Sherlock-style deducifyin’ in old San Francisco

In the late 19th century, when the Old West was giving way to the new, a drover bored with herding beeves and hankering for wild and woolly fictional mystery-solving might pick up a copy of “The Fireside Companion” to see what the Old Sleuth was up to, or maybe poke his nose into Street and Smith’s adventures from the casebook of Nick Carter. Or, as author Steve Hockensmith would have it, if two cowboy brothers, Otto “Big Red” and Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer, each a prime example of the family’s proclivity for “hair red enough to light a fire,” were handed the magazine story “The Red-Headed League,” they’d definitely give it a gander.

To be precise, Big Red read aloud the Sherlock Holmes tale to his illiterate elder brother, thereby changing their lives forever. This was mainly because Old Red (not all that old at 27), a contemplative, pipe-smoking misogynist, felt an immediate kinship with the celebrated sleuth. He was convinced that by using Holmes’ “deducifyin’ ” techniques, he too could solve crimes.

He’s been right about that.

In several short stories and two novels, Old Red has thwarted cattle thieves, unearthed and linked clues, saved lives and solved murders using the Sherlockian tools of data gathering and observation. His success as a “puzzle-breaker” eventually inspired him to trade droving for a life in law enforcement, with Big Red tagging along as his Dr. Watson, hoping that his chronicles of his brother’s exploits would lead to a career in literary yarn-spinning, preferably in the pages of Harper’s Weekly.

In their last adventure (2007’s “On the Wrong Track”), they became official lawmen working for the Southern Pacific Railroad, “a fleeting period of employment,” according to Big Red, during which “my brother and I were beaten, shot at, hurled more than once from moving train cars and witness to (and unintentionally party to) the fiery destruction of an S.P. engine. All in all, one of the more memorable weekends of my life.”

Hockensmith opens his latest novel, “The Black Dove,” with the brothers down on their luck in “what some would consider the most sinister section of the world’s wickedest city -- Chinatown in San Francisco, California,” being chased by “highbinders with hatchets,” members of a local tong. How they find themselves in such a pickle is a quirky, exciting and at times surprisingly poignant tale, and Big Red spins it out in cowboy lingo as colorful, funny and entertaining as the story itself.

Fresh from a rude turndown by the Pinkerton Detective Agency (possibly by the same personnel director who would later hire the young Dashiell Hammett), the brothers are invited to dine in Chinatown by Gee Woo Chan, a pleasant doctor they met while working for the Southern Pacific. Before too many pork buns are consumed, they’re joined by another carry-over from the last book, Diana Corvus, a beautiful, hard-boiled lawwoman. Big Red is already smitten, and before long even Old Red is looking a little moonstruck.

When Chan is asphyxiated by the gas lamps in his home-office, the local police, led by a thuggish Sgt. Cathal Mahoney (a.k.a. “The Coolietown Crusader”), declare it a suicide. But Old Red spots several clues that suggest murder. The brothers and Corvus begin their own investigation, working through a cast of characters that includes a smarmy private detective named Wong Woon; Little Pete, the emperor of Chinatown who “had a hand in so much sin and corruption he could almost compete with City Hall”; a hip, young guide named Chinatown Charlie; and assorted knifers and hatchet men. There also is the mysterious, exotic beauty known as the Black Dove, recently of Madam Fong’s house of pleasure, who reputedly was the last person to see Chan alive.

Other books and TV series have featured genre-melding cowpokes armed with ratiocination as well as revolvers, but Hockensmith’s take is quite special. There’s his combination of intriguing mystery, breathless action, colorful characters and enough laugh-out-loud moments for the book to fit in the humorous crime category. There’s the wide-open city of 1890s San Francisco, a backdrop considerably more substantial than one composed of prairie set pieces.

And, of course, there’s the author’s better-than-clever use of the Holmes conceit. There are numerous references to the works of that “top-rail yarn spinner” Watson, including Old Red’s use of Holmes’ quote in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”) and a discussion of the detective’s cocaine use, prompted by a visit to an opium den. And it doesn’t take Big Red long to compare the stunning, whip-crack smart -- and possibly deceitful -- Diana Corvus with Irene Adler, whom Holmes considered the woman.

Old Red may be the detective of the family, but his younger brother is pretty observant too -- and poetic when he wants to be. He writes of Madam Fong, with her powdered face and bright silken clothes, “She looked like fresh flowers on an old grave.”

With prose like that, how long can it be before Big Red earns his Watson stripes and turns his brother into a dime-novel hero?

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Dick Lochte is author of the comedy thriller “Croaked!”