OK, it’s not really called that. I’m reading a “new” Sherlock Holmes story, written in 2001 by, supposedly, John H. Watson and Robert E. McClellan. I picked it up in a charity shop at the weekend and couldn’t resist the promise of a new mystery. It’s actually called Sherlock Holmes and the Skull of Death (how, already, very unHolmesian) and it’s apparently got something to do with Piltdown Man, a true story that’s genuinely interesting in its own right and doesn’t need dramatising.

Anyway, it’s rubbish. I heartily whatever-the-opposite-of-recommend-is it. It’s full of anachronisms and Americanisms that could easily have been edited out and just weren’t. The characters of Holmes and Watson have undergone a complete transformation and, most heinously of all, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle appears as a character in it (Watson’s literary agent – it could have been a nice idea, had it been done better, but it wasn’t).

Even more oddly, the author uses CAPS to provide emphasis in his dialogue. These snippets are all from the same short passage:

“My mind is ever open to ALL sciences,” said Doyle.

“Some say they’ve found the fossils of EARLIEST man”

Holmes smiled, “What do YOU say, Sir Arthur?”

Doyle looked down his nose at Holmes. “Unline Dubois, I INVITE investigation of my belief.”

It’s barely English. I don’t think I’m going to make it to the end.

With flagrant disregard for my new year’s resolution to stop re-reading books, I’m currently re-reading The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.* I started reading it on holiday, when I thought the resolution probably didn’t count, and I don’t seem to have stopped yet.

But it’s not my fault! This morning I read the opening lines of The Three Garridebs:

It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.

Would you be able to stop reading there?

*I wanted to link to the classic orange, black and white Penguin edition, which is the one I’m reading, but Amazon don’t seem to stock it. The first version I read was a facsimile of the original Strand Magazine stories, complete with Sidney Paget’s illustrations, which I can still remember vividly and which are so firmly ensconced in the collective consciousness that every film and TV adaptation looks exactly like them. Unfortunately Strand Magazine was magazine-sized, and the book was book-sized, so the text was minuscule. But it was worth squinting over.