Holmes Entangled

January 8, 2018
Readers curious about an elderly Sherlock Holmes who was never a Victorian gentleman may enjoy this offbeat pastiche from Edgar-finalist McAlpine (Woman with a Blue Pencil). In 1943, Jorge Luis Borges hires an unnamed PI in Buenos Aires to read what purports to be an unpublished memoir in Holmes’s own hand entitled Uncertainty. In the manuscript, dated 1928, Holmes claims that Dr. Watson has misled the public about his retirement, saying he has spent five years “disguised as a variety of visiting lecturers at Oxford and Cambridge Universities.” Holmes is dumbfounded when Arthur Conan Doyle appears at Cambridge and is able to identify him even though he’s disguised as classical physicist Heinrich von Schimmel. The author was told where to find Holmes by the spirit of Stanley Baldwin at a séance, despite Baldwin’s being alive and serving as prime minister. Even weirder twists follow in a novel that explores the idea of parallel universes. That McAlpine’s Holmes is far removed from Doyle’s original may disappoint some Sherlockians. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip Spitzer Literary Agency.

Starred review from February 1, 2018
Believe it! Sherlock Holmes actually said, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. Thus does he foreshadow quantum mechanics in this pastiche that has the old bloodhoundhe's 73 nowmoving through a literary detective novel. It's to author McAlpine's credit that he makes what might have been an arch exercise into a joy to read. The plot finds Jorge Luis Borges coming across a manuscript handwritten by long-deceased Holmes. Suddenly Borges is evading a killer and seeking out a PI for help. Then we dive into the manuscript itself, and Holmes tells us he's become a college professor with a phony German accent. He's consulted by a midlist author named Conan Doyle about a problematic seance, and what follows is an engrossing display of Holmesian scholarship, bent on convincing us that Holmes was not the Victorian gentleman the late Watson portrayed. It's a fascinating read, smart and entertaining for all that it's based on those quantum mechanics. That's right, it's Holmes confronting alternate universes, and it's wonderful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)