Witty Little Knitter

"I require your assistance, and you suppose you're too good for my money! Well, you aren't, Mr. Holmes!" "On the contrary. I suspect that I've been too good for better people's money as a matter of fact."

The cases Holmes investigates in pastiches are often grand and important. Conspiracies that involve powerful people. Killers that are so clever nobody but Holmes even knows that they're out there. Cases where the future of the world is at stake (or worse: The future of England). That doesn't have to be a bad thing but to me the point of the original stories has always been that Holmes didn't investigate important cases. He investigated interesting cases. And sometimes it would turn out that there wasn't even a crime behind it all, only an interesting story. But that was enough.

The Whole Art of Detection captures exactly that spirit. All but one stories are about mundane things but that doesn't mean that they're boring. Just because somebody's actions don't have far-reaching consequences doesn't mean they can't do really clever things that are interesting to read about.

Now in some of the stories the solution was quite easy to guess which is a minor drawback but since I enjoyed everything else about them so much I didn't really mind it. Especially because apart from engaging mysteries Faye is also great at writing the relationship between Holmes and Watson and showing how much they care about each other. If you want to be nit-picky you might argue that it's a bit too much. Not because they express their emotions in a manner that would have been inappropriate for Victorian gentlemen but because almost every story has a few lines (or more) that show that, while Conan Doyle used such scenes very sparsely. I, however, am not nit-picky about that. I just enjoy it very much.

ARC received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.