Welcome to Litsy!

repost fore @dabbe

Sorry so late; surgery got in the way. The results are in! 🤩
•Our Name: The Litsy Irregulars
•Reading: bi-monthly
•Entire year's list: in the pic above.
A quick check-in will be given on the off-months; discussions will be low-key. All are welcome to join, and I'm tagging those who already expressed interested. Add your name below if you want to join! #foreversherlocked 🖤🤎🩶

I am so sad this is the last book in the series!
Mycroft seeks revenge and builds up relationships that will serve him well as he moves in the world of power, but he is at his wits ends when it comes to his brother. Their two cases come to a surprising connection and Mycroft starts to accept Sherlock as he is with help from friends and life lessons.
4.5/5 read for a diverse and really interesting Sherlock tale focused on his first case

@kspenmoll I can't thank you enough for the lovely get-well package. The books are right up my mystery alley (especially the SHERLOCK one, which I haven't read 😱) and will keep my mind busy. The pens are perfect for the lovely journal. The LUCY mug is sooo meee! (I called myself “Crabby Abbe“ as a teacher!) and the post card is hysterical. What brought me to my, though, were the worry dolls. I had no idea how much I needed them. 😅 ⬇️

S.C. Roberts didn't invent the Holmesian Game of treating the Canon as a factual subjects for critical analysis, but he is credited as having popularised it, so it was reasonable to assume his story, "The Adventure of the Megatherium Thefts" would feel authentic, and it does (phew! ?)
Rather than featuring a paleontological crime, the Megatherium in question is a gentleman's club similar to the Diogenes, but allowing more conversation between ⬇️

Stuart Palmer was a screenwriter and detective fiction writer, whose series of "spinster sleuth" mysteries featuring Hildegarde Withers sound interesting in both book and film form, and I'm minded to seek them out.
His Holmes pastiche, "The Adventure of the Marked Man" sees H&W in Cornwall investigating a series of death threats against an unassuming man. I don't think all the ends were quite gathered together, but it was still a good story 4?

Vincent Starrett was an important Sherlockian scholar, so I had high hopes for his "Adventure of the Unique 'Hamlet'", and while it was fun, it was a little too fun-ny. Written for private circulation to a group of like-minded Sherlock aficionados, I think there are some in-jokes that don't land so well for a general audience, & the amusing comments about eccentric bibliophiles edge into self-referential indulgence. But - it was still fun ? 3.5?

Some years after ACD's death, a typewritten, unpublished Holmes story was found amongst his papers, titled “The Case of the Man who was Wanted“. Its discovery was reported, but the ACD estate said it would not see print as it was a somewhat inferior work. Outraged readers campaigned for its release and so persuaded (🤑💵) it was first published in USA.
Retired English architect, Arthur Whitaker, recognised the story as one he'd sent to ACD years⬇️

The first story, "The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage" is by Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, a Catholic priest who wrote and critiqued detective fiction during the Golden Age of British crime writing, and is perhaps best known for his 10 rules of detective fiction. He also wrote a BBC radio play about a fictitious armed revolution in London in a documentary style which fooled many listeners into believing it was factual, and which Orson Welles ⬇️

Lancelyn Green's story-by-story introduction is an informative read, setting the stage for his selection of homages to Holmes. He states that he has been careful to collect stories that are written as serious 'apocrypha' rather than parodies, so I'm hoping for some quality entries 🔎📖
Paganini's violin concertos 1 & 2 seemed an appropriate musical accompaniment 🎻
#BooksAndMusic

I see from my previous post for this book from two years ago that I celebrated finding it with a chippy dinner of pie, chips & gravy, seeing which has given me the midnight munchies! 😋
This anthology of pastiches was first published in 1985, the stories being drawn from the 1920s onwards.
Editor, Richard Lancelyn Green, was an acknowledged Holmesian expert, who at age 50 was found garroted to death with a shoelace tightened by a wooden spoon. ⬇️