Bill Peschel

Jonathan Franzen would spit on this novella. It was written on a computer, probably with Internet access, and published on the Kindle. According to the Oprah-approved author, that means it’s not literature and not meant to last.

He’s right.

“McGrave” is what you would get if a Hollywood screenwriter rammed together John McClain from “Die Hard” and McBain from “The Simpsons” and played straight. Imagine the comedy stylings of Leslie Nielsen from “Airplane!” and you get the idea.

So Lee Goldberg is one of my favorite authors. I’ve known him for years ever since, when I was committing book reviewing, I got a copy of his Star Trek parody “Beyond the Beyond” (now self-published and retitled “Dead Space”). So, yeah, he sorta knows who I am and I know who he is, and our relationship is exemplified by the fact that when I wanted to read “McGrave,” I slapped down the purchase price, because I admit I’m cheap, but not that cheap to cage a freebie. I have standards, you know.

Honestly, what I did was download the first chapter, which, considering that this is a novella is pretty damn cheap. But I started laughing so much from the first page that I said the hell with it, I needed a laugh, and bought the book.

McGrave is a cop who disaster attaches to like a limpet. He is the ultimate Ugly American. He’s direct. He curses. He hates foreign food.

“McGrave” was designed like a high-performance car, intended to go fast and scare hell outta people, and Goldberg’s an old-school TV producer and the author of the “Monk” novels, so he knows how to design a story. There’s detection scenes and chase scenes and clashes with authority, and McGrave rumbles through it all knowing exactly what to do next. He doesn’t hate authority or paperwork or his bosses. What he does hate is crime and criminals with a childlike simplicity that would be endearing except to those who get in his way, especially on the road.

McGrave goes after a ring of thieves and after breaking up a home invasion makes an enemy out of the Kraut ringleader. So McGrave heads to Berlin to track the guy down before the guy finds him first. There’s more detection and another car chase and lots of action.

That’s it. “McGrave” is a novella and designed to be a fast read. The verbs are active and in the present tense:

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Russel says.
McGrave squints at it. “What is it?”
“The newest addition to Wallengren’s collection. A three-thousand-year-old chamber pot.”
“So it’s a toilet,” McGrave says.

“McGrave” is loud and dumb and brash and I read it on my Kindle over the course of the evening: while filing papers in the basement, talking with the wife in the kitchen, at the dinner table (we all read at the table). I finished it in bed, and I felt like a kid again, reading the Hardy Boys and wanting the next book.

So Franzen is right: “McGrave” is not literature. But here’s the wiki: literature doesn’t always last. But there’s always room in the world for one more funny book.

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So I’m writing a story about Sherlock Holmes and the wife brings home from the library “A Study in Sherlock,” and I’m looking forward to reading it. Apart from the writing bit, I’ve loved the stories since I was given two books one Christmas when I was a wee lad. I still have them, one of the few, visible reminders that I had a childhood.

Later, I received a two-volume set of the complete stories, and while I was going to Bouchercon regularly, I would take a volume along and got a few notables to sign it.

So after a long hiatus, I was looking forward to dipping my beak into the book, and I did.

I can’t recommend this book.

First, it doesn’t do what it says on the tin. These are stories that the cover blurb says were “inspired by the Holmes canon.” This is a tricky way of saying “yes, Holmes is the star of some of these stories, but he’s not in all of them.” Out of the 16 stories, he appears in 5 of them, and one of them is set in modern times. In another, set after Reichenbach, Mrs. Hudson and Dr. Watson appears.

Short-story collections are a mixed bag, but this one seems below average in quality. There are a couple of gems. Neil Gaiman’s “The Case of Death and Honey” is the best written, but whether you like it depends on whether you like stories that are simple narratives without any mystery to them. Gaiman is writing for effect, when Holmes in retirement travels to China to “solve” the mystery of Death after his brother Mycroft dies. It’s evocatively written and some lovely scenes, but it’s told almost like a legend, as inventive in its own way as his Holmes/Lovecraft mashup “A Study in Emerald.”

Laura Lippman’s contribution “The Last of Sheila-Locke Holmes” is similar to Gaiman’s story, about a young New York City girl snooping into her parents’ effects and discovering something unsettling about her father’s past. Again, if you know anything about her writing, you know what to expect, and you get it. The fact that it left me flat should not be taken as a criticism. These types of literary stories leave me cold, in general.

Then there are the mystery stories that I’m more comfortable saying I didn’t like. In Thomas Perry’s “The Startling Events in the Electrified City,” Holmes asked by William McKinley to fake his assassination. Apparently, the Occupy movement has reached Baker Street, because McKinley tells Holmes that he realized that Big Money put him in the Oval Office, and if reform is to come, he needs to be moved out of the way so Teddy Roosevelt can take over. Apparently, no one ever told Willie that he could resign. Instead, we get Holmes carrying out the task with much historical description and without much trouble.

This was an annoying story. If you’re going to rattle your keyboard against the One Percenters, why not push it over the top? Why not have the eeeevil banksters try to stop Holmes? Instead, of red meat, you get skim milk to feed the NPR crowd.

But just because Holmes doesn’t appear in the majority of the stories doesn’t mean they should all be cast into the outer darkness. I liked “The Eyak Interpreter” by Dana Stabenow, featuring her Native American police detective investigating a peculiar kidnapping with the help of her son, whose blogging about it for a school assignment. Clever. And Colin Cotterill tells his story through a graphic short story — hmmm, it’s not a graphic novel and not a comic. We need a German word, perhaps. Would grafik kurzgeschichte do? In any event, the effect is marred by it being printed on one step up from newsprint.

Laurie King co-edited the anthology with Leslie S. Klinger and contributed a “twitterview” with her character, Mary Russell, who over a series of novels marries Holmes and investigates cases with him. Brushing aside the ludicrousness of her still being alive (and Holmes, too) in the 21st century, she comes off as standoffish and priggish, not helped by 144-character statements, and she got my American up in wanting to tell her that the stick up her ass can be removed any time she likes. I had met Russell before in “The Moor” and thought her and the book a bore, so that didn’t help matters.

In fact, as I dutifully plowed through these stories, I began to wonder if it was me and not the stories that were deficient. I grew so concerned that I went back to my reviews and dug out a couple of anthologies edited by Marvin Kaye (“Resurrected Holmes” and “The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes” and read a couple that I had thought worked. They still did.

Solution: Check out “A Study in Sherlock” before you decide to buy.

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