Books I've Been Reading - Deductifyin'
Mar. 27th, 2011 01:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoyI am willing to bet you a whole nickel that the inspiration for Holmes on the Range was the title, and Steve Hockensmith then came up with an actually good plot just as icing. I was a tad bugged with Hockensmith, frankly, because he has contributed to the rather obnoxious literary meme of inserting zombies into classic novels, but this book made up for it because not only is it a COWBOY MURDER MYSTERY; it is also a good cowboy murder mystery. The voice of the Watsonian narrator, Big Red, is natural and solid, and his brother, Holmes fancowboy Old Red,* is a damn good twist on the Holmes-style** oddball detective.
The weird thing is, it works. It’s apparently not hard to plop Agatha Christie’s Bunch Of People In An Isolated Manor trope into Old West Montana, where you’ve got big sprawling ranches with their very own Accusing Parlors. And of course the traditional Accusing Parlor scene is in there, but it is most definitely cowboyed up. With guns. Damn, that was fun.
It did take me a while to realize that this book was set in the Holmes-verse—I was half-expecting our heroes to be cut to the quick by the discovery that Holmes was fictional, right up until some of the characters start bitching about how Holmes caused scandal to rain down upon their family name when Watson published an account of one of his cases. (It’s okay! The shocking blow still comes in another guise!) I like it even better now.
Good thing, too, because it looks like Hockensmith means this to be a series. I just hope he’s got more puns up his sleeve to get things rolling.
*He read a few of Holmes's cases—or, rather, Big Red read them to him, since he's the one who can read—and came down with a bad case of hero-worship, see.
**See? It’s fun! Try your own Holmes pun!
The weird thing is, it works. It’s apparently not hard to plop Agatha Christie’s Bunch Of People In An Isolated Manor trope into Old West Montana, where you’ve got big sprawling ranches with their very own Accusing Parlors. And of course the traditional Accusing Parlor scene is in there, but it is most definitely cowboyed up. With guns. Damn, that was fun.
It did take me a while to realize that this book was set in the Holmes-verse—I was half-expecting our heroes to be cut to the quick by the discovery that Holmes was fictional, right up until some of the characters start bitching about how Holmes caused scandal to rain down upon their family name when Watson published an account of one of his cases. (It’s okay! The shocking blow still comes in another guise!) I like it even better now.
Good thing, too, because it looks like Hockensmith means this to be a series. I just hope he’s got more puns up his sleeve to get things rolling.
*He read a few of Holmes's cases—or, rather, Big Red read them to him, since he's the one who can read—and came down with a bad case of hero-worship, see.
**See? It’s fun! Try your own Holmes pun!
