Baker Street Irregular

Lellenberg, the official historian of the Baker Street Irregulars and coauthor of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (with Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley), makes an impressive fiction debut with this gripping period spy novel. In 1933, Woody Hazelbaker, a young Wall Street lawyer, gets an unexpected and unlikely career break after taking on mobster Owney Madden as a client. The knowledge Woody gains from assisting the criminal in liquidating his interests in a number of businesses proves handy years later on the eve of WWII when Woody and some fellow Sherlockians get involved in anti-Nazi efforts amid strong isolationist sentiment. Lellenberg does an excellent job at bringing the original Irregulars, who included Christopher Morley and Rex Stout, to life. His own background as former director of the Pentagon's special operations bureau's policy and strategy office serves him well in recreating the grind and tedium of actual intelligence work. (Nov.)