Time for Sherlock Holmes

I found this book delightful as David Dvorkin lampoons just about everything Holmesian or Sherlockian as well as a smattering of Victorian, modern, post-modern and yes even future and extra-planetary sensibilities. I laughed my way through the first 50 pages and then got interested in the story line. This is a reminiscence so I do not understand the complaints about slowness. David does a superb job of capturing the anomie of perpetual existence over a period of 200+ years. He also does some mind bending and numbing conceptual gymnastics. "Time For Sherlock Holmes" has a rollicking good ending too!

One might think the master himself were alive and well and still chronicling the adventures of Holmes and Watson, so skillfully has David Dvorkin carried on the tradition. This beautifully crafted pastiche sticks faithfully to the language, flavor and attitude of the original stories. All our old friends are there: Dr. Moriarty, Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft. But there's an elixir of youth, and an interesting bit of time travel, thrown in for good measure. Get this: "Holmes vanished from the Libration Satellite shortly after I managed to get him unseen off the Exeter, his disappearance as unannounced as his coming." And this: "I pondered what I had come to regard as the central problem of immortality: While physically I was as a man in his twenties, and indeed looked much that age....I surprised myself upon occasion with my mental rigidity, my stodginess, and my querulousness." And another quote too good to omit: "I had lived to see my earlier chronicles of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson become world-famous; and yet, since copyright does not last forever and cannot be renewed indefinitely, I was no longer earning royalities." This is good stuff! You'll love it.