Cosmo Digital

Author: Nicholas Meyer
Page Count: 176 pages
Review originally written 6-13-2003

I came upon this novel completely by chance, at a booksale hosted by the Jefferson County Public Library which I forced my mother to take me to. I read, and owned, the paperback version of Meyer's first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Seven Per-Cent Solution, but was unaware that he had continued on with Holmes and Watson.

I was not sure what to expect of this book when I first began to read it. I did buy the hardcover version of this book, as well as a hard version of the first tale mentioned above, although I already own a copy of it. The book itself was pretty short, and I read the entire thing in just two days.

I do have some reservations about this book. Some of this has to do with the large number of famous individuals that Meyer wrote into the book, including Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Bram Stoker, among others. This was interesting, but it did tend to distract from the mystery. If made me feel as if Meyer was writing the book for the sole reason of turning these people into characters. Although many of these famous figures were suspects in the murder case Holmes was trying to solve, I knew that because they were real people, none of them would turn out to be the killer. My suposition was correct, and the killer turned out to be a doctor who had hitherto played a small role in the book, and who was not modeled around any real life person.

Another thing which irked me about this book was what seemed to be a lack of any true deduction of the part of Holmes. It seems as if he and Watson just created a theory about what happened, and went with that until they just happened to discover the real killer who then proceeded to explain everything to them. I did not see any piecing together of the facts; there wasn't any set of clues or evidence that Holmes followed, other than the Indian cigar. It therefore seems to me that they came upon the conclusion too quickly and without any collaborating facts, and just happened to be correct in their guess.

It still seems to me that the mystery was a secondary thing to having all the famous characters present in the book. Perhaps the book would have held more value to me if I was more interested in those people and knew more about them than what was shown in this book, or maybe not.

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