My Dear Holmes: Being the Continuing Annals of Sherlock Holmes

Review: Most of the thirteen stories in this slim volume purport to be among the cases that Watson merely tantalisingly referred to. They are often cleverly plotted, and it’s very interesting to know that one derives from a personal reminiscence of the late Michael Harrison.

In that respect this third collection is an improvement upon the second, but Mr Hammer’s style still doesn’t ring true to me. The fact that a word or a phrase was current in Victorian England doesn’t in itself make it appropriate in a Sherlock Holmes story. I was brought up short by Watson’s breakfast references to ‘shirred eggs’, and, having checked various Victorian and modern British sources, finally found the phrase in a modern American dictionary. No doubt Mr Hammer will say that Mrs Beeton gives a recipe, but I’ve never come across the phrase in a British book of whatever age.

David Hammer is the author of a series of insightful and chatty guides to Holmes’s world, and I know he can do better than this.

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 230, 2003]