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“The Amateur Executioner: Enoch Hale Meets Sherlock Holmes by Dan Andriacco and Kieran McMullen. MX Publishing. 2013. 180 pp. Enoch Hale, a native Bostonian, is a reporter for London’s Central News Syndicate (where, in 1920, Horace Harker is still a familiar figure, though far from revered) and a friend of Chief Inspector Wiggins of Scotland Yard. As it becomes evident that the apparent suicide of a Music Hall artiste was only the first of a series of murders by hanging, Hale’s determination to find the link between the victims is variously helped and hindered by a cast of remarkable characters that includes his friend T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, Alfred Hitchcock and Winston Churchill. The presence of each person is rarely gratuitous and is never forced. Given Hale’s personality and background, and the edgy mixture of crime and politics in which he becomes involved, their participation is almost to be expected. So, of course, is that of Sherlock Holmes. In contrast to most tales involving Holmes, The Amateur Executionertakes us into an ambiguous and murky world where right and wrong aren’t always distinguishable. I look forward to reading more about Enoch Hale.”

The Amateur Executioner  is available from all good bookstores including in the USA Amazon, Barnes and Noble, in the UK Amazon, Waterstones,  and for everywhere else Book Depository who offer free worldwide delivery. In ebook format there is Kindle, Nook, iPad and Kobo.

“The second novel about Holmes and Irene Adler by Amy Thomas, The Detective, the Woman and the Winking Tree (MX; £9.99), uses the same narrative technique as the first,The Detective and the Woman: Miss Adler’s chapters are told in the first person, and Holmes’s in the third person. It works well, not least because the woman emerges as a strong, intelligent and entirely credible character, whom Holmes rightly comes to admire. The subject of this new joint investigation is the apparently impossible disappearance of a Mr James Phillimore – who, as we remember from Dr Watson’s guarded remark, ‘stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world’. Amy Thomas is a Baker Street Babe – and that is a recommendation.”

The Detective the Woman and the Winking Tree is available from all good book stores including in the USA Amazon, Barnes and Noble, in the UK Amazon, Waterstones,  and for everywhere else Book Depository who offer free worldwide delivery. In ebook format there is Kindle,  iPad, Kobo and Nook.

“56 Sherlock Holmes Stories in 56 Days by Charlotte Anne Walters. After submitting her novel Barefoot on Baker Street, Charlotte Anne Walters set herself the task of re-reading all the short stories in the Canon, one a day, and writing about each of them on the same day for her blog at http://barefootonbakerstreet.wordpress.com/. For the book publication she has added her observations on the four long stories. Her remarks are often amusing, occasionally thought-provoking (why so little protest about the uncanonical back-story for Mary Morstan in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes? I suspect it’s because so much else in the film is defiantly uncanonical), and always personal and entertaining. She seems unaware that the text in the Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes is American, and differs in several instances from what was (and ought still to be) the standard British text. And I can assure her that marriage between first cousins was and is perfectly acceptable in British law – and church law, if it comes to that. Royalties from the book go to the Undershaw Preservation Trust. “

Roger Johnson

56 Sherlock Holmes Stories in 56 Days is available from all good bookstores including in the USA Barnes and Noble, Amazon, in the UK Amazon and Waterstones. For elsewhere Book Depository offer free delivery worldwide. In ebook format there is Amazon Kindle,Nook and iPad format.