New Sherlock Holmes Stories by Craig Stephen Copland

Craig Stephen Copland is a man with a mission –to write 60 new Sherlock Holmes stories. He’s well on his way. Two of them take Holmes and Dr. John Watson well away from England – to the United States and Japan. 

In The Hudson Valley Mystery, Holmes and Watson (ably assisted by Mrs. Watson) travel to New York to investigate what appears to be an open-and-shut case. Charles McCarthy, who had made a considerable fortune in the California Gold Rush, has been murdered, and his nineteen-year-old son James has confessed, pled insanity, and is now confined in a prison for the criminally insane. The widow (and mother) has retained Holmes, not believing that her son could have committed the deed.

Involved are the nearby neighbor and Gold Rush partner John Turner and his daughter, and Holmes and Watson soon learn that few of the people in both families are telling the truth. Something is being hidden, and Holmes is determined to discover what it is.

In The Yellow Farce, Holmes and Watson travel to Japan at the behest (actually, the demand) of Holmes’ brother Mycroft. It is 1905, Japan and Russia are at war, and the Russian fleet is sailing around the world to battle the Japanese fleet. The head of the British legation in Tokyo is married to an American who happens to be a former Russian, and it looks like the woman is up to no good in trying to tilt the British toward supporting the Russians. 

Craig Stephen Copland

It’s a vastly different culture from England or the United States, and the detective duo find themselves confronting gun smuggling, spies everywhere, and even what looks to be a planned assassination. The climax will come at the summit of Mount Fuji.

Copland is a longtime fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. After he retired, he set himself a goal of writing a new Sherlock Holmes mystery related to and inspired by each of the 60 stories published by Conan Doyle. He’s also written monographs on Holmes and two non-Holmes mystery stories featuring a detective in the Old American West, the Reverend Ezekiel Black. He currently lives and writes in Toronto, Buenos Aires, New York, and the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. 

The stories are great fun, but readers should not expect an exact reproduction of Holmes and Watson. Copland’s Holmes make mistakes, and he often has to directed on to a better path by Watson and his wife. That said, it makes for a more realistic detective, one that is still paying homage to the original stories.

"When Winter Breaks Softly" by Jim Burnett

Jim Burnett has written a considerable number of novels set in the Old West, and now he’s published a collection of short stories, also set in the Old West and with a strong theme of faith. When Winter Breaks Softy includes five stories that are simple and straightforward tales of good, evil, and redemption.

In “Blind Love,” a young couple have struggled for years to have a family. When a baby finally does come, their joy is cut short when they learn their little boy is blind. Not helping at all is the young woman’s mother, who’s constantly criticizing and belittling her daughter.

“Fiona’s Redemption” is a kind of Hatfield-McCoy or Romeo and Juliet kind of story. Two families have hated each other for a long time, and one family in particular has more than its fair share of bad men and bullies. Fiona Darcy finds herself attacked and raped by Clay Miller, an attack that leads to the birth of a child. It will be another Miller, however, who will fall in love with Fiona.

Jim Burnett

In “Fit to be Tied,” the Jackson family has four boys until the birth of their daughter Annabelle. They live on a big ranch in Wyoming, and as Annabelle grows up, she takes special delight in aggravating Danny Elder, the son of the ranch foreman. They always seem at odds, until an abandoned calf changes their lives.

“Maria’s Stubborn Love” is set in Texas. Maria Sanchez and her mother work at the Lazy D Ranch, where they are both the occasional object of ridicule by the ranch hands because of their Mexican heritage. But the son of the ranch owner will discover a very different kind of relationship with the beautiful girl.

“The Man Behind the Hammer” is Jess Slade, who once had been a farmer but had turned to blacksmithing after the accidental deaths of his wife and young son in a wagon crash. He’s never gotten over their deaths, and he seems to take his anger and guilt out on the iron and meatal he’s pounding in the shop. But Sarah Jane Nickels, the daughter of a cattle buyer and entrepreneur, has set her sights on the blacksmith. 

