Reviews

The Grand Game: A Celebration of Sherlockian Scholarship Volume One: 1902–1959 by Frank Sidgwick, Christopher Morley, Percy Metcalfe, G.B. Newton, Paul Gore-Booth, Edgar W. Smith, Ebbe Curtis Hoff, Anthony Boucher, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Madeleine B. Stern, O.F. Grazebrook, Winifred M. Christie, Felix Morley, Vincent Starrett, William S. Baring-Gould, Dorothy L. Sayers, Bernard Davies, Norman Crump, Earle F. Walbridge, Donald A. Yates, H.W. Bell, Jay Finley Christ, Remsen Ten Eyck Schenck, W.S. Bristowe, Red Smith, A.A. Milne, Michael F. Whelan, Nathan Bengis, Julian Wolff, Fletcher Pratt, A. Carson Simpson, Esther Longfellow, Ronald Knox, D. Martin Dakin, Arthur Bartlett Maurice, Helen Simpson, T.S. Blakeney, Leslie S. Klinger, Leon S. Holstein, S.C. Roberts, Zasu Pitts, Gray Chandler Briggs, James Edward Holroyd, Rex Stout, J.W. Sovine, Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler, John Ball Jr., R.K. Leavitt, James Montgomery, S. Tupper Bigelow, Pope R. Hill Sr., Robert Pattrick, Vernon Pennell, Otis R. Rice, Bliss Austin, J.B. Mackenzie, Laurie R. King, Crighton Sellars, James Keddie Sr., Gavin Brend

lucyb's review

3.0

A delightful yarn of espionage and adventure in which too-little-known history mingles with familiar literature. The stage is masterfully set; my one serious complaint would be that the novel failed to fully deliver on its astonishingly ambitious promise. A lesser complaint is that the suspense of not knowing (or delight of recognizing) the identity of a certain K---- O'Hara, with whose possessions Holmes and Russell are charged, lasts scarcely more than a page. Surely King's audience can be trusted either to wait for the resolution of a mystery, or to have read Conan Doyle's most eminent contemporaries.