Smoking Him Out

When the gaunt, sullen man with a peaked cap came visiting India.

A Bengali play written by Arindam Mukherjee, a software entrepreneur, three years ago. “It’s a drama about Holmes, which, I’d like to think, defies categorisation,” he says. “A whodunnit with plenty of the riddles from Holmes’ stories,” he adds. It will be staged in Calcutta in March-end or early April.

Partha Basu says he wrote this book to give Dr Watson his due. The book centres around the discovery of Watson’s diaries and sheds light on how he helped Holmes solve many a famed mystery. “History is full of instances of hero worship and deification and I am against that. I wrote this book to fictionalise what might have been Watson’s contributions to Holmes’ successes,” Basu told Open in an interview.

Tibetan scholar Jamyang Norbu pairs Holmes up with Rudyard Kipling’s spy Huree Chunder Mookherjee on his travels across India and Tibet. Sadly, the US-based exiled writer has not gone knocking on Baker Street again, choosing non-fiction to highlight the Tibet crisis.

Vithal Rajan’s forthcoming book takes Holmes and Watson to various parts of colonial India between 1888 and 1914. And everybody from Vivekananda to Jinnah to Annie Besant makes a cameo appearance. Rajan, who called his book a tongue-in-cheek effort, has written a play, Sherlock Holmes and the Pirates of the Horn, and is planning another novel featuring him.

Neelum Saran Gour’s book is set in England. Clients like Nicolas Nickleby and David Copperfield approach the celebrated detective, who has acquired an equally celebrated butler, the incomparable Jeeves. Needless to add, Jeeves saves the day.

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