The Execution of Sherlock Holmes: And Other New Adventures of the Great Detective

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The Execution of Sherlock Holmes: And Other New Adventures of the Great Detective

by Donald Thomas

3.47 · rating details · 51 ratings · 14 reviews

"Creepy atmospherics and unpredictable plot twists."-Publishers Weekly "Sherlockians old and new should relish Thomas' wit and elegance."-Booklist "Dedicated Sherlockians will appreciate the novelty of the great detective's incursion into real-life crimes."-Kirkus Reviews Crossing historical fact with detective fiction, the cache of the celebr...more

Hardcover, 351 pages

Published January 1st 2007 by Pegasus Books

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Apr 17, 2011

Mike rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: Anyone

This book is both more singular and, I think, more consistent than the other Holmes pastiches by Mr. Thomas that I read before this volume. Overall I think this collection of stories had more “punch”. I also find myself writing more “details” into this review than I normally do; maybe not so much as to be spoilers, but enough to illustrate specific thoughts about the collection. Again I find myself only giving it a "3" because it just doesn't quite deserve the "4" - call i...moreThis book is both more singular and, I think, more consistent than the other Holmes pastiches by Mr. Thomas that I read before this volume. Overall I think this collection of stories had more “punch”. I also find myself writing more “details” into this review than I normally do; maybe not so much as to be spoilers, but enough to illustrate specific thoughts about the collection. Again I find myself only giving it a "3" because it just doesn't quite deserve the "4" - call it a definite "3.5".

On a side note, I an many others are so picky about the Holmes stories that at times we may lose sight of the great pleasure they bring us. For true fans any tale of the Great Detective is satisfying because it gets us another "fix". The irony of course is that Conan Doyle wrote his Holmes tales quickly and they are rife with errors and contradictions and yet these are the "gold standard". One should have pity on the author who dares take up the pen (word-processor?) to follow in his footsteps. Instead, we judge more harshly because they are not Conan Doyle. I suspect I am as guilty as anyone else in this regard. That's it for the mea culpas.

To be sure the opening tale, “The Execution of Sherlock Holmes” is very different and dark. We get Holmes’ tale as it occurs to him; Watson adding in a “framing story” of how he acted during this time and how Holmes related his part to him. While the author may have woven a nugget of historical fact into the story (an explosion and fire), it brings together a collection of villains intent on the destruction of SH. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but after completing the collection I wondered how this SPECTRE-like association began. It made for good reading, nonetheless.

The quality of writing is very high, as it has been in all of Mr. Thomas’ books so far. In this book, I felt fewer of the moments when a phrase or mannerism grated on my sense of Holmes and Watson. But, the author traded small issues for larger ones. The title tale is one such; cleverly written, but very bold. Another has Holmes operating as a one man code-breaking organization (ok, Watson does lend his assistance.)

Now, it is true that Holmes has broken codes (cryptograms, too) in the “official canon” (one thinks immediately of “The Dancing Men”), but those were ciphers created by individuals or criminal organizations, not the intelligence arm of a foreign government! It is an engaging tale, to be sure. There is an excellent mix of detection mixed in with the code-breaking and there may have been some historical fact (other than the names and types of British warships prior to WWI) used, but that I cannot judge. Does this strain the credulity of even the most ardent Holmes fan? I thought it was reaching a bit.

The remainder of the stories is a decent group of tales spanning a man falsely accused of murder in a small village, the early 20th century fascination with “spiritualism”, “mesmerism” and “phantasms”, and the coronation (a year after his mother’s death) of Edward VII. Each is a fairly well-constructed tale (the murder accusation being perhaps the weakest in the group) and holds the reader’s attention. The final one brings back a character (discussed, but never met) from the first story, which is the foil against whom Holmes judges himself.

In this last tale, the villain is stuck on a railway bridge, over the Thames, cut off on one end by Lestrade and a group of policemen. On the other side, Holmes and Watson are advancing as the man fires off his last shots – the final one being aimed at Holmes over a short distance. Now, this is what I object to: rather than both firing simultaneously like in some many other tales (think Peter Gunn, or a western, or film noir), Holmes fires only after further approaching the man. Now is that sporting or what? It most certainly isn’t cricket!

I think it diminishes Holmes, making him feel smaller and pettier than he should. True, he had stated throughout the story that this was to be a duel from which only man would survive, infuriating his brother Mycroft and Lestrade along the way, but it still feels wrong. Holmes is not the wild gunslinger who we expect to shoot first (or an unarmed man). Not that shooting first is a bad thing; I am one who strongly objects to George Lucas re-writing the original Star Wars film so that Han Solo does not fire first in the bar.

