The Casebook of Non-Sherlock Holmes

Summary:
Visual artists and curators get in touch with a London-based writer. Can he take advantage of the unique opportunities for dialogue and experience to produce original creative work of his own? Can he conjoin his interests in art and literature in a way that illuminates contemporary life?

Each case is a self-contained narrative, but all are linked by the writer’s desire to fully engage with his correspondents and by a willingness to float free from reality when the time seems right. The cases start with Twenty-first Century art and artists but end up as fictions involving Sherlock Holmes and Watson. This allows the stories to veer from the personal to the social overview, and from a present-day perspective to a Victorian one. The relationship between the naive doctor and the over-analytical Holmes gives an opportunity for rich, ultimately self-lampooning comedy. Watson usually - but not always - runs rings round the world’s most egotistical consulting detective.

Duncan comments:
This material was written between the years 2000 and 2003, when 221b Baker Street was for me a bedsit in south London. Two of the individual cases are in the public realm, including The Strangled Cry of the Writer-in-Residence, which focusses on the troubled sexuality of John Ruskin. But there are a dozen long cases that are unpublished for now. Or they’re in the pipeline, as Sherlock prefers to put it.

Last word to Watson:
'There's only one thing I did wrong. Stayed on Baker Street a day too long.'

The sample case can be bought here:The Strangled Cry