Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #8. Ron Goulart

      The Outbursts of Everett True was a two-panel newspaper comic strip created by A.D. Condo and J.W. Raper that ran from 1905 until 1927, when Condo was obliged to abandon it for health reasons.

       It’s one of the comic strips that Sherlock Holmes could have read. We’re running a few select panels in this issue.

      FROM WATSON’S SCRAPBOOK

      For the past few months, Mr Sherlock Holmes has been having a right good chuckle at the expense of yours truly, but now that Mrs Hudson is at long last returned from her lengthy stay in Yorkshire, where she was assisting her Aunt Ruth to recover from a lingering illness, Holmes’s risibility has finally been laid to rest. Be patient, dear friends, I will explain the circumstances directly.

      In preparation for our preceding issue, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #7, Mrs H, though out of town, spoke on the telephone with Ms Carole Buggé about her writing under the pen-name of C. E. Lawrence. This interview, which began on page 18, was correctly titled: “C. E. Lawrence—The Darker Half of Carole Buggé”—conducted by [Mrs] Martha Hudson. But unfortunately some printer’s devil saw fit to list said article on the Table of Contents page of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #7 in this fashion: Interview Conducted by (Mrs) Martha Watson. (N. B.: This has been corrected in subsequent copies.—MK)

      Martha WATSON?!

      The error vastly amused Holmes, as I was made all too aware. A lesser mind might have laughed for a moment and let it go, but lately my friend has been in the doldrums, as it were, and with no investigations afoot, he devoted a surprising amount of time to devising all sorts of tomfoolery: advertisements from wedding-cake bakers; gift patterns registered for the “happy couple” at Gillow’s; travel brochures pertinent to honeymooning in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales (though not America). And so on … and on! Sophomoric, as I pointed out on more than one occasion, and yet, I admit, it was a most ingenious parade of practical jokery.

      But now that Mrs Hudson is home again, the raillery has ceased, for Holmes has long respected our landlady’s privacy. That she was married is evident in the pride with which she affixes that prefatory Mrs to her name, but further details of her domestic history are not open to discussion.

      Out of curiosity I once asked her whether she had considered calling herself Ms Hudson, instead, but she replied, “No, Doctor, I do not particularly care for that term’s sonority.”

      Speaking of Ms Buggé, I am pleased to announce that The Star of India, a splendid Holmesian adventure that she devised from my notes, and which was published some years ago by St Martin’s Press, soon will be reissued in a British edition from Titan Publishing.

      The current issue of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine is chiefly devoted to American crime stories and their ilk; the only two Sherlock Holmes tales included are “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” which I do believe is one of my friend’s most amazing examples of his pure deductive genius, and “Sun Ching Foo’s Last Trick.”

      —John H Watson, MD

      * * * *

      I am planning to run an all-Holmes issue again in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10 (as we did with SHMM #5). Thus, in our last editorial, we said we would include a delightful Holmes story by German writer Christian Endres in this issue, but we have decided to save it for SHMM #10. Instead we present “Sun Ching Foo’s Last Trick,” by Adam Beau McFarlane, which is shorter and fits better here.

      So if you are not already a subscriber, now is an auspicious time to consider becoming one!

      In regard to Carole Buggé, let me add to Dr. W.’s remarks that her C. E. Lawrence “Silent” series (an excerpt of which ran in SHMM #6) is still going strong. The latest title in this story of the investigations of a New York City forensic psychologist is about to appear: Silent Slaughter; its follow-up, Silent Stalker, is nearly finished . . . Carole a/k/a C. E. is an enormously prolific (and excellent) author.

      * * * *

      Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #8, I am happy to announce, features the latest installment in the exciting, often hilarious exploits of Harry Challenge, star of two novels and many shorter pieces by the estimable and also quite prolific Ron Goulart, as well as two new stories by our regulars, Marc Bilgrey and Bruce Kilstein. Dr. Kilstein has written some fine Sherlock Holmes pastiches, but this time he presents a fictionalized study of one of America’s classically gruesome murders, the Lizzie Borden case. Another dark piece from newcomer Stefanie Stolinsky is based, the author says, on fact.

      Finally, we are ever so glad to bring a new Kelly Locke case from Hal Charles in Kentucky, and the first of a new series of amusing detectival doings in John M. Floyd’s “Traveling Light.” Mr. Floyd’s Lucy Valentine will be back with us again in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #9.

      Canonically yours,

      —Marvin Kaye

      CARTOON, by Andrew Genn

      [no image in epub file]

      SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker

      Not a Cardboard Box(er), or How Making Moriarty a Champion Pugilist in Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows Won Me Over To This Nontraditional Movie Series

      Caveat: As an anti-spoiler partisan who has written on the subject for Publishers Weekly (“Spoil the Plot, Or Spare the Riled,” to promote myself shamelessly), I have decided to write this review in two parts—the first, without spoilers, the second, with some plot developments discussed in detail, for the many readers of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine who will have seen the film by the time this column appears in print.

      Part I

      Color me astonished. I had reservations about Guy Ritchie’s first Sherlock Holmes film, although I found aspects of it appealing. For all the efforts to find Canonical proof texts justifying that movie’s depiction of Holmes more as an action hero than a quiet, patient thinker, both on the part of its production team and reviewers, it’s clear that while that’s an interesting reinterpretation of the Master, the emphasis should be on the “re.” That’s not just me; the DVD actually labels one of its special features, Sherlock Holmes Reinvented. Just as transforming Holmes into a Victorian Nero Wolfean (or Mycroftian) armchair reasoner distorts the character, making him a more intelligent precursor to James Bond, or a less affluent one than Bruce Wayne, also does so. I have generally been open to most variations on the character, from Christopher Plummer’s appropriately-passionate and emotional portrayal in Murder by Decree in the face of corruption and horrific violence, to Nicol Williamson’s paranoid cocaine addict in The Seven-Percent-Solution, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s game-changing 21st century Sherlock. But 2009’s Sherlock Holmes left me unsatisfied, and making Irene Adler into Holmes’s Catwoman didn’t quite do it for me.

      So it was with considerable surprise—and pleasure—that I emerged from a screening of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows very, very impressed. Parts of it were so well done that the movie has cracked my top-10 Holmes movie list (a ranking that does not include television adaptations such as the best of the Brett series, The Patient’s Eyes, or Sherlock, and the subject of a future column). Let’s be clear—this is not a return to the Holmes and Watson of the two Rathbone and Bruce films properly set in