Book of the month: A great endeavour

Is the world in need of a yet another Sherlock Holmes story? Well, with the successful publication of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk it seems it is. Riding on the crest of the wave created by BBC’s ingenious series Sherlock, which brings the brilliant detective into the 21st century, and the Robert Downey Jnr blockbuster movies, which portray Holmes as a scruffy Victorian bruiser, Horowitz’s novel, authorised by the Conan Doyle estate no less, attempts to give us an authentic Sherlockian adventure.

Of course, creating copycat Holmes tales is nothing new. There have been literally hundreds of them over the years. Indeed in 1954 Doyle’s own son Adrian, with the help of crime writer John Dickson Carr, brought out a volume of short stories, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, which mimicked his father’s style effectively. However, the pastiche bandwagon really began rolling with Nicholas Meyer’s phenomenally successful novel, The