The stories of When Winter Breaks Softly seem a bit old-fashioned, but that’s what gives them their charm. Good and evil are clearly drawn, and broken people find redemption and love.

Poets and Poems: Harry Clifton and “Herod’s Dispensations”

Herod the Great (74/73 B.C. – circa 4 B.C.) lived 2,000 years ago, but he still causes arguments among historians. He built the second temple in Jerusalem, the port at Caesarea, fortresses, and palaces. He reorganized Judea’s social hierarchy. He rather artfully managed his Roman overlords. 

Yet he was among the most violent and ruthless of kings, including within his own family. He’s most infamously associated with the slaughter of the innocents, the killing of the young children and babies to eliminate the king foretold to take his place. Some scholars doubt that story, recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew, but Herod certainly had the reputation to be credibly accused of it.

Irish poet Harry Clifton uses the idea of Herod in his latest poetry collection, Herod’s Dispensations.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

“The Secret Orphan” by Glynis Peters

It’s 1938. Eighteen-year-old Elenor Cardew lives on a farm in Cornwall with her two brothers. Life is mostly drudgery, with her brothers’ expectations of her central role of taking care of them. And then an aunt, her dead mother’s sister, requires her to come to Coventry to take care of her as her health is failing.

At first, the aunt and her attitude seem little better than that of her brothers. A couple, George and Rose Sherbourne, and their five-year-old daughter Rose live in the home, Victoria serving as housekeeper and George behaving boorishly on a good day. He’s a tutor, and he’s often away. Rose, however, is bubbly and almost irrepressible, although she’s treated rather coldly by her parents.

As the months pass, the aunt warms to Elenor and arranges for her to buy some decent clothes. The aunt’s sternness gives way to genuine affection. Elenor grows close to Rose, while George and Victoria remain somewhat odd. And the clock is ticking toward September 1939 and the prospect of war. Elenor meets a young Canadian airman stationed near Coventry and finds herself falling in love. The aunt dies in the spring of 1939, and Elenor learns she’s her aunt’s heir.

The city centre of Coventry after the Move,ber 1940 blitz

The war starts; Elenor’s brother both enlist in the army and are caught at Dunkirk. Assigned to be the remained guard fighting the Germans while the main army escapes, neither brother returns. Elenor goes back to Cornwall to care for the farm and undertake a general rehabilitation of the property, farmhouse, and farming practices. Her brothers left a mess. 

Coventry experiences the firebombing of November 1940; only Rose survives of her family. She’s brought by a friend to Cornwall; Elenor had been listed as next of kin. It’s after she arrives that Elenor discovers the little girl carries a dangerous secret with her.

The Secret Orphan by Glynis Peters tells the story of Elenor and Rose, and what happens when Elenor determines to protect the child at all costs. It also tells the story of Coventry, of life on an English farm during wartime, the ongoing prospect of enemy bombing, even on farms, and the romance between and English girl and a Canadian airman.

Glynis Peters

The novel is Peters’ first, and when it was published in 2018, it reached several international bestseller lists. The author lives in Dovercourt, Essex, England. A grandson lives in Canada – and that’s why she introduced a Canadian pilot as one of the novel’s characters.

It’s a good story of England before and during wartime. It might have done to exclude a character or two; the Land Girl assigned to the farm was interesting but doesn’t really advance the narrative. And an epilogue that ended as the book began – with an elderly Rose reliving some of her memories – would have tied it together. But The Secret Orphan is still an enjoyable story.

Blame: a trilogy

After Genesis 3:1-19

The questions fly:

Who did this

what have you done

did you do what

I told you not to do

who told you

you were naked

It was the woman 

you gave me

(clever: a double denial,

a double shift: blame

the woman and blame

the One who gave 

the woman)

It was the serpent

who deceived me

with his slithering

words (aka, the devil

made me do it)

The serpent says nothing

but he smirks.

The condemnation flows

in reverse order:

   a curse of position

   a curse of pain

   a curse of labor, of work

   of toil, of sweat

a curse of dust

raised from dust

returned to dust

and a promise:

to be continued.

