Admirable as the reason is for writing this story, it was hard for me to like it.  That was mainly to do with the style in which the story is written and the mood I felt as I read it.  Firstly, some background - you may recall that back in 2000 a fellow in the U.K., Rodger Garrick Steele, made incredible claims that Arthur Conan Doyle stole the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles from Bertram Fletcher Robinson, was having an affair with Fletcher Robinson's wife and persuaded her to poison her husband to avert any threat of a literary scandal [see here].  Without a shred of hard evidence to back up these claims, Garrick-Steele was eventually thoroughly discredited [see here] but not before foisting a self-published book upon the world.

Dicky Neely wrote his story in reaction to Garrick-Steele's outrageous assertions.  It first appeared in a U.S. newspaper in 2002 and now has come out in this book.  The story takes the form of Holmes and Watson coming to life at the time when Garrick-Steele made his claims - they have taken it upon themselves to fight to protect the reputation of Conan Doyle.  Rodger Garrick-Steele is not named in the story, the character making the claims has a French name that translates as "Roger Garlic Peel".  The style is set quite early on when the story narrator, Dr Watson, says:

This is the aspect that I don't like, this make-believe world where literary characters come to life and interact with real humans.  There is also a mix of language styles which I found irritating.  Dr Watson catches a London Tube train and comes out with the pretentious sounding phrase:

The underground train conveyed me with incredible velocity to my egress point.

But he also speckles his language with such gratingly modern terms as "hotfooted my way to...", "kill some time", "snack", and "Okay" in response to a suggestion from Holmes.

The book is edited by Sydney Passenger Paul Spiring, who collaborated with Garrick-Steele in the original investigation in an attempt to ascertain Fletcher Robinson's precise cause of death, but later broke off the association when he realised that Garrick-Steele could not back up his claims [see here].

The last 13 pages of the book are purportedly the fruits of Dr Watson's research at the local library in Princetown, Dartmoor into the relationship between Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson to refute Garlic Peel's charges.  This has no doubt been supplied by Spiring - it forms a handy summary and is probably a good enough reason on its own to get the book.

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By Paul R Spiring 2012.