Murder, My Dear Watson: New Tales of Sherlock Holmes

Rating:
Summary: Slim pickings again
Review: I went ahead and invested in this follow-up to last year's "Murder in Baker Street", hoping that the stories would be better. Well, they weren't. The tales are just flat and unexciting. What happened to the good stories some of these authors used to contribute to previous anthologies? Out of this batch, maybe two are worth reading. Other than that, I would recommend saving $$ and renting it from the library.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of Plums
Review: Within the past three months I've read a dozen collections of Holmes pastiches, and found this to be the best. It includes several quotable "plums." Such plums were one of the key features of the original Holmes stories; they'd be a raisinless rice pudding without them. Here are a few:

P. 13: The best way to tell a lie effectively is to tell the truth badly.

P. 18: The moral, Watson, is that while life contains its hazards, it is the man who does not know how to calculate the risks who is in real danger.

P. 67: An amateur. Which means he is either a genius or a dilettante. There is no in-between in such cases.

P. 69: Swamp gas can only explain so much, sir, so much and no more.

P. 154-55: I saw the small twitch of irony catch the corner of his mouth. The next moment the face had regained its classically sculpted lines, something poised between Roman senator and an American Indian.

P. 161: He acted as though he expected to have the fatted calf killed daily on his behalf.