Sherlock Holmes and the Man Who Lost Himself

Rating:
Summary: A book that should have lost itself
Review: As a general rule, I quite enjoy the Sherlock Holmes pastiches that Val Andrews writes. But not this one.

My impression is that the idea for a short story occurred, but it was padded out to make is a short novel instead. Worse still, there is very little in the way of deduction in this story.

The title itself is a little misleading, and the depiction of the regulars (including Inspector Lestrade) is done more as parodies than characters.

And then there is a jokey bit, where law officers refuse to believe that Holmes and Watson are themselves because they don't look like the Sidney Paget illustrations from the Strand magazine. The author found this so enjoyable that it gets used twice.

Not atrocious, but not what I'd expect from Val Andrews either.

Rating:
Summary: A book that should have lost itself
Review: As a general rule, I quite enjoy the Sherlock Holmes pastiches that Val Andrews writes. But not this one.

My impression is that the idea for a short story occurred, but it was padded out to make is a short novel instead. Worse still, there is very little in the way of deduction in this story.

The title itself is a little misleading, and the depiction of the regulars (including Inspector Lestrade) is done more as parodies than characters.

And then there is a jokey bit, where law officers refuse to believe that Holmes and Watson are themselves because they don't look like the Sidney Paget illustrations from the Strand magazine. The author found this so enjoyable that it gets used twice.

Not atrocious, but not what I'd expect from Val Andrews either.

Rating:
Summary: Thin and palid entry in the series
Review: This pastiche Holmes novel opens promisingly when the great consulting detective and loyal companion Watson are interrupted in their Baker Street home by the erruption into their lives of a harried and dishevelled Professor Mainwaring .He tells of how he took his wife to see the doctor ,whereopon both the wife and doctoe promptly vanished .The nurse claims she was never a patient of te doctor .On returning home he finds that the house locks have been changed and another man is claiming to be the owner of the property and there are no records of his existence .
Intrigued Holmes takes the case and discovers that it is linked to Mannering'swork as an inventor and in particular his development of a revolutionary new aircraft engine which is being eyed covetously by England's rivals especially Germany .German agents have stolen the design for the engine and set up the predicament Mannering finds himself in .
Nothing daunted the dynamic duo pusue the villains to the Continebt in an attempt to recover the engine -a journey fraught with peril .It sees them incarcerated in both an English gaol and a German mental institution .
This is all pretty lively and rattles along at a fair clip but what scuppers the novel is the large amount of extraneous padding inserted into the story to ensure it is of a decent length .Several chapters are simply interpolated short stories -we learn of what happened to Holmes after he disappeared ,feared dead ,after the Reichenbach Falls incident ; there is a side story of Holmes solving a burglary in a provincial French town ,and there is a case of murder witnessed by a laboratory ape .None of these are remotely interesting and serve merely to pad out a slender tale to book length .
This is not among the best of the series and only completists need bother reading it .