The Bacchus Club Mystery: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes

Chris Redmond is Director of Internal Communications at the University
of Waterloo.

My friend Sherlock Holmes is a patient man, save for his aversion to
hounds, but his endurance has been sorely tried by the badly narrated
and implausibly plotted adventures devised for him by certain modern
authors and known to his devotees as “pastiches.” The authors of
dozens of such volumes have brought to our Baker Street rooms an
improbable sequence of international spies, femmes fatales, and sex
maniacs, giving them Valley diction and all the Victorian charm of a
Watergate plumber.

It is a pleasure to report that Wayne Howell has avoided the worst of
these modern excesses in imagining “a further adventure of Sherlock
Holmes” at novelette length. In this tale Holmes and Watson sound like
themselves and behave with their natural dignity. The one novelty is
that both are presented as wine connoisseurs, who find themselves
investigating a case amid a sophisticated circle of congenial
oenophiles. Occasionally the narrative stops while one of the characters
appraises, say, a Romanée Conti 1877.

Those who have no use for Sherlock Holmes will of course find the tale
tedious, but those who enjoy Holmes will find it readable even if they
doubt that the great detective cared passionately about fine wine.
Expert knowledge is not required, and those who are unfamiliar with wine
terminology can still read the tale with reasonable understanding,
though with a sense of missing something that was important to the
author. (The story first appeared as a series in the Montréal journal
Wine Tidings.)