The Missing Tales of Sherlock Holmes: (as compiled by Peter Coe Verbica, JD)

By Peter Coe Verbica JD

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0991153537
• ISBN13: 9780991153534
• Release Date: July 2017
• Publisher: Peter Coe Verbica
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Not even if it were free!

The author’s name is given as Peter Coe Verbica JD. J.D., in my experience, stands for Juris Doctor, a law degree - Mr Verbica has been to law school and wants us to know it. Perhaps he expects it to impress us. I have had attorneys in my life: A mother-in-law, a brother-in-law, and my own sister, who graduated from Cornell’s law school. My mother-in-law (-at-law, we joked) used to tell me that most of the lawyers she knew made their living with words, but they were terrible writers. They relied heavily on their legal secretaries to transcribe their notes into paragraphs and pages that made the arcane legal magic work. I take no pleasure in saying it, but Peter Coe Verbica, JD, seems to be such a lawyer. He has apparently published some books of poetry. I haven’t read them, so I can’t comment on them. But where Sherlock Holmes stories are concerned, he’s clearly a terrible writer. No, make that TERRIBLE. I have forced myself - without pleasure - to read the first “story” in this book, called “The Lucky Strike.” The first warning should be the formatting - unlike any novel ever published professionally, the paragraphs are separated by blank lines. This may be an attempt to disguise the fact that the “chapters” within each story average three to five pages. Of fairly large print. We are given a little background setup referring to the California Gold Rush of 1849, and then Holmes and Watson are grumbling about it. The “plot” refers to a scam relating to a mining company, involving a cowboy-hatted American who happens to be an English knight anyway. The word “disjointed” was coined to describe Verbica’s writing. Characters appear and disappear almost randomly. Holmes and Watson are nothing like Doyle’s characters, and Holmes does pretty much zero detection and deduction. Instead he magically knows things to which the readers are never exposed - a capital crime in a mystery story. He simply announces what he knows, and people tell him that he’s brilliant. An example of “disjointed”: A paragraph begins by describing the Voyagers Club, and the King who founded it and abolished slavery. Then it mentions the architecture. The next sentence in the SAME paragraph is: “As I watched our cab leave with haste, I turned round to five large men who had surrounded Holmes and me.” Bang - just like that, the ruffians are there. No lead-in, nothing about how they gathered or ran up or beamed in with a humming Star Trek transporter effect. Holmes, the ultimate observer, was either oblivious, or he told the cabbie: “Let us out in the middle of that knot of dangerous-looking armed ruffians in front of the posh club.” And at the end of a paragraph about the Voyagers Club. Apparently Peter Coe Verbica got a BA in English without ever learning how to structure a paragraph. So Watson dispatches one thug and Holmes the other four, using his umbrella built around a lead bar (!!!), as well as a hat - wait, he called it Holmes’ “cap” - with chain in the crown to catch knives... “In three quick motions, spinning his umbrella like a shillelagh, Holmes disposed of the remaining aggressors.” Impressive - I remember that Holmes was an expert single-stick fighter and swordsman. I don’t recall Holmes ever doing anything like that... Not to mention getting his gear from the predecessor of James Bond’s Q. Later, a man comes into a room through a hidden door (that’s all the description the door gets - it’s “hidden), shoots the villain (with a cane gun, more Q gear!) while Holmes and Watson watch, and then leaves again through the same door... The villain is gut shot and has maybe two minutes of well-deserved agony until he expires - so Watson gives him a shot of the morphine he happens to conveniently have on hand (which also takes about five minutes to begin taking effect, as an Army surgeon would know!). The writer apparently trusted a spell checker to catch errors - thus we have Watson’s old shoulder wound being “aggregated