If you’re fan of pastiche Holmes then you probably know the name of James Lovegrove for his Cthulhu Casebooks, a series of novels pitting Holmes against Lovecraftian monsters.
Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon is something a little more mainstream. At first blush it might seem like we’re still in supernatural territory though. A damsel in distress named Eve Allerthorpe comes to London to see if Holmes can help her solve the mystery of an evil spirit of Yorkshire folklore known as the Black Thurrick (don’t bother looking the name up, it’s Lovegrove’s invention). This Black Thurrick creature has a reputation for stealing children at Christmas from families who don’t offer him the traditional offering of milk and cookies, leaving a bundle of birch twigs behind.
Intrigued, Holmes and Watson set out for the Allerthorpe family castle, a spooky place with the delightful name of Fellscar Keep that sits out in the middle of a lake. There they meet the extended Allerthorpe family as well as some of the household staff, and have some Scooby-Doo adventures involving possible ghosts and things that go bump or even scream in the night. Holmes isn’t buying the legend of the Black Thurrick for a minute though (he even dismisses Christmas itself as “fatuous and tawdry”), and is more interested in the fact that Eve is due to come into a significant inheritance on Christmas Day, but only if she is found to be of sound mind.
(As an aside, and still on the matter of sound minds, the novel is set in 1890 and at one point Eve refers to her deceased mother as having been “anxious and neurotic.” The term “neurotic” was popularized only in the 1940s, and according to what I could find online its first use in English, at least to describe an individual, was in 1896.)
As with a lot of contemporary Holmes pastiches the action and setting here are highly cinematic, as is the story’s structure. The mystery is also resolved in a manner that doesn’t play fair with the reader (Holmes, as he often does, disappears to do his own investigations when necessary), while the conclusion, with everyone gathered in the drawing room to hear Holmes’s explanation, includes a truly ridiculous character turn. That said, there’s fun to be had and we’re sent off with a Watson family Christmas vignette that indulges a bit of that holiday spirit. Holmes isn’t such a Grinch after all.
Alex Good 
There’s enough demons in Yorkshire not to have made one up! But no matter, glad it was a fun read.
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You know, I always had it in my head for some reason that Yorkshire was as north as you could go in England and still be in England. But then I found out there were places even further north . . .
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Yep Marshall Meadows Bay in Northumberland is the Northest, it’s on my photo-visit-needed-bucket list.
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Well according to the Internetz they have a hotel and a trailer park. Or as you like to say over there, a “caravan site” 🙄.
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Yeah but there’s a Marshall Meadows hamlet to the west of it, and the hotel is well nice.
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Did they have figgy pudding?
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Can’t remember. The cook is always being complimented on her marmalade though.
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Well, I will have to boycott this book then. It’s not a REAL english Christmas story without figgy pudding.
See, authors like this are why the world is in such bad shape. Leaving figgy pudding out of a story. Shame on him!
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There’s kidney pudding. And oxtail soup. And blackberry crumble. And marmalade. I don’t recall figgy pudding being mentioned but it may have been served at some point. It’s just Christmas pudding right? My mom made that.
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I have zero idea. I just know that Dickens has mentioned figgy pudding, so that means EVERY book set in England has to have it. Or they are traitorous frenchy doxies! with painted faces no less.
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Figgy pudding, also known as as plum pudding and Christmas pudding. In spite of not having either plums or figs in the recipe. Don’t know if you had the same tradition as us – baking a sixpenny piece in the mix, as a kid you always wanted to be the one to find it in your portion.
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No we never did the money thing. We never needed any incentive to lick our bowls clean. That stuff was delicious!
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Did mum pour brandy over it and set fire to it?
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No, we weren’t that flamboyant a family. Also nobody drank *at all* so there was never any brandy in the house, even over holidays.
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Sheesh, fun times at your gaff then. 🙄🤣
why is ‘at all’ in asterix?
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That’s one way of coding an emphasis, like italics. Meaning we were a family of total teetotalers.
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The temperance movement influence of the early 19thC mayhaps?
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I think it does go back that far in my family, yeah.
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Are you a tooteetle too ?
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Yep. Quite a boring fellow.
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Not as boring as a drunk fellow so there’s that.
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😁
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On the one hand, stealing children for lack of milk and cookies seems somewhat disproportionate, but on the other, if all it takes to protect your kids is some milk and a few cookies why wouldn’t you offer it?
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These are exactly the sorts of questions I think we should be asking!
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