Overall, I think this collection of stories worked best for me (so far). There is plenty of good plotting, detection, and characterization throughout the author’s expansion of the adventures of Holmes and Watson. I would not have a fan miss any of them. Read and enjoy.
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Jun 06, 2009

Cynthia rated it

Shelves: 12th-grade-advisory-reading-books

This book captured my mind because in it contains 5 different case stories which reveals different aspects of what Sherlock Holmes and his companion actual does to help his clients. The most interesting case was "The Execution of Sherlock Holmes" because it was a change of event when Holmes was actually taken captive by his enemies and imprison within a jail cell. He was able to use his mind to help him find a way to escape the jail cell or else face being hang on a noose.

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Oct 28, 2009

Lindsay Frost rated it

Shelves: reviews, mystery

The Execution of Sherlock Holmes
By Donald Thomas

Publisher: Pegasus Books
# of Pages: 348
Age Rating: 13+
My Rating: 4 Stars

Synopsis:

Drugged, manacled, condemned to a dank cell in the depths of London's infamous Newgate prison, the world's greatest literary detective awaits execution by a vengeful crew of formidable enemies. Escape is impossible; death, a certainty. But not for Sherlock Holmes, who, in a stunning display of intellect and de...more

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Aug 01, 2008

Jason Pettus rated it

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

As someone who for a long time now has been dedicated to the newest of the new in the contemporary arts, I of course have a low tolerance for so-called "comfort food" projects; that is, the act of revisiting a set of fictional characters or a certain fictional milieu over and ove...more(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

As someone who for a long time now has been dedicated to the newest of the new in the contemporary arts, I of course have a low tolerance for so-called "comfort food" projects; that is, the act of revisiting a set of fictional characters or a certain fictional milieu over and over again, not because the milieu is necessarily good but merely for the warm, cozy sense of the familiar such an activity provides. After all, it's this exact compulsion that inspires the lowest and crappiest forms of the arts altogether: the endless soap operas, the endless cop and lawyer and doctor television shows, the endless mystery novels all featuring a quirky detective protagonist. But that said, I confess that I too fall prey to this pleasant sense of the familiar sometimes, that happy sense of the known and understood that comes to eventually supersede whether or not any particular project is any good, the artistic equivalent of sleeping every night in a favorite t-shirt despite it being old and ratty and a little smelly.

One such comfort-food subject for me, for example, is that of Sherlock Holmes, that delightfully sociopathic private detective of Victorian-Age London, the invention of doctor-turned-author Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1800s, a character who ended up being featured in a total of four of Doyle's novels and 56 of his stories. After all, even since a child I have always deeply connected with Holmes, and have always empathized with the tortured situation he found himself in; a brilliant rationalist with a barely disguised contempt for humanity, he was much too smart to be a cop and much too arrogant to be a politician, instead adopting the freelancer's life and collecting massive amounts of knowledge just to satisfy his own intellectual curiosity, forced into heavy opium use during down-times of his life just to get his brain to slow down a little. Add to this, then, that Doyle's Holmes stories were one of the first projects of my childhood to introduce me to Victorian-Era England, a time in both history and the arts I have come to have a deep love for as a middle-aged adult; perhaps, then, you can see why the mere idea of Sherlock Holmes produces a certain sense of happiness and contentment in me, the mere thought of sitting down and reading yet another one of his adventures.

And of course, I'm far from alone in this yearning over this exquisitely complex character; in fact, you could argue that the 125-year-old Holmes is more popular than ever with mainstream society these days, with for example not just one but two competing new movie deals recently being announced by competing Hollywood studios, one of them being directed by no less than gonzo-action veteran Guy Ritchie. And a big part of this, frankly, can be attributed to the fact that the copyright on Sherlock Holmes expired awhile ago; it means that for several decades now, pretty much anyone who wants to can legally sit down, write and publish their own story featuring the detective, which of course has led to hundreds and hundreds of new projects coming out over those decades. (This is in fact one of the biggest arguments over why copyrights need to be held down to a decent but not infinite duration, just long enough to benefit that artist and their immediate family; when you allow corporations to own the creative rights of certain characters and stories into perpetuity, society never gets a chance to expand and build on these characters and stories. And that's an integral part of the arts, is the chance to grow and add to the things that have come before, something that is getting profoundly tampered with these days through the exact Disney-led effort to get copyrights lengthened into perpetuity.)

