“Today I do some real sleuthing. In a deerstalker, I
suppose. Wonder if Holmes ever did? Stalk a deer, I mean.”
—Thackeray Phin, By an Unknown Hand (by John Sladek)
Anthony Boucher’s The
Case of the Baker Street Irregulars is a delightful book full of wit, but at the same time it is an incredibly
frustrating mystery. Boucher, a prolific author, critic, and editor, was also a
big Sherlockian and this really shows in this book, which I own in a highly
attractive Gregg Press edition. Although it does not star his usual detective,
Fergus O’Breen, it does connect to O’Breen
in that his sister is a major character, as well as a police officer who
appeared in The Case of the Seven of
Cavalry.
[Note: This review is far overdue. This is because on the day I
originally planned to release this review into the wild, TomCat had just
written a review of Boucher’s The
Case of the Crumpled Knave. I decided to push back the review due to
the extremely similar content.]
When F. X. Weinberg of Metropolis Pictures set out to adapt
the Sherlock Holmes story The Speckled
Band into a film, the reception was initially enthusiastic. After all, it
is a great story for adaptation and Conan Doyle himself said so. Unfortunately,
Sherlockians everywhere suddenly turned against Weinberg when he hired the
hated Stephen Worth to write the screenplay.
Nobody worse could have possibly been chosen for the job
(with the possible exception of Michael Bay, who wasn’t around yet). Stephen Worth has expressed absolute hatred of Holmes
and his stories, and he vows with his screenplay that he will “toughen up” the
Great Detective and show his lily-livered followers just what a real detective does. As the author of
several hardboiled detective novels and an ex-private eye himself, Worth seems
like the ideal choice to butcher the source material.
Suddenly, F. X. Weinberg finds himself branded Public Enemy
No. 1, and when he tries to get rid of Worth, the screenwriter points out a
clause that says that if he doesn’t write
the script, nobody will. Finally, to appease the Baker Street Irregulars, F. X.
Weinberg invites a delegation to come to Hollywood to serve as unpaid
consultants. The invitees eagerly accept, and the stage is set for murder: for
not long after he crashes the welcoming party, Stephen Worth is found shot. But
then his corpse disappears and the Baker Street Irregulars all find themselves
involved in adventures that could have come straight from Conan Doyle’s pen…
This sounds like a job for Sherlock Holmes himself! But since he isn’t around,
the Baker Street Irregulars will have to do.
This book is truly a delightful read for the Holmes fan. You
will find all sorts of great references to the Canon, such as a police officer
named Sergeant Watson who must guard over the house in which the Irregulars are
staying. And the next day when their adventures take place, they all have
multiple connections to the Holmes Canon and the untold stories Watson alluded
to, such as the adventure of the tired captain or that of Colonel Warburton’s madness.
These are witty and wonderful, and they form the most delightful part of the
book.
Unfortunately, as delightful as the book is, it quite simply
falls apart by the ending. This is a book that logically makes little sense.
There’s a huge paradox that
you simply cannot ignore about
Stephen Worth— and as much as you try to forget this gaping hole, the book won’t
let you forget it, making it an integral part of the solution. There’s no
reason why half the people involved should have acted the way they did. There
are inexplicable masquerades that are apparently orchestrated by the same
person even though multiple ones take place at the exact same time in different
parts of town... There’s the ever-so-convenient aspect of motive, which brings
up an entirely new plot hole: how the devil could P.I. Stephen Worth uncover
dirty secrets single-handed, but these same secrets eluded the efforts of the entire LAPD???
And yet, not even this lack of logic makes for a surprising
solution. Half of the ‘twists’ are painfully obvious despite the fact that a sieve holds more water than these revelations.
You get sudden, dramatic reversals of character, and a killer who could have
very well been anybody else with just a bit of tweaking. That’s not a sign of a
strong detective novel.
The book’s saving grace, then, is its wit and the charm of
all the Sherlockian references. As much as I enjoyed The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, I had to swallow a very
convoluted and fundamentally flawed mystery. While it’s a fun book, it’s of far
more interest to the Sherlockian than to the casual mystery fan. If you
absolutely love Sherlock Holmes, you will probably enjoy this book for the
Sherlockian references. But if, like Worth, you can’t stand the fellow, or even
if you are casually indifferent, your reaction could end up being very
different.
The reader is warned.
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