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.