In what Publishers Weekly calls an “audacious revisionist view of one of the best-known mysteries of all time,” French literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard explains his theory of “detective criticism" in Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles.
Applying this critical method, explains Bayard, allows him to be "more rigorous” than detectives and writers, “and thus to work out solutions that are more satisfying to the soul."
Arguing that Sherlock Holmes often drew false conclusions, Bayard offers an alternative solution to that reached by Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
In The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls, John R. King has provided yet another interpretation of the epic battle between Holmes and Professor Moriarty.
Probably the most infamous story in the Sherlock Holmes canon is Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem” which relates the events at Reichenbach Falls. On May 4, 1891, the detective met his archenemy Professor Moriarty on a ledge above the falls. The two became locked in a titanic hand-to-hand struggle before both tumbled over the precipice, presumably to their deaths, witnessed by Dr. Watson.
The outcry was so great that in 1901 Conan Doyle was forced to give in and he resurrected his detective by claiming that Holmes had managed to survive after all.
In King's book, another detective of the Victorian era — Carnacki the Ghost Finder — also witnesses the event.
Thomas Carnacki is a fictional occult detective created by English fantasy writer William Hope Hodgson who appeared in six short stories published between 1910 and 1912.
Carnacki rescues one of the men and whisks him away to Switzerland to treat his amnesia only to find that the survivor's nemesis has preceded them there.
Once Holmes recovers his memory with boosts from the electrical machine Carnacki has stolen from a sanatorium, the game is once again afoot, with all of its prerequisite disguises and deductions.
Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of eleven short stories of mystery and dark fantasy pitting Holmes against the supernatural, allegedly found in that fabled tin dispatch box belonging to Dr. Watson.
It includes Barbara Roden's story, The Things That Shall Come Upon Them which involves Holmes with yet another fictional occult detective mystery, Flaxman Low.
Flaxman Low was created by E. and H. Heron, the pseudonym of Hesketh V. Prichard and Kate O'Brien Ryall Prichard, a mother-son writing team.
Appearing in Pearson's Magazine in 1898 and 1899, Flaxman Low was the original occult detective.
The Occult Detective genre was very popular on into the 1920s, and in addition to Carnacki and Low included Saxe Rohmer's "Dream Detective" and "Doctor Thirteen" as well as various creations of novelist Dion Fortune.
