The Centennial Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes, that most famous and durable of all detectives, is kept alive not only by the passionate attentions of the Baker Street faithful; his life and casebook continue to be extended, 57 years after the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by a whole platoon of neo-Holmeses. The very first Holmes, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in 1887, and the centenary is being marked by still more new work.

Michael Hardwick’s The Revenge of the Hound carries the imprimatur of the Conan Doyle estate. Hardwick earlier wrote “Sherlock Holmes: My Life and Crimes.” The year in the new novel is 1902; Dr. Watson is engaged, Holmes is not and feels his day is over. But a mauled body is found on Hampstead Heath, and the inevitable guess is that the Baskerville beast has somehow reappeared. How better to re-energize Holmes? Then there are the matters of a love letter likely to embarrass the newly enthroned King Edward, the theft of Oliver Cromwell’s bones, a mad peer and a subversive organization, confrontations in a country manor and a crypt in Highgate Cemetery.

Hardwick’s detailing of Holmes’ life as we have read of it is predictably perfect, and the Irregulars should take to the book as to comfortable old slippers. The plotting is in fact a good deal more diffuse than Doyle’s, the pace hesitant, the denouement melodramatic but short of the ingenious surprises Doyle could bring off. But the affection of writer and reader for the icon is all that matters. One guesses Hardwick will be let off easy.

Affection is multiplied in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 16 new Holmes pieces by authors as various as Stuart M. Kaminsky, Dorothy B. Hughes, Peter Lovesey and Stephen King. The stories approach parody, but pastiche is the better word, because the emulations are never rude.

King contributes a clever locked-room puzzle involving a trick-of-the-eye painting, and his Holmes really cries, “Quick, Watson! The game’s afoot!” John Gardner (busy extending the 007 casebook these days) writes a factual article about the real London underworld of Holmes’ (or Prof. Moriarty’s) day. Dorothy B. Hughes offers a swift, adventurous tale about stolen diamonds and even manages a ringing prophecy of educational equality for women.

A well-mixed and amusing assortment, a pleasant birthday gift for the master.

Back in the present day, AIDS is becoming as endemic in literature as in the society. In Early Graves, Joseph Hansen’s homosexual insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter finds the body of a murdered AIDS victim on his doorstep, and there appears to be a serial killer at work who specializes in AIDS sufferers.

The solution Brandstetter discovers is more complicated but not less tragic. In this ninth Brandstetter mystery, Hansen as always writes about the gay world with a calm sensitivity and candor that neither exploits, advocates nor condemns. His capturing of the new grief and fear in that world transcends the crime genre.

Murder in the CIA is Margaret Truman’s ninth Washington-set mystery. She is very good and it is very good. Here she invades the turf of John Le Carre and the others who write about the shadowy, double-dealing world of spies and dirty tricksters.

She draws on her close knowledge of government as seen from the White House and she does not mind bringing her father into the wings, if not onstage. Indeed she lets one of her characters vindicate Harry Truman’s establishing of the CIA and describe the corruption from within of Truman’s limited intentions for it.

“He got snookered,” a character says. “Allen Dulles . . . thought Truman’s views on intelligence were too limited. . . . He sent a memo to the Senate Armed Services Committee undercutting Truman’s view of what the CIA was supposed to be.” Congress awarded the agency new powers and a freedom from accountability. Now, says the character, “At best it’s disorganized and ineffectual. At worst, it’s evil.”

The Company is strewn with evil in the novel, which begins when a bright young woman who runs a literary agency dies at Heathrow Airport. Truman’s heroine, Colleen Cahill, herself a CIA person, is suspicious and, of course, rightly so. The victim was not all she seemed to be and neither is much of anybody else.

Truman’s complex plot is crowded with events and with small, authenticating details (e.g., the pleasures of an offbeat “in” hotel in London, 11 Cadogan Gardens, and a sunset seen from the roof terrace of the Hotel Washington).

Lullaby and Good Night, ostensibly based on a real case (not otherwise identified) in New York in the ‘20s, is a potboiler that never gets to the boil. It is peopled with historical figures, like Madam Polly Adler, Texas Guinan and Mayor Jimmy Walker, but it is woodenly written, with unsayable dialogue. Its tale of a young actress-wife betrayed by her husband, sent to prison, deprived of their child and ultimately driven by circumstances to work for Adler (at top prices) is unpersuasive and unmoving.

Peter Barthelme, said to be a member of the well-known writing family, is in the advertising business in Houston. In Push, Meet Shove, his first novel, his hero, a Houston ad man, is trying to keep his agency afloat. A ruthless oil executive blackmails him into lending a hand on some offshore smuggling.

It is all contrived and unconvincing, although Barthelme doubtlessly knows boats and advertising. The latter is made to sound as if it consists entirely of hard drinking and personal dissatisfaction.

H. R. F. (Harry) Keating, the London author of the Inspector Ghote of Bombay series and other mysteries, has chosen The 100 Best Books of Crime and Mystery, from Poe’s “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” in 1845 to P. D. James’ “A Taste for Death” in 1986.

It is an act of folly, obviously, as Keating admits in a charmingly defensive introduction, and he anticipates the first cry of “What! No Dick Francis!” Yet I can’t imagine anyone who enjoys crime fiction being without the book.

It is a guide to overlooked gems. I had never heard of Jon Franklin Bardin’s “Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly,” for example, but it sounds terrific. Keating’s culling is also a refresher course in such familiar works as Agatha Christie’s “Sleeping Murder” and Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye.”

Keating devotes two pages to each of the books, and I suspect that only someone who writes in the form (and who reviewed mysteries for something like 15 years) could have so eloquently and precisely accounted for the importance of each book and its author’s whole body of work.

The genius of Margaret Millar (two titles included) is, Keating says, “her recognition of the abysses in the human psyche that may lie behind the most ordinary-seeming individuals.” (And “how well she writes,” he murmurs, rereading “Beyond This Point Are Monsters.”)

His startling but, as you ponder it, accurate encomium for P. D. James’ “A Taste for Death” is that “Never before has there been a crime novel about religious faith.” The pathologist who has the taste for death hopes it will bring him close to “the central mystery of death, which is surely what comes after, the sustaining key to religious faith.”

The book is lit with insights to authors as distinct in time and feeling as Margery Allingham and Ed McBain, Jim Thompson, Tony Hillerman and Ross Macdonald. Collectively, it makes the case for the variety of criminal fiction and its value as a reflection of social history. Keating’s folly may also preempt 100 insomniac nights, more than three times that many if you count the titles cited but not discussed.

THE REVENGE OF THE HOUND by Michael Harwick; illustrations by Steranko (Villard Books: $17.95; 288 pp.) THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Rossel Waugh; illustrated (Carroll & Graf: $18.95; 334 pp.) EARLY GRAVES by Joseph Hansen (Mysterious Press: $15.95; 192 pp.) MURDER IN THE CIA by Margaret Truman (Random House: $17.95; 332 pp.) LULLABY AND GOOD NIGHT by Vincent T. Bugliosi with William Stadiem (NAL Books: $17.95; 457 pp.) PUSH, MEET SHOVE by Peter Barthelme (St. Martin’s: $14.95; 200 pp.) THE 100 BEST BOOKS OF CRIME AND MYSTERY by H.R.F. Keating, foreword by Patricia Highsmith (Carroll & Graf: $15.95; 220 pp.)