I liked the overview of the “franchise” very much, though this term is probably misapplied. It brought to mind the episode of “House” in which Wilson invents House’s former lover and names her Irene Adler (of course), without any subsequent explanation. Very sly indeed. You didn’t mention Spock’s injunction to eliminate the impossible, presumably because enough space had already been taken up.

Your description of pomo caricatures the notion of an active reader, one aspect of the various theoretical approaches that fall under that label. In fact, the book offers the opposite of “everything goes:” it invites an intensified version of what people do when reading detective fiction, and it gives a very clear (though incomplete) outline of Holmesian “method” and the typology of clues. The excellent “The Sign of Three: Holmes, Dupin, Peirce” provides rigorous semiotic and logical (“pomo”)analyses of Holmes, and is far from proclaiming that every reading is correct.

Nonetheless, you provide an admirable summary and a pointed evaluation.

As for the book, I didn’t find the “gibble-gabble” sufficiently well argued (perhaps a concession to a popular audience), I thought the connection between Conan Doyle’s “hatred” and Beryl’s plotting unconvincing, and the solution selective, while the criticism of the plot was convincing.

Much more likely than the autonomous character hypothesis is that Doyle was at first unsure who the murderer would be and had been out of the detective fiction game for a while. The fact that Doyle originally didn’t want Holmes to be in the book (if Bayard reports this correctly) suggests that the atmosphere of doom was a literary device which later became a crutch for the detective story. No doubt time constraints (the publisher’s deadline) meant that certain details were not always consistent with detective logic. A giant dog is, though a powerful image, not a very discreet weapon.

If Bayard is right about the murderer’s identity, then I think he might have argued that Doyle could have planted that reading, since Holmes so pointedly dismisses the question of motive (Holmes is occasionally on the wrong side of the law in the interests of justice). In any case, it’s made me want to read the whole canon again (not to mention reading some works you mentioned in the “franchise” section)!

Thanks for the review.

Great review of the Holmes franchise.

Re your mention of the animated TV show portraying Holmes in the future: I hope you’re also aware of the sci-fi collections “Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space” and “Sherlock Holmes in Orbit”, two of my favorites. Although I did see a little of the cartoon series and got a kick out of the many references to the original stories, still I couldn’t decide if the robotic Watson was a hoot or just freaky…

And Gregory House’s guitar standing in for the violin! Why didn’t I catch that before!? lol

Anyway, thanks for the review. I appreciate informed comments on any new Holmes title.

My first thought would have been Bond, James Bond.