Vaughn Entwistle struck literary pay dirt when he partnered Sherlock Holmes's creator with Oscar Wilde in The Revenant of Thraxton Hall, the first Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mystery, in which Doyle is the detective and Wilde is his Watson. The dynamic duo has turned up again, this time in The Dead Assassin, and more good fun awaits.
London, 1895: Detective Blenkinsop requests Doyle's assistance one very foggy evening at the site of a "murder most 'orrible." Wilde accompanies him. They're told that Lord Howell, the prime minister's Secretary of War, has been found dead in his home, the front door completely smashed in, as was his bedroom door. His body was thrown against the wall with unimaginable force. But he fired off six shots from his revolver before expiring. Doyle, Wilde and Blenkinsop follow a trail of footprints down the street to discover a body in the dense fog outside, riddled with bullets. The detective recognizes him--Charlie Higginbotham, a murderer who was hung for his crime last week.
Entwistle injects the "Fog Committee," whose members included Lord Howell, as a sidelight. The committee is convinced that the recent, unusually dense fogs are "purely a function of the vagaries of the English climate," and any theories about London's excessive burning of coal in some way contributing to it is a "fantastical theory."
The Dead Assassin's paranormal aspects are lightly and intriguingly laid into the story. And even though Entwistle's portrait of Doyle isn't at the level of some other portrayals, this is a most entertaining pastiche pot-boiler with luscious Victorian atmosphere and ambiance. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher