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Sherlock Holmes and the Disgraced Inspector by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Features
Paperback
(Large Print)
Reader Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Something different, August 17, 2001
Reviewer:
Rory Coker
from Austin, TX USA
Something a bit different in the recent sea of Holmes pastiches. Here the situation faced by Holmes, Watson and Lestrade has a distinctly modern touch, but without jarring anachronism. A psycho serial child killer named Algernon Clayton, convicted 20 years before, has been released from prison on a technicality and has become the leading exhibit in a questionable but popular social reform movement. It's almost routine today for brutal killers to be sanitized by the forces of Political Correctness and converted into saintly, put-upon targets of police brutality and social repression, suitable to be the figurehead of some large organization self-proclaimed to be Fighters for Truth and Justice, and--- it could have happened in 1895 as easily as 1995. Naturally, the luckless Lestrade, who was only indirectly involved in the original case, has become the prime scapegoat of the reformers. Holmes is thus presented with a complex set of problems: if Clayton was indeed guilty, how can he be neutralized by evidence that will stand in court, before he begins another killing spree? How can Lestrade be protected from the press and the reformers? And what hope is there of finding new evidence in a case cold for two decades? To say more would spoil the grim fun. At 140 pages this is just about right in length for a case in which Holmes finds himself doing fairly routine police work in hopes of turning up some lead by sheer chance and persistence. As you can see, this isn't your mother's Holmes pastiche, unless your mother's pastiche was written by Andrew Vachss. You'll enjoy it, I think.
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