Sherlock Holmes: The Persian Slipper and Other Stories
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- ¥800
Publisher Description
Did you ever wonder where Sherlock Holmes found the Persian slipper he keeps his shag tobacco in? Had Holmes and Watson ever met before that day at St. Barts? Did Holmes really believe in curses when he said he did? Dr. John Watson reveals the answers to these questions in The Persian Slipper and Other Stories along with cases involving the putative Naval Man, a night spent at a gentlemen's club, Holmes' second marriage proposal, a movable tree, and a surprising wedding ending. Eight traditional pastiches with a touch of fantasy here and there were published in Holmes anthologies at Belanger Books in the US and MX Publishing in the UK. Brenda Seabrooke is the author of 22 books - mostly mysteries - for young readers and many stories in anthologies and literary journals. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robie Macauley Award from Emerson College and was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award at Mystery Writers of America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The eight Sherlockian short stories in this collection from Seabrooke (The Haunting of Swain's Fancy) offer imaginative concepts weakly executed. In the title story, set early in Holmes and Watson's association, a former army colleague of the doctor's, Charley Lyndley, asks for his help, and Holmes tags along to probe a puzzle. Lyndley's sister is bereft because her fiancé abruptly canceled their engagement, possibly after suffering some odd hallucinations. In "The Naval Man," Holmes teams up with Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin, who's in London on the trail of the man he suspected of a murder decades earlier, a case based on a real-life New York City cause célèbre. At one point, Watson says of their arrival at Scotland Yard: "Inspector Lestrade met us at the entrance, his thin sallow face almost aglow with glee." Such awkward prose matches thin characterizations and plots lacking the kind of clever turns that distinguish the work of the best pasticheurs. Those willing to accept less fidelity to the canon are most likely to enjoy these.
