel Edward Hyde. Hyde is a bounder in every sense of the word, inspiring hatred in every person he meets. He has no friends, and the only reason he is tolerated on the social scene is because of his money. Yet all of his money seems to come from Dr. Jekyll, and this is slowly casting a shadow on the good doctor’s name. Utterson wants Holmes to investigate the connection between Jekyll and Hyde, and to release the doctor from the evil man’s grip.

Retrial

My Lord, members of the jury, the great Internet public, we are gathered here today to re-examine the case against one Gilbert Adair, author of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, a crime against humanity posing as postmodern literature. When he was placed on trial on the first day of November in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, the evidence was overwhelmingly against him. But in the meantime, influential bloggers such as Sergio from Tipping My Fedora pressed the case in Adair’s favour and demanded that it be re-examined. And so we bring the late Gilbert Adair back to trial to examine A Closed Book, a 1999 novel that Sergio regards highly enough to put on his “Top 100 Books” list.

…Okay, I’ve established a connection to my previous Gilbert Adair review, so I think I’ll stop the fake trial here. My original review was a very angry rant written as though I were putting Gilbert Adair on trial for crimes against humanity. He died about a month after I published the review, and I have not changed a word of that review: it stands as an example of just how furious a bad book can make me. However, it seems like putting him on trial all over again would probably be in bad taste… especially since A Closed Book is actually pretty good.

Dance of Death

Elementary, my dear Watson!

—apocryphal; attributed to Sherlock Holmes

The idea came to Robert Louis Stevenson in the form of a nightmare, according to his wife Fanny, and the first draft took only days to complete. Afterwards, she read the manuscript. As usual, she gave Robert her comments. After a while, he called her back to the bedroom and pointed to a pile of ashes: he had destroyed the manuscript and would start all over again from scratch. The story would eventually become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of the most celebrated stories of all of English literature.

But what if that manuscript survived? What if Stevenson never burnt it at all? What if the manuscript came into someone else’s possession? That is the situation created by René Reouven in his book Élémentaire mon cher Holmes (Elementary, My Dear Holmes). And in this novel, we learn that the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a manuscript of such concentrated evil that anyone who reads it becomes a murderer…

A Most Mysterious Murder...

Le Détective Volé (The Stolen Detective) by René Reouven begins with a disclaimer that goes something like this: “Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, and Sherlock Holmes was born in 1854, but such a minute detail wouldn’t have prevented two such remarkable people from meeting.” This is a bit misleading, since there is never at any point in the novel a moment where Sherlock Holmes meets Edgar Allan Poe. And yet…

I will admit, the concept of this novel initially had me baffled. This is a Sherlockian pastiche in which Holmes’ fictional nature is admitted from the outset, and as a result the entire novel is a literary game being played out between Reouven and his readers. Here is the premise: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is sick and tired of hearing all these comparisons between Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories and his Holmes stories. So he uses H. G. Wells’ time machine to send Holmes and Watson back in time to Paris in the 1830s. Their mission is to get in touch with Vidocq, and investigate whether or not Poe ripped the idea for The Purloined Letter from the headlines. And if so, who was the real-life C. Auguste Dupin?