R. Holmes & Co. **

** R. Holmes & Co., John Kendrick Bangs, 1906

As a kid I devoured the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and read them again many years later. However, Doyle is dead and he left behind only 4 novels and 56 short stories about Holmes. It doesn't take long to exhaust the oeuvre, so one must look beyond the canon for fresh material. A skim of the reading lists from 1992, 1994 and 1995, will reveal that I have amassed a decent collection of extra-canonical works, some brilliant, some abysmal.

R. Holmes & Co ranks below the middle of that scale. It's clever and diverting, but has, from my perspective, some fatal flaws that keep it from rising out of the ratings basement.

A bit of history may be in order for those not familiar with the genre. The character of Raffles, the gentleman thief, was created by E. W. Hornung, who was the brother-in-law of Doyle in the 1890s, the same time Doyle was writing the Holmes stories. Raffles is the evil twin of Holmes, brilliant and urbane, but using his powers for ill-gotten gain rather than for good.

In 1905, Bangs evidently got the idea to create a mash up of Raffles and Holmes, creating Raffles Holmes, the son of Sherlock Holmes and Marjorie Raffles, the daughter of Arthur Raffles, the thief. The second story in the collection chronicles how this came to pass.

My biggest compliant about the stories is that the premise makes no sense. Raffles Holmes seeks out the narrator, Jenkins, to make a bundle by having Jenkins publish his exploits as Dr. Watson did for Holmes and Bunny Manders did for Raffles. However, R. Holmes does some decidedly questionable and sometimes illegal things in the stories. If you're going to be deceiving folks to make money, you can hardly then publish the stories and expect to get away with it or continue to do so in the future.

My second complaint is that the language is unnecessarily stilted, even more so than the originals it draws from.

R. Holmes & Co is available at the Gutenberg Project if you want to check it out for yourself.

Paperback Chair

Check out this chair made from paperback books.

Romancing Hollywood Nobody ***

*** Romancing Hollywood Nobody, Lisa Samson, 2008

This one got delivered to Casa Wunderfool the day before my Orlando trip. Yeah! Reading material for the plane. It was just the right size for the trip and just the thing for my frazzled brain. While I was in Orlando, the first Hollywood Nobody won a Christy award. I reviewed the second one (FHN) here.

RHN fits right in with the rest of the series. In fact, I like it better than FHN. Rumor has it that only one volume remains in this series. Dang.

Texas: A Year with the Boys **

** Texas: A Year with the Boys, by William Hoffman, 1983

A fellow screenwriter loaned me this book because she said some of the characters reminded her of the characters in my latest project. It's an interesting read, and there's one guy in there who is almost a dead ringer for my college roommate. However, it's not a particularly great book.

Conflicts

Volunteering as a reader for a screenplay competition has seriously cut into the amount of reviewable material I can read. I'm doing tons of reading (have to wade through 80 screenplays) but I can't write about any of it, and even if I did, you wouldn't be able to get a copy, so it would be pointless.

All that so say that until I get through them, posting will be a bit sparse. On the upside, for all my trouble I get a full-access badge to the festival. Of course, when you do the math for the benefit on a per-hour basis, it would be cheaper to buy the badge. But for me, someone who is navigating the journey from novelist to screenwriter, the experience as a first reader is very valuable. I'm getting to see first hand what it is like to evaluate random stuff that comes in, just like somebody will one day evaluate a screenplay I send in.

The main thing I've learned so far is that I have to up my game. If I got my first project, currently in fourth draft, to read, I'd drop it in the No box.