“You don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?”—Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” Art imitates life, said Aristotle, but Oscar Wilde allowed as he’d gotten it backward: life imitates art. These days, we’re worried that machines imitate art…
If you’re anything like me—and my sincerest apologies if you are!—then you know what it’s like to be haunted by the specter of the books that you have yet to read. More specifically, those classics that somehow managed to escape your mandatory education curriculum, resulting in an embarrassing gap in literary knowledge. For the longest…
Now that Enola Holmes has reconciled with her overbearing older brothers Mycroft and Sherlock (yes, that Sherlock,) she has settled into a relatively respectable life as the youngest boarder at the Professional Women’s Club. Enola spends her days taking classes at the London Women’s Academy and attempting to get to know her brothers better now…
Curtain Raiser As the Turkish police began to dig up the remains, Holmes and I gratefully sniffed the morning desert air. It was chilly at this hour but the heat would soon become insupportable. “Remember Nietzsche’s dictum,” the detective remarked, lighting his pipe. “Nothing not written in blood is worth reading.” “Or writing, in this…
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Back-to-Front Murder by Tim Major is a thoughtful homage to the original Sherlock Holmes tales, where the Great Detective and Dr. Watson assist a popular mystery writer whose plots seem to be coming to life. There’s a brand new conundrum for the iconic duo of Sherlock Holmes and…
Scribbling my first novels back in the 1970s, already I knew, just knew, that I would never write mystery. Not. Ever. I loved reading classical mystery novels, but the plotty plots didn’t feel right for me as a writer, or the red herrings, or the first murder, the second murder, the third murder, or any…
Chapter the First After my reconciliation with my brothers in the summer of 1889, I spent August quite happily with Reginald Collie, visiting Ferndell, my childhood home in the country. Moreover, after returning to London and my very safe albeit somewhat Spartan room at the Professional Women’s Club, I purchased a delightful new dress, apricot…
Who are the real Baker Street Irregulars? Are they a gang of street kids who worked for Sherlock Holmes, appearing in only three stories but nevertheless spawning at least three major TV shows in the last 30 years; or are they the US’s first and most famous Sherlockian society? Or are they actually Winston Churchill’s…
Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons by James Lovegrove is a continuation of the story of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, as five years later, another monstrous creature stalks across Dartmoor, leading the detective to believe that Stapleton may not have perished in the Great Grimpen Mire after all and…
“But to begin at the beginning…” said Corporal Benjamin Grier. “If you wouldn’t mind,” said Holmes. Sitting back, the American commenced his narrative. “I was owed several weeks’ leave by the army, and got it into my head that I should visit with my old pal Henry all the way across the Atlantic. I was…
