The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Albino’s Treasure

Stuart Douglas

Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)

When anarchists attack a painting of the Prime Minister and suggest that the man himself could be next, Scotland Yard have no choice but to call in Sherlock Holmes. It is just the start of an adventure that sees Holmes and Watson on the trail of a centuries-old puzzle, a puzzle that they are not alone in trying to unravel. As the master criminal The Albino closes in on them, not to mention the mysterious Lord of Strange Deaths, Holmes and Watson find themselves in a race to solve the clues and locate England's long-lost treasure.

Review by Ben Macnair (010521) Rating (7/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Book Source: Not Known
Rating 7/10
The literary shoes of Arthur Conan Doyle are pretty big shoes to fill. The author has given us many stories, from those of Sherlock Holmes, to The Lost World, and as such he has a writing style that is individual, and distinctive. His characters are loved throughout the world, so the many authors who have written in the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes had a poisoned chalice when handed this particular writing assignment.

Not only do they have to write in a new style, and idiom, with already established characters, they have to write new mysteries which fit in with an already well known body of work, and also please Holmes’s many fans, the numbers of which have grown exponentially following the success of the BBC television series, and two films.

Stuart Douglas has got around these myriad problems admirably. His writing is at once similar to Conan Doyle’s, but also different enough to bring his own ideas, the cases are all of the hidden ones that Holmes didn’t want Watson to share with the world, so they are only published after the characters death, which immediately gives them a heightened sense of Pathos, for we know that Watson is now also an old man, reflecting on his younger days, and also one of the best friends he ever had.

However, none of this would matter if the story was not up to scratch, and in this case, it is. It starts off simply enough, with anarchists damaging paintings, but only Holmes notices that some of the paintings were forgeries, something which escaped the notice of the dim-witted Lestrade, but as is often the case, these things soon spiral into something much bigger. Soon the anarchist group from Ireland want Holmes dead, and a subtle subterfuge soon means that he is dead, at least among the criminal underground fraternity, but soon Holmes has bought attention from The Lord of Strange Deaths, and The Albino, both criminal masterminds that even Holmes has trouble with.

Obviously, both Holmes and Watson survive the case, but the tightness of the plotting, the writing, and our familiarity with the characters means that this book would be a welcome diversion from fans of crime mystery, Holmes, and Victorian Literature.
Ben Macnair (1st May 2021)