Sherlock Holmes and the Sixty Steps – Review

What a treat to read Séamas Duffy’s new collection. It is comprised of a novella – the title piece – and three carefully crafted short stories, based on Mr Duffy’s extensive research and knowledge of the Canon.

The novella is the star of the show, but the stories are intriguing as well. The Tragedy of Langholme Wyke is a clever sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles, based on Mr Duffy’s own mock-scholarly study of that novel. The Problem of the Three Coptic Patriarchs takes inspiration from one of Holmes’ cases mentioned but never written up by Dr Watson. The sinister The Mystery of the Thirteen Bells – all cryptograms, body parts and foggy London backstreets – is a pastiche firmly in the spirit of the Canon. All three terrific reads.

As for Sherlock Holmes and the Sixty Steps, Mr Duffy takes us to Glasgow, and to the case of a miscarriage of justice, where one Osip Stoller, a German Jew involved in petty crime, has been fitted up for the murder of an elderly spinster.

An old school friend of Dr Watson’s, Stoller’s defence solicitor, has appealed for Holmes’s help in saving his client from imminent execution, and the bored detective is as ever only too willing to take up the challenge. An ingeniously involved plot, well-drawn characters and a convincing evocation of late nineteenth-century Glasgow, all contribute to the enjoyment of the story.

By the way, the ‘sixty steps’ of the title refers to an actual landmark in Glasgow, built in 1872 by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, the lovely illustration on the book’s cover calling to mind the sets of steps leading up the butte of Montmartre.  The author, who himself is based in Glasgow, is donating all royalties from the sale of his book to the Greek Thomson Sixty Steps Preservation Society.

Mr Duffy writes with wit and wisdom, like Conan Doyle himself citing numerous cases not (yet) written up by Dr Watson. I’d particularly like to hear more of the case of the Bognor Prestidigitation Circle.

Nor is the author averse to a little self-mockery (and mockery of all those of us who attempt the genre): the villain is ‘a writer of third-rate detective stories – the mark of a low, scheming and venal mind – he knew well how to weave a plot and trail a red herring.’ However, Séamas Duffy is anything but third-rate by the standard of his latest book. Highly recommended.

*

Published by MX publishing, Sherlock Holmes and the Sixty Steps is available from

https://www.bookdepository.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Sixty-Steps-S%C3%A9amas-Duffy/9781804240175