The parodies chapter is based on the assumption that a parody must of necessity have a main character whose name is a burlesque of Holmes' (and is categorised again by publication chronology, but thereafter by the name of the character). This leads to many parodies that feature Holmes under his actual name being included in the pastiche sections and referred to as such. Again many of the summaries that accompany the headings are so cursory - merely a mention of the author and the story title in which the character appeared - as to make one wish for a cataloguing rather than the"entertaining narrative" approach of this book, which results in much repetition of the phrase "They appeared in...a short story by..." Again this would have made the information more accessible, while also reducing the number of pages and thus presumably the price.

The structure also makes it seem strange that a book published in June 2003 only includes stories published up to 2001. Surely, with this chronological approach, and particularly bearing in mind the lack of any structure or discussion within each chapter other than listing the books published each year with a synopsis, it would not have been terribly difficult, particularly in this electronic age, to add last year's publications onto the end of the appropriate chapters.

At £45 the book is far from being cheap, but presumably this is controlled by its limited readership appeal, and ultimately it is consideration of that readership that is perhaps lacking. Much of the information here is available in a more useful format elsewhere (most notably the print/on-line/CD-Rom versions of De Waal), and very little information is added to what is already available. The serious collector will already know most of what is here - no research into authors, or the background to the stories is evident - which would appeal to those already interested in the subject, while the breadth and lack of detail hold little of interest for the casual reader - if you haven't read the stories, then an approach that veers between on the one hand simply telling you they exist, and on the other giving the ending away is probably not what you're looking for.

A work on this scale cannot hope to be comprehensive, but there are some surprising gaps here. Nicholas Meyer's third pastiche, The Canary Trainer, is noticeably absent, as are all of Frank Thomas's novels (cynics might say understandably so, but they are historically important in a survey of pastiches as being the first series of Holmes novels to be published in
the mass market), and Robert Lee Hall's The King Edward Plot: The Pursuit of the Houseboat, the first novel-length story to feature Holmes as a character, gets a only a brief mention (inaccurately) as another book by Bangs which contained a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, under the erroneous title "In the Pursuit of the Houseboat" and does not appear in the index.

A Sherlockian pastiche-aware proofreader would have been a considerable bonus to the book: Typo's are frequent, particularly in titles and character names. OK, it may not be a major problem that Quinn Fawcett's character Penelope Gatspy is referred to three times as Penelope Gatsby (which every reader of Fawcett's believes she should have been called, anyway), but it

still rankles (Particularly at that price). There are also occasional awkwardnesses which seem to suggest that the book was cut and pasted from bits and pieces from here and there: the section on John Gardner's Moriarty novels begins "In 1974 John Gardner published the first of his two Moriarty novels The Return of Moriarty", followed by a 5 line synopsis, then "In 1975 John Gardner published The Revenge of Moriarty", and a 3 line synopsis of that. Not strictly wrong use of English, I suppose, but still not terribly elegant.

Endnotes to the chapters are also awkward, giving bibliographical data that would have been more useful in the main text, or as footnotes, but more importantly, jumping about all over the place, defying logical structure. The notes on one page of text, for example, are numbered 8, 23, 1, 27 in that order. Call me old-fashioned, but I do like my end-notes to be in the same order as the text, so I can stick my bookmark in the back and go from one to the next as I get to them, I don't want to have to search through 50 pages of references each time I come to one. These would have been much better presented as a bibliography (the Bibliography that is presented as such is rather cursory, listing a few collections of pastiches - but not all those in the book, and a couple of reference works).

All that said, this is a good first effort at what is by its nature a fairly unmanageable topic - and there are a few things in it that I didn't know - and hopefully will lead on to more in depth studies of the genre, dealing with major and minor trends in pastiche-writing, giving more background on the authors. Research into/ reading of all the stories listed, or separating out those that have not been read by the authors into an appendix would help too. It will probably serve best as a memory-jogger for those who have read the stories, but can't remember what they were about.

Editor's note: British born (hence some of the spellings above), Adrian is "our man in Malaysia." He teaches at a prestigious boys' school there and was able to come to Nashville several years ago during his summer vacation. We welcomed him with a picnic - what else? - and made him a member of the Nashville Scholars. Judging from the review above, he's a Scholar indeed.

If the review seems a bit familiar, it was posted on WelcomeHolmes recently. Gael Stahl suggested it be included in our newsletter and we were more than happy to oblige.