Shylock Homes—His Posthumous Memoirs

When a gilded steam radiator in a shabby New York apartment begins clicking out messages in Morse code, the narrator discovers an astonishing new channel of communication with the departed. On the other end is the spirit of the world’s most celebrated detective, who perished five years earlier in a final struggle with his greatest enemy—and who now wishes to publish his posthumous memoirs.

Dictated from beyond the grave, these recollections carry the reader into a bustling netherworld where history’s great figures rub shoulders along the main avenue of Cimmeria, and where the detective profession has sunk to shameless commercialism. Determined to restore honor to his calling, the shade accepts a series of cases that test his celebrated powers of deduction against rivals, impostors, and a client whose identity is not what it seems.

At once affectionate parody and sparkling supernatural farce, these memoirs follow literature’s most famous sleuth into a hereafter that proves every bit as puzzling as any locked-room mystery on earth.