The Torso at Highgate Cemetery and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories

Some of the plot ideas in this uneven collection of six short pastiches from Symonds (Sherlock Holmes and the Strange Death of Brigadier-General Delves) are creative, while others invite groans. In the title tale, Watson is worried when Inspector Lestrade summons him to a London graveyard where Holmes’s corpse is apparently displayed with its legs chopped off. It’s only when the real Holmes appears that the doctor realizes that the head topping the remains is just a wax bust. That error undermines any effort to portray Watson as the intelligent companion Conan Doyle created. That Watson states that both his income and “Holmes’s considerable reputation” depend on publication of their adventures in the Strand strikes another false note, while the characterizations of Holmes and Watson aren’t skillful enough to pull off the surprise decision one of them makes at the conclusion of “The Case of the Seventeenth Monk.” Unenlightening chapter headings (“We Take a Cab to Hackney College”) don’t help. Readers looking for faithful continuations of the canon have many better options to choose from. (Dec.)