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Book Review, © Copyright 1998, Jim Loy
I, of course, highly recommend all of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories. This book is not by Arthur Conan Doyle. Instead, it consists of twelve stories that were inspired by comments by Watson and Holmes in the original stories, cases which are mentioned, but never published.
The first six (of twelve) stories, in this book, were written by famous mystery writer John Dickson Carr, in collaboration with Doyle's son, Adrian. These stories are very good, and original. I enjoyed them very much.
The other six stories were written by Adrian, without help, after Mr. Carr became ill. And they are very uneven. There is good story-telling here. But, at least three of the stories are close imitations of Sherlock Holmes stories by Adrian's father. There are long run-on sentences and paragraphs; there are confused double negatives; there are even obvious misspellings. But, if you can forgive these faults, you will stumble onto some very interesting writing. To a woman who was an accessory to a theft, Holmes says, "I beg that you will spare me my delusion that you played that part unwillingly." "Spare" may not be the right verb, but I think Holmes' feelings are fairly vivid, here.
All in all, I do recommend this book, very highly, despite its flaws.
To order this book, click Amazon.com (goes directly to this book).