A New Review

Joe Revill has posted on nice review of Baker Street Beat on his blog, A Case of Witchcraft, named for his book of the same title. Here's what he says:

Dan Andriacco’s “Baker Street Beat” is a slim volume of Holmesian writings of various kinds. The stand-out piece here is the excellent pastiche, “The Peculiar Persecution of John Vincent Harden”, which is very much in the manner of the original stories. I also enjoyed the time-travelling play “The Wrong Cab”, in which a modern American private eye becomes Holmes’s partner in a grisly mystery set in the Chamber of Horrors; and “Reichenbach Pilgrimage”, which gives a good account of what there is to be seen at the second most famous place in the Canon.

I have to take issue with Dan over his essay on “Writing the Holmes Pastiche”, however, since his rules would disallow any Holmesian fiction not written from Dr. Watson’s point of view, containing real historical characters, and having the word “Case” in the title! They are good enough rules if one is trying to produce an exact imitation of the original stories, I suppose; but some of us want to do something new with the beloved characters. For my part, I thought that it would be interesting to see Holmes at work without Watson, but instead trying to build a working partnership with someone very different, to whom he could show another side of his personality; and I think that it works rather well, in my novel, when circumstances oblige him to team up with the young Aleister Crowley.