Content area
Full text
More than a hundred years ago, in the story "The Final Problem," Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls, locked in mortal combat with his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty. He meant to put an end to his famous character, but public demand forced a revival of the old boy, and, though Doyle faced his own final problem in 1930, Holmes has remained alive and well and has been solving crimes ever since.
This fall has been a particularly active time for him and his Victorian associates. The great man is celebrated in "Murder in Baker Street" (Carroll & Graf, $25, 277 pages), an anthology edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower (whose biography, "Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle," won the Edgar Allan Poe Award). In 11 new stories by Anne Perry, Bill Crider, Loren Estleman and Stuart Kaminsky, among others, Holmes and his chronicler-companion Dr. John Watson solve impossible crimes while bumping into such historical folks as Bram Stoker, Sir Richard Francis Burton and Jane Austen.
"Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Alliance" (Viking, $24.95, 336 pages), Larry Millett's fourth chronicle of the detective's visits to North America and the St. Paul area where he and Watson are assisted by Shadwell Rafferty, a wily Irish giant of a saloonkeeper and self-made sleuth. This time, the trio takes a short hop across the river to Minneapolis where the grim...