Happy Friday, all!

Once again, I’ve spent the week busy with research for the new book (on which more later).  But when I haven’t been reading monographs with many footnotes, I tumbled back into the familiar old realm of 1990s Sherlock Holmes spin-offs: namely, Carole Nelson Douglas’s Irene Adler and Laurie King’s Mary Russell.

I eagerly read through Nelson Douglas’s Irene Adler books when they first came out, from Good Night, Mr. Holmes when I was in Upper School to Chateau Rouge when I was living in London, avoiding my dissertation research.  (For those who haven’t read them, these are the feminist counterpart to the original Holmes stores, with Irene’s starchy companion Nell in the place of Holmes’s Watson as chronicler and foil.)  But I had never read the short story she wrote for the series, The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes, a delightful romp involving the foibles of the then Prince of Wales.

Nelson Douglas’s Holmes made me nostalgic for Laurie King’s Mary Russell and her Holmes, so I went back to the first book of King’s iconic series, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, in which a brilliant but troubled American teenager teams up with the aging Holmes, and manages, despite all odds, to prove herself his equal and partner.  With old favorites, there’s always the fear that they won’t have aged well, but this one absolutely has.

What have you been reading this week?