My next stop is rereading volume two of six. The argument quickly became a moot point, after Warner Bros.’ steam-punk-style action mystery grossed an astounding 524 million worldwide. So for those who have a Friday evening complete with fireplace and nothing scheduled on Saturday, these books are the ticket. Included are spot on historical details and the writers are skillful enough to insert misdirecting elements in manners so successfully that as of yet I have not successfully guessed a climax to a story. The writers really know what they are doing and provide taut, focused plots along with clear descriptions of settings and characters. I have had very pleasant experiences thus far. They inhabited the realm my mother, an English teacher, called trash.
Until my exposure to these books my views of pulp fiction had been rather on the disdainful side. Being the owner of a large number of Holmes/Watson stories (closing in on 300 is a reasonable guess) it's enjoyable after a while to pull one off the shelf and reread it. This is a return visit to my first foray into the pulp fiction approaches to the Holmes/Watson stories.
It can be played as a group but is best at two players who can bounce ideas off of each other to spark new life into the decision space. Look elsewhere for compelling Holmes tributes Boyer or Horowitz for example. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is a text-heavy storytelling game that requires focus, heavy note-taking, and the ability to parse information to deduce potential pathways forward. Couldn’t the publisher afford an editor, a fact checker or even a computer with Google? Even good stories would have trouble surviving glaring errors like this. That’s one progressive referee, considering red and yellow cards weren’t introduced to soccer until the 1970s. In one example, Holmes and Watson investigate the murder of a soccer player who, along with the suspect, were sent off during a game after, in Watson’s words, the referee, “produced a red card from his pocket and waved it at each of them”. But where the amateurism really shows through is in the historical authenticity, or rather the lack of it. The characters, especially Watson, never ring true. The plots are generally ludicrous, with Homes conjuring the solution out of mid air instead of demonstrating the observation and reasoning that led to the solution. In 1999, a DVD-ROM version of the game (renamed Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Volume 1) is published by Infinite Ventures. As expected, the cases are rather short and there is no real motivation to replay the cases once they are solved. Unfortunately, more often, you also come across the exact opposite, like this particular volume. Some of the conclusions Sherlock draws are just so farfetched to make you scratch you head. I have read a lot of these Sherlock Holmes tributes by a variety of authors.
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