I thought a bit about whether I should include this Jeffery Deaver story in my list of Sherlock Holmes stories, as it doesn’t have Sherlock Holmes in it. But since it’s an ironic homage, and is collected in the anthology In the Company of Sherlock Holmes edited by King and Klinger, I decided to give it a place. There are “Sherlock Holmes” stories out there that are less Holmesian.

What we have here is the story of a young Manhattanite named Paul Winslow who decides, in the course of therapy, that becoming a consulting detective to the NYPD would be a dream job, especially given how he’s such a big fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories and has the same gift for analyzing evidence and inductive reasoning (making inferences based on observation of details). Given that there’s a serial killer currently terrorizing New York, dubbed the “East Side Slasher” by the media, ingratiating himself with the police turns out to be easy to do, and soon he’s partnering up with an overwhelmed and relatively dim police detective (Lestrade by another name) to crack the case.

This he does in an unanticipated way, leading to my description of this as an ironic homage. Not so ironic though as to put Holmes fans off, even if it does present a darkly humorous take on Holmes’s abiding influence.

Holmes index