Sherlock Holmes Society of London reviews East Wind Coming by Yuichi Hirayama and John Hall

“The Shoso-in Bulletin, published in English between 1991 and 2004, was the most truly international Holmesian periodical of all. It was founded by our distinguished Japanese member Hirayama Yuichi, whose own contributions alone justified the Bulletin’s existence.East Wind Coming: A Sherlockian Study Book by Yuichi Hirayama and John Hall (MX,www.mxpublishing.co.uk) gathers twenty-eight of Dr Hirayama’s essays, from The Shoso-in Bulletin, The Baker Street Journal, The Ritual and elsewhere, along with four written jointly with a leading English Holmesian, John Hall. Yuichi has discovered, in a Japanese detection manual of 1940, the simple means by which Holmes determined the direction Herr Heidegger’s bicycle travelled on the moor. In Grand Duke Paul of Russia, he has identified the most credible candidate for the King of Bohemia. As a dentist, he explains, entirely convincingly (alas!), that Sherlock Holmes was toothless. The collaborations examine Holmes’s sporting prowess, Watson’s qualifications, and the travesty of Holmes in the Arsène Lupin canon, but most stimulating, I think, are the authors’ discussions of the first nine cases in The Adventures. Altogether it’s a grand collection!”

East Wind Coming is available from all good bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon and Barnes and Noble, in the UK Amazon and Waterstones . Fans outside the US and UK can get free delivery from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Nook and Apple iBooks(iPad/iPhone).