In the novel a Holmes scholar named Alex Cale claims to have found the diary and then suffers death by shoelace while the Irregulars’ convention is under way. Moore extrapolates from the 2004 death of Richard Lancelyn Green, a real-life Sherlockian who claimed to have found the lost diary and was garroted with a shoelace, to stage a similar, fictitious crime. The 2010 murder in “The Sherlockian” is, like a lot of things in this interestingly researched book, based on something authentic.

In a prologue of sorts, Conan Doyle makes a brief 1893 appearance and explains why he wants the hated Holmes (“My Mam speaks as if she’s Holmes’s mother, not mine”) out of his life. The grail this time is a lost diary of Conan Doyle’s, the turn-of-the-century volume that explains why he resuscitated Holmes eight years after throwing him over the Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarty and leaving both of them for dead. So it needs a girl, a murder and a holy grail, not necessarily in that order. Moore never gets around to investigating, Harold’s story in “The Sherlockian” is set up like a movie scenario and owes at least as much to “The Da Vinci Code” as it does to “The Sign of Four.” It must be pointed out that Harold works at a film studio vetting scripts, because he is so well read that he can fend off any plagiarism claim by finding similar story lines in the public domain. And before he can say “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Harold is swept up into a mystery that will force him to do a latter-day Holmes imitation. Harold White is a bedazzled new inductee into the group. Red herrings, exclamations of “Elementary!” and the assurance that life’s problems have logical solutions are at the core of Mr. This is a novel by, for and about Holmes-quoting mystery nuts, and it understands what makes them happy. Thanks to the sly self-awareness that keeps “The Sherlockian” smart and agile, it’s possible to enjoy this book’s laughable affectations and still be seduced by them.

He’s going to take a lot of readers with him too. Its smart young author, Graham Moore, has done much more than fall into the fancy of Holmes’s existence. Eliot wrote in a 1929 review of “The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories.”įor an extreme example of what Eliot meant, consider “The Sherlockian,” a new novel predicated entirely on Holmes worship, Holmes mimicry, Holmes artifacts and assorted other forms of Holmesiana. “Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence,” T.

The sherlockian by graham moore