For his second novel sanctioned by the Conan Doyle estate, Anthony Horowitz has dispensed with the great detective entirely, choosing to set his narrative during the time that would later be known as The Great Hiatus. Yes, Sherlock Holmes, as far as the public knows, is dead, having tumbled over the Reichenbach Falls with his mortal enemy in his grasp. Dr. John Watson is also absent from the events of this story. Instead our narrator is one Frederick Chase, a Pinkerton agent from New York […]
Hearst, Pulitzer, and a headless corpse
For the first half of this brief narrative non-fiction book, the prose crackles and the action builds and the reader wonders how he or she has never heard about any of this before. Collins takes the reader from the discovery of a matching trunk and torso in separate parts of New York City on a sweltering summer day in 1897 through the haphazard police investigation and the competing detective work from New York’s bloodthirsty newspapers. Even readers familiar with the antics of newspaper magnates Josef […]
Flashback
I’ve continued my exploration of the world of comic books with the next two volumes of the New 52 series of The Flash. I chose the Fastest Man Alive as my entry point because of my love for the CW television series and I feel like that series may itself be the reason I’m not capable of embracing the comics format. This is obviously just a personal bias, but compared to the well-rounded characters and fully-developed plotlines of the television show, the comics pale in […]
The Spirit of ’76
It should be obvious given the subtitle, but suffice it to say that Dan Epstein’s book about baseball in 1976 has little to offer people who aren’t serious baseball fans with a keen interest in the history of the National Pastime. However, for diehard seamheads like me, Epstein’s panoramic look at baseball at a turning point is a thoroughly enjoyable read, even if his level of detail can be mind-numbing at times. Baseball was in an interesting place in 1976. The reserve clause, which had […]
Portrait of the Artist as a Dirtbag
Three or four years ago I read Women just so I could cross Bukowski off my list of “important” American writers. I found the book and it’s first-person, semi-autobiographical narrator so deeply unpleasant that, upon finishing the book, I stood up, walked to my kitchen and deposited the book in my garbage can. My first inclination was to set it on fire using the burners of my stove, but I decided that was a little over-dramatic and potentially unsafe. So I suppose you could say […]
Sherlock, Through Modern Eyes
Why do authors keep writing new stories about Sherlock Holmes? There are obvious reasons, of course, including the financial. Holmes’s fans are so zealous that Conan Doyle’s output is nowhere near sufficient, so a steady audience can be counted on. And then there is that signature style, so easily imitated but so damnably difficult to master. While many authors have attempted to recapture the magic of 221B Baker Street, Anthony Horowitz is the first to do so with the explicit blessing of the Conan Doyle […]