Very nice round-up of recent Sherlockian tomes...
At least a half dozen titles have come my way in the past year alone, the footprints of a gigantic horde. Michael Chabon's The Final Solution (4th Estate, 131 pages, $23.95) is an elegiac and elegant novella that finds an ancient and physically decrepit (never mentally so) Holmes facing the mystery of a mute boy, a talking parrot and the Nazi threat to England. Set just a few years later, in 1947, is U.S, writer Mitch Cullin's affecting A Slight Trick of the Mind (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, 253 pages, $33.95). It follows a 93-year-old Holmes, now sustained by royal jelly (a product of the bees he keeps in retirement) though a three-headed tale which takes him to Japan and back to Baker Street. Both Chabon and Cullin humanize Holmes considerably, while also exploring the effects of age and memory...
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