The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes

Returning as an occasional consulting detective in some of the Edwardian era's most baffling real-life cases, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the alleged bigamy of King George V, the 1907 theft of the Irish Crown Jewels, the Dreyfus affair, and other notorious affairs.

Readers of a Sherlock Holmes pastiche have every right to expect a reasonable iteration of Conan Doyle's original creation, a detective whose essential humanity is cloaked in aloofness and whose superior intellect serves a passion to expose crimes. Thomas, a biographer (of Lewis Carroll and others) and novelist (The Ripper Apprentice), instead offers a smug Holmes whose ramblings through a collection of stories based on true crimes at the beginning of this century lack both clarity and credibility. The best of these tales include "The Case of the Camden House Murder," in which Holmes, retained to prove the innocence of an artist charged with the Ripper-like murder of a prostitute, conducts a convincingly quirky investigation with solid examples of Holmesian deduction. In "The Case of the Blood Royal," Holmes defends Queen Victoria's grandson Prince George against blackmail at the hands of Charles Augustus Howell and Prof. Moriarty in what becomes the prequel to Doyle's "The Final Problem." The author describes his tales as historical events, "over which the shadow of the Great Detective is allowed to pass." Holmes's presence in these pages is as fleeting and intangible as that shadow.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Thomas (Dancing in the Dark, 1993, etc.) drags the inimitable detective out of retirement still again to investigate seven mysteries closely based on historical fact, from the alleged bigamy of George V (a case that brings him to the attention of Professor Moriarty) to the theft of the Irish crown jewels from an impregnable strongroom. Holmes journeys with a grumbling Watson to Paris to vindicate Captain Dreyfus (embroiling himself in the death of French President Flix Faure), books passage to Yokohama for the second of two cases of arsenic poisoning, and allies himself with the pyrotechnical barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall for two cases closer to home. Holmes's repeated defense of hopeless cases casts him as an unlikely Perry Mason, and the cases themselves--spacious and leisurely, unfolding over a period of months or years--do more justice to history than to Holmes. But dedicated Sherlockians will appreciate the novelty of the great detective's incursion into real-life crimes that don't involve Jack the Ripper. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.