Photograph by Frederica Giusti via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

I'm not sure what's going on with (non-fiction) books and publishers these days. Just recently, author Naomi Wolf was called out (during a broadcast, no less) for misinterpreting a Victorian legal phrase - and demolishing her book's ("Outrages") argument in the process. Now it's writer Paul Dolan, whose book "Happy Ever After" makes the claim that unmarried women are happier than married women -- based on a series of misinterpreted studies and reports. Vox has the story. Don’t publishers of non-fiction books do fact-checking anymore?

George Orwell’s novel 1984 is 70 years old this week, and it still sells well. If you’ve looked up a book on Amazon and shortly thereafter found a sponsored link on your Facebook newsfeed, it can seem like 1984 is here, it just took a few years longer that the title suggested. Not to mention facial recognition technologies. Glenn Arbery at The Imaginative Conservativehas another perspective – what the book says about propaganda and the exclusion of ideas. Which is what is happening at many colleges and universities across the United States. 

C.S. Lewis remains a popular writer, and not only because of his Narnia stories and The Screwtape Letters. Dr. Art Lindsley at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics considers Lewis’s warning against progress at any cost, and Samuel James at Letters & Liturgy looks at why Lewis was so persuasive.

Georgia is one of several states that has passed more restrictive abortion laws. Georgia is also home to a sizeable film industry. Netflix and Hollywood producers have threatened to boycott the state, at least as far as filming there. Justin Lee at Medium’s ARC Digital has some thoughts about the film industry doing things like this. Of course, no film company has threatened to stop distributing movies in Georgia or, in Netflix’s case, end all subscriptions in the state. 

More Good Reads

Writing and Literature

Why Do Found Texts Fascinate Us So Much? – Peter Rock at The Millions.

Is There a Poet Laureate of the Anthropocene? – Ed Simon at The Millions.

Are Crime Thrillers Our New Folklore? – Sandra Ireland at CrimeReads.

Writers Are More Prolific When They Cluster – Richard Florida at CityLab.

British Stuff

What was the real purpose of the English country house library? – Jeremy Musson at The Art Newspaper.

Brexit Did Not Cause Brexit – Carl Trueman at First Things Magazine.

Jacqueline and Eileen Nearne: Sisters and Spies – Jennifer Ryan at CrimeReads.

Life and Culture

An Acceptable Prejudice – Elizabeth Corey at First Things Magazine.

Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Opportunity – Tim Challies.

Without Athens, There is No R.E.M.: The Loss of Local Cultures – R.M. Stangler at Front Porch Republic.

A striking, joyful portrait of America's greatest divide: On Chris Arnade’s ‘Dignity’ – Matthew Walther at The Week.

The Rise of Progressive Occultism – Tara Isabella Burton at The American Interest.

Why We Need to Be Intentional About How We Use Social Media – Blake Long at Theology & Life.

Poetry

Cabin in the Woods – Karl Kerchwey at Literary Matters.

Dylan Thomas – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

Gospel Flag – Joe Spring.

News Media

The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent–  Whitney Webb at Mint Press News.

You Raise Me Up – Peter Hollens and 200 Kids Sing A Capella

Painting: The Reader, oil on canvas by Franz Defregger (1835-1921).

The Surprise of "The Scarlet Letter"

It’s been 50 years since I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter in my high school American literature class. What I vaguely remembered was a story about a woman named Hester Prynne in Puritan New England, with a baby born out of wedlock, and the narrowminded colonists who took great pride in displaying their superiority over the sinful, fallen woman. 

As I started reading the book in May, it took me all of the first two chapters to realize that what I remembered, and what had seeped into my head about the book in the past half-century, was superficially right but substantially wrong. It is much more than what I remembered. 

The biggest surprise so far has been the two significant male characters, the Reverend Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale and the man who shows up and calls himself Roger Chillingworth but is actually Hester Prynne’s long-absent husband. (You have to love the names Hawthorne gives his characters, as descriptive as those of Charles Dickens, but then, Hawthorne was writing and publishing about the same time). 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.