Sherlock in Love - Hardcover

Naslund, Sena Jeter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879239778 ISBN 13: 9780879239770

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1993

Synopsis

While attempting to pen Sherlock Holmes's biography, Dr. Watson receives death threats and he decides to find out why, plunging himself into a world of unearthed diaries, stolen journals, apparitions from the past, and bizarre characters.

About this title

About the Author:

Sena Jeter Naslund grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where she attended public schools and received the B.A. from Birmingham-Southem College. She has also lived in Louisiana, West Virginia, and California. She received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of the national bestseller Ahab's ' Wife and the short-story collection The Disobedience of Water Her short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other journals. For twelve years, she directed the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisville, where she teaches and holds the title Distinguished Teaching Professor. Concurrently, she directs the low-residency M.F.A. in Writing Program at Spalding University, Louisville. She is coeditor of the literary magazine The Literary Review and the Fleur-deLis Press at Spalding University, and has taught at the University of Montana and Indiana University. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council, she lives in Louisville with her husband, John C. Morrison, an atomic physicist.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A triumphant reimagining of the Sherlock Holmes canon that identifies, once and for all, the great love of the detective's life. Detailed summary would wreck the inventive plot by unmasking its mysteries, which begin to unfold when Dr. Watson's 1922 announcement that he is writing a biography of his late friend brings a storm of threats and warnings against the project--two of them from Mycroft Holmes and a writer identifying herself as Mrs. John H. Watson. The disappearance and reappearance of a mysterious old mental patient called Nannerl leads Watson to a secret Holmes had kept even from him (a secret that someone is now determined to keep from coming to light): Holmes's fascination, dating back to his earliest years with Watson, with Victor Sigerson, the gifted violinist who gave the detective lessons back in 1886 and left him his prized Stradivarius in his will. By comparing his own notes on the Sigerson affair with Holmes's account in his diary, Watson uncovers the woman, code-named ``English Violet,'' with whom Holmes was secretly in love--the woman for whom he traveled that summer to the kingdom of Ludwig II in a futile diplomatic errand that placed both Holmes and Violet in danger. Where does all this leave Irene Adler, the woman of Holmes legend? Don't worry: Naslund (the story collection Ice Skating at the North Pole, 1989) calls on her to point the feminist moral of Holmes's romance in a magical epilogue. Despite some incredible flights of fancy in Ludwig's fairy-tale Bavaria: one of the very few Holmes pastiches that not only honors the great man's memory (compare Nicholas Meyer's slapdash The Canary Trainer, p. 821) but unleashes his residual mythic power for more ambitious purposes. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0879239778
• ISBN 13: 9780879239770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240