Sherlock in Love: A Novel - Softcover

Naslund, Sena Jeter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688178448 ISBN 13: 9780688178444

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2001

Synopsis

How did Sherlock Homes come into possession of a true Stardivarius?  Who was the one true love of the great detective's life?  And what shattering disappointment left the detective with feelings of overwhelming melancholy?  As Holme's great friend, Dr. Watson, sets out to answer these questions and recount the thrilling "lost" adventure of Holmes's attempt to rescue the love of his life from a mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, his own life is threatened by a figure in a familiar Inverness coat and deerstalker cap.

In this extraordinary novel, Sena Jeter Naslund, author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller Ahab's Wife, brilliantly reweaves the colorfully cryptic, fog-enshrouded world of Sherlock in Love is at once a rewarding entertainment and a remarkable homage to the greatest sleuth in literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Sena Jeter Naslund is a cofounder and program director of the Spalding University (Louisville) brief-residency MFA in Writing, where she edits The Louisville Review and Fleur-de-Lis Press. A winner of the Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction award, she is the author of eight previous works of fiction, including Ahab's Wife, a finalist for the Orange Prize. She recently retired from her position as Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Louisville.

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: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0688178448
• ISBN 13: 9780688178444
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240