The Perils of Sherlock Holmes by Loren D. Estleman

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

This short story collection was authorized and licensed by the estate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s greatest consulting detective. A discerning reader need not be wary, fearing a bad pastiche. The author of 70-some mysteries and historical westerns, Estleman has been a hardcore Holmes fan and re-reader of the stories since his adolescence in the Seventies.

Estleman is a master of the Victorian idiom: the prose sounds like Conan Doyle. However, he gives the stories his own imaginative stamp by taking our favorite duo to both the UK and US basing characters on real-life figures such Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and Sax Rohmer (the creator of Fu Manchu). There is even a story that takes Holmes and Watson to mansion formerly owned by Scrooge and now owned by grown up and successful Tiny Tim.

All in all, I read these inventive stories with a smile on my face. Just amazing work, I can’t recommend it more highly.

The Case of the Gold-Digger’s Purse by Erie Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

When Perry Mason’s confidential secretary, Della Street, peeks inside a red-headed gold-digger’s purse, she spies a roll of bills big enough to gag a mastiff – and the gun that killed businessman-heel Harrington Faulkner.

Mason and Della don’t feel it proper or opportune to burden the police with their knowledge. Then – too late – it dawns on them that Della’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon. The police regard the gold-digging ingenue and Mason and Della with the most profound suspicion.

Turns out that in order to raise funds her tubercular boyfriend needs for a sanitarium stay, the gorgeous but loyal gold-digger figures on separating the businessman-heel from a little of his dough. She offers the heel her BF’s cure for the heel’s sickly goldfish. Proving nobody is completely bad, the poor fishies with ick are the only creatures for which the heel has any human feelings. However, her plan goes ahoo when the fish vanish and Faulkner ends up shot to death still with shaving lather on his face.

Thus, Mason has to solve multiple disappearances: rare goldfish called Veiltail Moor Telescopes a.k.a. “the Fish of Death,” a secret formula of an new ick remedy, a vanished bullet, and the real murderer.

In rating this 1956 mystery, the 26th Mason novel, I can give only a qualified thumbs-up. On the positive side, we readers enjoy the retro names (Adele, Genevieve, Elmer, tail-rot for ick) and retro artifacts (straight razors, fountain pens, cars with finicky chokes). The nemesis Lt. Tragg proves himself a most worthy opponent. Gardner gets across points about the fallibility of the police and their unwitting misconstrual of evidence when they think they know who the perp is. In the last scene, Perry and Della do a victory waltz at a dance hall. Letting her guard slip, she calls him “darling.”

Way and Means by Henry Cecil

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

The English judge Henry Cecil (1902 – 1976) wrote comic legal fiction. Think of John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories, though more gentle and less acerbic, just as clever, funny, and enjoyable. Sometimes he is profound – see According to the Evidence, which is about capital punishment.

This novel from 1952 describes four scams pulled off by the con artists Basil and Nicholas. The shameless fraudsters unethically exploit soft spots in the British legal system in order to spin money, avoid real work, and keep their attractive wives in style. Cecil explains their ingenious scams and the vulnerable legal system in clear language. The dialogue-driven stories should be read slowly and savored.

Cecil’s bag of tricks will call to mind P.G. Wodehouse in that he uses stock characters like the dumb colonel and on the make widow. But, to my mind, Cecil writes breezy, sometimes profound stories set in a recognizable world whereas Wodehouse writes silly and not too memorable tales set in Neverneverland.

Reading Henry Cecil’s books makes me feel nostalgic for a vanished world I never knew first-hand but confirms my belief that the basic vices and virtues of human beings haven’t changed and probably won’t change down through the ages.