Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly and Other New Adventures of the Great Detective
By Donald Thomas (Pegasus Books, New York). Thomas is such an accomplished hand at writing Sherlock Holmes yarns that he overwrites and overindulgesd, lulling you into complete credulity. When he writes at length about a late-19th century actor-manager named Caradoc Price, he provides such extensive tangential detail that I had to stop reading to go Google the character and see if he actually existed. Thomas is exceeding good at scene-setting. A whole chunk of this new collection of his original Holmes novellas and short stories bears the title “Sherlock Holmes the Actor,” and Thomas not only provides a ripping adventure set in the Victorian theater realm but a 12-page introduction to that story labeled “A Fragment of Biography” which elaborates on Sherlock Holmes’ brief career as a professional actor before he began dabbling in crime detection. He (or rather the usual narrative presence of Dr. John H. Watson) describes roles Holmes played and posits that, based just on the costumed improvisations he developed in his detective work, “he would have encountered little competition on the London stage—except perhaps from Irving and possibly from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. But that was all.”
It doesn’t have the sheer theatrical splendor of an earlier Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Nicholas Meyer’s The West End Horror, but Thomas adds a scholarly severity which is hard to shake.