John Kendrick Bangs' R. Holmes & Co. I've been on a Sherlock Holmes kick recently, maybe because I'm missing Elementary.
Barnes & Noble used to have a mail-order catalog, and it was there, in the early 90s, that I found Otto Penzler's Sherlock Holmes Library, a series of mass-market paperbacks reprinting vintage Sherlock Holmes books from the early 20th-century. One of those books was John Kendrick Bangs' R. Holmes & Co, a novel by the satirist, about the adventures of Raffles Holmes, the son of Sherlock Holmes and grandson of A.J. Raffles. The gimmick is that Raffles Holmes is torn between his ancestries, precariously balanced between the larcenous impulses of his grandfather and the upstanding justice of his father, and, like both of them, he has a writer to act as his partner and his chronicler.
On its own terms, R. Holmes & Co. is amusing, and Raffles Holmes is, despite the gimmickry nature of his character, a charming protagonist. He's far more Raffles than Holmes in his make-up, and a bit of a scam artist. A typical story sees Raffles Holmes hired to solve a robbery that it turns out he committed in order to pocket the reward money. Raffles Holmes does have his father's sense of justice, but if he has his father's deductive gifts he never displays them.
As a reasonable extension of the Holmes and/or Raffles mythos, R. Holmes & Co. doesn't work. The origin story -- "The Adventure of the Dorrington Ruby Seal," in which Sherlock Holmes woos and wins the hand of A.J. Raffles' daughter -- doesn't fit with either character's chronology. For one thing, Raffles (and Bunny) aren't thirty years older than Holmes (and Watson). For another, both Holmes and Raffles are pretending to be other people, and Raffles' daughter doesn't know her father is the cracksman and thief, A.J. Raffles, nor does she ever realize that the young parson who wooed her is Sherlock Holmes. I know there's some Wold-Newton theorizing to explain it all, and Laurie R. King makes reference to Raffles Holmes in the Mary Russell books as Sherlock Holmes' "lost' son, but, if it weren't for the final story, it's really just easier to think of Raffles Holmes as a man in his mid-twenties who so loved the stories of Sherlock Holmes and A.J. Raffles that he decided to claim them as his name and his family when he arrived in Manhattan for a fresh start in life, a fanboy, essentially.
It occurs to me that it's really counter-productive for A.J. Raffles and Raffles Holmes to have chroniclers publishing stories about their larcenous ways while they're actively thieving and scamming. Arsene Lupin doesn't have this problem, as he's notorious in the French press as a thief (and characters in the stories actively comment on the fact), but the accounts of Bunny and Jenkins would bring their partners unwanted notoriety and scrutiny.
It's an amusing book, though as when I read Bangs' other Raffles series sequel (Mrs. Raffles, about the adventures of Raffles' widow), some of the references, and thus the satirical humor, are pretty much lost to the modern reader.
