History Repeats

Obviously, I knew that Holmes Sweet Holmes wasn't an original title when I chose it for my second Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody mystery novel. After all, I'd already used it myself as the name for one of the essays in Baker Street Beat!

Nevertheless, I was a bit jarred in going through my files to find the words "Holmes Sweet Holmes" blazoned across the cover of the January 18, 2010 issue of Publisher's Weekly. Below that headline it says, "After a long absence, Conan Doyle's sleuth is back onthe big screen, but he's hardly ever left publishing."

That statement is certainly true. But Lenny Picker's cover story on pages 18 and 19 actually takes a somewhat different tack. It's called "The Return of Sherlock Holmes: Is it inevitable, my dear Watson?" And it begins like this:

"The December 25 release of Guy Ritchie's new movie, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as the Baker Street duo, makes this an appropriate time to speculate whether the film will be the catalyst for another spike in the publication of new Sherlock Holmes books, the first in more than three decades."

Then begins a comparison with the Holmes boom that followed the publication of Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Per-Cent Solution, as correctly predicted by Publisher's Weekly in 1974.  

After two pages of rounding up the usual suspects, and also some unusual ones, the 2010 article comes down to this conclusion: "The publishing world will know soon enough whether history is repeating itself."

More than two years later, it's obvious that the answer is a resounding yes! How much of that is due to the Ritchie movie, how much to BBC Sherlock, how much to some highly talented new writers taking up the task is anybody's guess.

However it came about, MX Publishing alone has come out with so many Holmes-related books in the past year that I barely have time to read the titles, much less the books. For that I am highly grateful, for three of my books are among them.