Sherlock Holmes in America

Arthur Conan Doyle had a fascination with the United States, even using American characters and places in some of his stories, as with A Study in Scarlet, featuring a flashback set in a Mormon community in Utah, or the Valley of Fear, which deals in part with crime in Pennsylvania coal-mining territories. Irene Adler, the only woman to best Sherlock Holmes, was originally from New Jersey, and Holmes himself posed as an Irish-American spy in "His Last Bow."

Doyle once wrote:

"And no less wonderful to me are those Western cities which, without any period of development, seem to spring straight into a full growth of every modern convenience, but where, even among the rush of cable cars and the rining of telephone bells, one seems still to catch the echoes of the woodman's axe and of the scout's rifle.

These things are the romance of America, the romance of change, of contrast, of danger met and difficulty overcome, and let me say that we, your kinsmen, upon the other side, exult in your success and in your prosperity, and it is those who know British feeling--true British feeling--best, who will best understand how true are my words...."

After four trips to the young country, Doyle even called for the creation of an Anglo-American society to promote ties between the two nations. His fascination with the wilder side of the U.S.—the frontier tales of James Fenimore Cooper, the tales of Poe, Twain, and Harte, the wild west—were the inspiration behind a new collection of short stories which either feature Sherlock Holmes or touch upon his influence in some way. Editors Martin Greenburg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower have gathered fourteen stories and three essays which place Holmes in such cities as San Antonio, San Diego, New York City, Salt Lake City, and Boston, running into notables drawn from the history pages, including the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Wyatt Earp, and Buffalo Bill Cody.

Contributors include Steve Hockensmith, author of the Holmes on the Range mysteries about Sherlock Homes-obsessed cowboy brothers; multiple-Shamus Award winner Loren D. Estleman; Anthony winner Bill Crider' Carolyn Wheat, winner of several major awards and author of How to Write Killer Fiction, and Gillian Linscott, historical Dagger-award winner and author of a suffragette detective series.

The first story in the collection, "The Case of Colonel Warburton's Madness," by Lyndsay Faye, sets the right tone by using one of Watson's untold tales which Holmes cleverly solves in an armchair after the doctor describes a mystery he encountered in San Francisco. It's hard to pick a highlight, as all the offerings are entertaining. Some are written from the traditional viewpoint of Watson as documentarian, some with others taking that role in one form or another, and the concluding story by Michael Walsh, which casts him in a less traditional, but more poignant role than usual, is told from Holmes's own POV, set as a prelude to Doyle's story, "His Last Bow."

Almost eighty years after Conan Doyle's death, his legendary protagonist continues to fascinate. Fans hungering for more fodder to feed their Holmes habit will find the pastiches in Sherlock Holmes in America a welcome "hit."