Recently I had the honor of being asked to give a Zoom talk on mystery plotting to Capital Crime Writers, based in Toronto. Art Pittman invited me specifically because of my association with the world of Sherlock Holmes as well as the more than 20 mystery novels I’ve written.
And that set me to thinking about how my mystery writing about an amateur sleuth has been influenced by the greatest detective of all. T.S. Eliot wrote that “Every writer owes something to Holmes.” I owe him a lot.
I don’t recall what won my heart when I borrowed The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes (an anthology) from the Cincinnati Public Library at the age of 9 or 10. But as an adult I can recognize that the Holmes stories excel in character, writing, plot, and setting.
It’s the unique character of Sherlock Holmes that has made his name and his markers—the deerstalker, the pipe, and the magnifying glass—instantly recognizable throughout the world 137 years after his debut in A Study in Scarlet. But the sturdy and reliable Dr. Watson is an equally memorable character, and my narrator Jeff Cody probably wouldn’t exist without him. In addition, Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, was fiction’s first master criminal.
But Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing in the Holmes stories is also first-rate, whether it’s descriptions of weather, immortal maxims such (“You see, but you do not observe”) or great dialogue (“That was the curious incident.”) Conan Doyle is also a writer of great beginnings and great endings; see “His Last Bow” for peerless examples of both.
I’m sure that my four Holmes pastiches (two novels and two short stories) and my three other novels that feature Holmes fall far short of that standard. “We can but try—the motto of the firm,” as Holmes said in “The Creeping Man.”
But most of my fictional efforts have been concentrated on the Sebastian McCabe & Jeff Cody series, with my 15th book about them—The Magician’s Trunk— coming soon. All of their adventures are baskets full of Sherlockian Easter eggs. That’s most obvious in the titles and plots of No Police Like Holmes, Holmes Sweet Holmes, The 1895 Murder, The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore, and No Ghosts Need Apply, but is true of the other books as well.
Right now, with the 2025 already book written (Ding Done! The Witch is Dead), I’m plotting Mac and Jeff’s 2026 outing. And I’m inspired by a line in “The Red Circle.” When Holmes meets Mr. Leverton, of Pinkerton’s American Detective Agency, he greets him by asking, “The hero of the Long Island cave mystery?” Well, this is a mystery indeed—because Long Island has no caves. How did that inspire a McCabe & Cody mystery set in the small town of Erin, Ohio?
Stay tuned and find out in the book that will be called Too Many Suspects.
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