Holmes Entangled

Readers curious about an elderly Sherlock Holmes who was never a Victorian gentleman may enjoy this offbeat pastiche from Edgar-finalist McAlpine (Woman with a Blue Pencil). In 1943, Jorge Luis Borges hires an unnamed PI in Buenos Aires to read what purports to be an unpublished memoir in Holmes’s own hand entitled Uncertainty. In the manuscript, dated 1928, Holmes claims that Dr. Watson has misled the public about his retirement, saying he has spent five years “disguised as a variety of visiting lecturers at Oxford and Cambridge Universities.” Holmes is dumbfounded when Arthur Conan Doyle appears at Cambridge and is able to identify him even though he’s disguised as classical physicist Heinrich von Schimmel. The author was told where to find Holmes by the spirit of Stanley Baldwin at a séance, despite Baldwin’s being alive and serving as prime minister. Even weirder twists follow in a novel that explores the idea of parallel universes. That McAlpine’s Holmes is far removed from Doyle’s original may disappoint some Sherlockians. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip Spitzer Literary Agency. (Mar.)