From Holmes to Sherlock: A Book Review

As faithful readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I've been busier than a cat at a dog show these days, and the posts have been few and far between.

One of the areas in which I'm staying active, though, is in following up on my duties as mystery & thriller book reviewer for the New York Journal of Books.

As I evolve as a reviewer of other people's work, I find I'm less hesitant to speak up when I don't think a book is very good. In this way, I suppose, a reviewer evolves into a book critic.

Book critics, though, also have an obligation to inform readers about books they judge to be a success. Authors who hit the nail on the head should be celebrated in book reviews for their good work, shouldn't they?

Such an author is Mattias Bostrom, a Swedish writer and veteran Sherlockian who has just published a remarkable work: From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon. As someone with only a passing interest in things Sherlock I selected this book to review with mild enthusiasm at best. I ended up reading it from cover to cover and enjoying it immensely.

What was so darned good about it? Check out my review to find out!

Elementary, My Dear Watson?

Jerome Caminada

 
The Telegraph has an interesting article on Jerome Caminada, the real-life detective who may well have been the inspiration for the fictional Sherlock Holmes. Author Angela Buckley has written a biography of Caminada entitled The Real Sherlock Holmes, which underlines the similarities in character, methods, and case work between the real and fictional detectives.

Buckley states that “Caminada became a national figure at just the time that Sherlock Holmes was being created. There are so many parallels that it is clear Doyle was using parts of this real character for his.”

Caminada spent most of his career with the Manchester City Police Force, later operating as a consulting detective. He relied on an extensive network of informants to keep him apprised of criminal activity and would often move among the underworld in disguise. He was purportedly responsible for putting 1225 criminals behind bars.

For the full text of the article, please see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10700558/Has-the-real-Sherlock-Holmes-been-deduced.html.

For an article on Angela Buckley and her book, please see http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/manchesters-sherlock-holmes-new-book-6892219.

 

How Sherlock Changed the World

For those who are fans of Sherlock Holmes and his crime-solving methods, you'll want to catch a new two-hour PBS special coming this fall. It's entitled How Sherlock Changed the World and has as its premise that Holmes was not only the most famous of all fictional detectives, but also had a lasting impact on real-world criminal investigations.

The program discusses real-life crimes solved by the equipment, forensic techniques, and methods of detection employed by the fictional detective.

How Sherlock Changed the World is scheduled to air on PBS on Tuesdays, November 19 and 26, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET.

By the way, if you are interested in my post on the importance of forensic research in crime fiction writing, please visit my Open Investigations blog at http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/4380901-forensic-research-in-crime-fiction-writing

Crime Fiction

Welcome to my blog on crime fiction, writing, and other stuff. I’m also maintaining a blog on my website at http://www.mjmccann/apps/blog and I encourage you to skip over there to check things out. I’ve decided to open up shop here as well, however, because Blogger has outrageously good search engine indexing and better opportunities to interact with the bloggiverse. So, in the immortal words of Darkwing Duck, “let’s get dangerous!”

As I was preparing Blood Passage for publication I found myself wrestling with questions of taxonomy. How would I categorize a novel in which attention shifts between homicide investigators, a murderer who is a high-ranking organized crime official, and a little boy who claims he is the reincarnated spirit of the murder victim at the center of the investigation?

The most appropriate category available from Mother Amazon is Mystery & Thriller, and so Blood Passage has been duly listed there. While other novels in the series may be more accurately described as mysteries, Blood Passage isn’t so much, because while the killers of Martin Liu are eventually identified through the investigations of Donaghue and Stainer – as well as Peter Mah, the Triad Red Pole – the killings perpetrated by Peter are not at all mysterious in nature.

As a result, I took a little comfort in slotting Blood Passage into the Police Procedural subcategory of the Mystery & Thriller category, because it does in truth focus on the investigative procedures of Donaghue and Stainer in some detail. I spent a fair amount of time researching homicide investigation and tried to present a reasonably accurate picture of how police detectives work and live.

But when it came time to settle on the name of the series of which Blood Passage is the debut installment, I balked at calling it the Donaghue and Stainer Mystery series. Instead, after a little experimentation, I settled on “the Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel series.”

Wikipedia defines crime fiction as “the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred.”

While you could argue that this is a typically fuzzy Wikipedia effort, I like it because it touches on all the important elements in what I’m writing. Crime. Its detection. Criminals. Their motives. This works well for Blood Passage and will work well for the other novels to follow.

This distinguishes it from the kind of story in which the mystery and its solution take center stage, usually a story in which the detective follows clues and uses logic and sound reasoning (ratiocination) to identify the perpetrator, as in the Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie vein, or investigators sift through thousands of bits of physical evidence to solve the crime, as in the CSI-centered stories.

The more general definition of crime fiction allows me to position your point of view as reader anywhere in the story I wish. I can withhold the answers from you and make the mystery and its solution the primary focus of your attention, but in some instances I might prefer to position you closer to the characters than to the mystery. In the case of Blood Passage I prefer to have the characters dominate your attention as you move through the story. I want you to learn about Hank, Karen and Peter. And Smoke Archer. And Uncle Sang. And Anna Haynes Donaghue.

So, crime fiction it is.