The Nature of Things

I've written before about how Sherlock Holmes was my first literary love. I fell in love with him when I was twelve years old and I've never fallen out. Obviously, then, I am a sucker for any story featuring the great consulting detective. It's not just me. There is still an extensive audience for Sherlock Holmes stories, and so the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate, for the first time in its long history, authorized a new Holmes novel.  To complete the task, they chose Anthony Horowitz, who I knew chiefly from his excellent work as screenwriter for the television series  Midsomer Mysteries , certainly one of my all-time favorite television mystery series.  Horowitz channeled Conan Doyle very successfully, I thought. He wrote very much in the style of the master and remained true to the spirit of the originals, particularly in the relationship between Holmes and Watson. The story, of course, is told in the voice of Watson who is writing it twenty-five years after the events. He i...

I have loved Sherlock Holmes since I was twelve years old and spent the summer reading the complete collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about the iconic detective. A sure-fire way to catch my attention for a book is to give it a Holmesian theme, so when I saw news of the publication of The Sherlockian by Graham Moore, of course I had to read it. Moore had a doozy of an idea for this, his first novel. He would write a tale of two storylines. One would be a historical mystery involving Arthur Conan Doyle and his friend Bram Stoker solving a series of murders that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century. The second storyline would take place in the present and would involve the present-day disciples of Conan Doyle's famous detective, the Sherlockians. Moore switches back and forth from one chapter to the next in telling his two stories and he does quite a masterful job of juggling the two tales and keeping the reader's interest. Moore actually begins his tale...

My first literary love affair was with Sherlock Holmes. I met him at the highly impressionable age of twelve and fell instantly in love. I read every Conan Doyle story that featured him - read them more than once. Since then, I have had many loves in my life. Indeed, I have been a very loose woman, literarily speaking, but one never forgets one's first love. He is always special. A few years ago when I read a review of a book called The Beekeeper's Apprentice , I was both fascinated and a bit outraged. How dare anyone tamper with Conan Doyle's perfect creation! But in the end fascination won out over outrage and I picked up the book and read it, and thus a long ago love affair was rekindled, but this time with the added fillip that it became a three-way affair - Sherlock, Mary Russell, and me. Mary is Laurie King's unique creation who was introduced in The Beekeeper's Apprentice as a young orphan girl in Sussex who came under the sway of her neighbor, the be...

One of the first grown-up books that I remember reading as a child was The Complete Sherlock Holmes , all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writing starring his most famous creation, packed into one volume. How I loved that book and how I loved Holmes. He was an eccentric and an iconoclast, just what I longed to be. It was from Sherlock that I learned my love of the mystery. I still devour mystery novels by the dozens each year. In recent years, I've even been able to enjoy my old friend Holmes in well-written mysteries once again. Author Laurie R. King has a pastiche series going, beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice , that stars Holmes and his protege Mary Russell, a protege who later became (horrors!) his wife! Conan Doyle may still be spinning in his grave over that turn of events, but, in fact, the series is very well done and I feel that it is true to the original spirit of Holmes. Holmes, of course, is one of the most enduring characters in literature and he has...