And thus do we come to The Execution of Sherlock Holmes, by a veteran genre author named Donald Thomas who has actually cranked out a number of other books in the past of Holmesian adventures; this latest is a collection of five long stories, ones that in true Doyle style slyly reference many of the others Thomas has written already. In fact, this the sort of the main point I wanted to bring up about these stories and this book; that it was so successful in my eyes precisely because it is so Doylesian in its spot-on mimicry, very much as if Thomas wanted these to be mistaken literally for old Doyle stories that just happened to have never gotten published, ones that had maybe gotten discovered recently in some trunk in some British attic and were just now getting released to the public for the first time. And this of course is why I've been talking about the concept of certain artistic projects being enjoyed for the same reason as comfort food, because that is exactly what this book is; it's a book for people who are already slobbering fans of Sherlock Holmes, people who can get a smile on their face just thinking of smoking jackets and bubbling glass vials, people who don't want their beloved detective screwed around with by snotty postmodern revisionists, but rather an exact and faithful reproduction delivered with each and every new product.

Is it wrong to occasionally delve into the world of comfort arts, to have a certain part of such a thing in our lives? Not really, in my opinion, but with the operative word being "occasional;" let's not forget that such projects are mostly filler when it comes to an intelligent person's life, the equivalent of a potato you eat during dinner for no other reason than to help fill your belly. Thomas' book is extremely well-done for what it is, with him even using the five stories as an excuse to take on five different archetypical "types" of Holmesian tales (a daring escape; a job for the royal family; a case in the rural boonies; a story about war; and a showdown with a master nemesis); but let's face facts, that it is no better and no worse than the couple thousand other well-done Holmesian tales that have now been published over the last century, something merely to have some short-time fun reading while at an airport or the beach and then to forget again. The book itself comes recommended to all my fellow "Baker Street Irregulars;" I just urge all of you as well to keep track of how much of this kind of stuff you take in altogether in your life, and to make sure it's balanced by unique and challenging projects too.

Out of 10: 8.5 (less)

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Mar 17, 2010

Saturn rated it

Donald Serrell Thomas has a firm grasp on the character of Sherlock Holmes, making this a very believable account of the great detective's further adventures, but the book itself was FILLED with enough editing mistakes that I could only give it three stars. There were quite a few instances where I had to reread a passage seven or eight times until I finally determined that no, I was not going crazy and yes, this glaring error was actually overlooked by both author and editor. Considering this ...more

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Jan 20, 2011

Cherilee rated it

Started out pretty good. The first mystery was interesting but not a typical mystery. However, if you are going to write about Sherlock Holmes as Arthur Conan Doyle did you have big shoes to fill and the second mystery in this book quickly doused any interest I had.

· see review

May 16, 2011

Annie rated it

· review of another edition

awash in irrelevant detail as no doyle was, homes as often out of character as in. unfortunate, as the same author writing his own series, away from comparison, might be rather enjoyable...

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Aug 20, 2011

Corinna rated it

The first story, "The Execution of Sherlock Holmes", was very good. The other ones were enjoyable, but not as good as the first.

· see review

Aug 27, 2008

Huan-hua rated it

A fun but forgettable collection of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. They were slightly longer than I would have liked, five stories in a book of 350 pages, and Watson's voice didn't ring entirely true to me--maybe his upper lip wasn't stiff enough in his descriptions of certain characters? Also, Mycroft comes across as very irritating and not very smart. I always thought he was supposed to be even more brilliant than Sherlock, but exceptionally lazy.

· see review

May 15, 2011

Shawna Millard rated it

Absolutely entrancing! I was mesmerized from beginning to end. You couldn't have torn the book from my hands!

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Dec 07, 2009

Dustin rated it

Shelves: fiction, mystery

If I had not known that Donald Thomas wrote this book, I would swear that Doyle did it himself. Brilliant, true-to-character cases combining the best of The Great Detective's wit, humor, style, and intrigue into a satisfying recreation of the original.

· see review

Aug 14, 2008

Samantha rated it

Shelves: 2008

a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, I was attracted by the title. The title story was the best, but the further into the book I read the more bored I became.

· see review

Dec 03, 2010

Frederick rated it

Almost as good as Arthur Conan Doyle. Certainly Thomas remained true to my notion of the greatest detective, his sidekick, and adventures.

· see review

Jul 31, 2007

Josianne rated it

Shelves: mystery

Holmes lives! Love Sherlock Holmes and this does not disappoint. Great fun.

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