-- Boyer's "The Adventure of Zolnay the Aerialist" would rank in the bottom 5% of the Doyle canon. A woman trapeze artist beloved of two circus aerialists plunges to her death invoking "the elephant man." Weird, but not hopelessly bad.

-- "The Adventure of Bell Rock Light" is set on both western and eastern coasts of Scotland. I am not sure that Rick Boyer gets the geography of the Hebrides islands quite right. But I admire the yarn about a lighthouse miles off shore for giving me all the clues I needed to solve a mystery of a man possibly murdered high up in a place where no human could likely have reached him. Yet I did not solve the puzzle. My bad!

-- "The Adventure of the Eyrie Cliff" features an aging Holmes and Watson racing around the Windsor coast during World War I in motorcycle and sidecar. The duo link up once again with Holmes' fat but highly placed brother Mycroft to foil minions of the Kaiser. Supported by a cast of toughs who might as well have been the Baker Street Irregulars grown up tough and ready for a fight, the Holmes brothers and Watson tackle Germany's most brilliant U-Boot Kapitaen. This is a keeper.

-- THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA, if it were really by Conan Doyle, would rank in the top 30 % by quality and its continually baffling features. This is a sequel to THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. Villain Jack Stapleton had trained a basically gentle dog to go against its nature and kill people who were not threatening it. Stapleton survived his first encounter with Holmes but now challenges both London and the Welsh borderland with an imported, exotic gentle creature driven to frenzy. A very good read.

-- The reprint of 1976's novel, THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA is by far the longest of the QUARTET's four Holmes pastiches. As have others, author Rick Boyer expands upon a few words in Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire:

 "... Watson, it was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared."

Boyer also uses THE GIANT RAT to continue Doyle's great THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. BASKERVILLE's villain, Jack Stapleton, had survived the pitfalls of the moors and now burns for vengeance against Holmes. As he had once trained a large but gentle hound, perverting it into a raving man-killer, so Stapleton now does the same with an herbiverous Sumatran tapir. Soon enough Holmes senses that his old foe Stapleton is alive and well and casting his gauntlet at the great consulting detective's feet.

-- Easily the slightest and ranking in quality with the bottom five percent of genuine Holmes' tales is "The Adventure of Zolnay, the Aerialist." Historical John Merrick, the deformed London "elephant man," becomes a pawn in a jealous circus performer's murder of a lovely trapeze artist who had ditched him. A bit ham-handed.

-- Much better and full of both good clues and red herrings is "The Adventure of Bell Rock Light." Holmes and Watson vacation in northeastern Scotland near Aberdeen.

Fans of Sir Walter Scott and of Robert Louis Stevenson (the latter's ancestor built Bell Rock and other lighthouses) will not mind the didactic treatment of the men who managed light houses, especially famed Bell Rock Lighthouse built far from shore in the Firth of Tay. High up in that isolated tower a mysterious death occurs. If it was murder, it had to be by a non-human, as Holmes and Watson with enormous difficulty determine. A Chinese print sets Holmes's giant brain to work.

-- "The Adventure of the Eyrie Cliff" is set on the southeastern coast of England during World War I, in the spring of 1917. Germany has resumed full scale submarine warfare against neutral vessels and America will soon enter the war.

Aging Sherlock Holmes, his high-ranking older brother Mycroft and Doctor Watson do battle with a German U-boat as it attempts to smuggle out a kidnapped young English genius who knows how to foil the Kaiser's new maritime strategy. Holmes's wartime duties entitle him to a fast motor cycle with sidecar, which terrifies Watson when a passenger.

 "... depicting a river scene in China. ... Sea birds and ducks swam abut the boats" (Part Three).

-- One Boyer novel, THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA, pays conscious tribute to Doyle's better and more original THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. For villainous Jack Stapleton had not perished in a Dartmoor bog after torturing and training beyond madness an otherwise gentle hound. Stapleton, fled to the Far East, trained a gentle plant eating giant tapir and brought him to England for two purposes: revenge on a noble Lord for an ancient ill turn and to kill Sherlock Holmes. The Lord, his Lady and Holmes and Watson leave London for the Lord's country home on the border of Wales to unravel a puzzle: who has kidnapped the Lord's daughter and why? Holmes soon enough grasps that Stapleton lives and is after him. "I ask you, Watson, are we the hunters or the hunted?" (p. 235, Ch. 5)

-- Perhaps even better is Boyer's "The Adventure of Bell Rock Light." Holmes accepts Watson's suggestion of a vacation in Scotland. They go to visit an old friend of the great consulting private detective, "Clive Wallace who lives in Arbroath on the Firth of Tay." This is near St Andrews. With virtually the force and presence of a human character, the very real lighthouse miles out at sea, on Bell Rock, dominates the story.

 One night just before Holmes's visit three men were on duty in that real 109 foot high lighthouse. Two disliked each other, for love of a girl. Ross, one of those enemies, died on duty, having scribbled down the word CORM. Did he thereby implicate his enemy Cormack? The police thought so and arrested Cormack.

There were, however, other possibilities, including natural death, murder by the third lighthouse keeper or even, preposterously, by some agent at a distance. Inspired by a Chinese tapestry he observed in a cliffside cottage, Holmes solves the case. I myself failed to do so, though I confess the clues were ample and clear enough. This is a top-grade thriller.


-- There is more adventure than logic in "The Adventure of the Eyrie Cliff." Fans of Sherlock's fat, politically crucial older brother Mycroft will be happy to reacquaint themselves with this Holmesian sibling. The two brothers and Watson are pitted against British traitors and a German U-Boot in the spring of 1917, not far from Windsor Castle. Holmes is older now, but still spry enough to race around back roads on his official motorcycle doing his patriotic bit. The cycle even has a sidecar for Watson.

-- Feel free to skip Boyer's fourth member of the SHERLOCKIAN QUARTET, "The Adventure of Zolnay the Aerialist." A beautiful circus trapeze artist falls to her death during rehearsal. With her last words she seems to implicate the historically attested, hideously deformed Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick (1862 - 1890), mistakenly called John by Holmes. This tale shows the compassionate, empathetic side of Holmes -- emphasized by narrator Dr. Watson in Boyer's other three tales as well.

"Zolnay the Aerialist" is not good. But neither is it as bad as the very worst Holmes presented by Conan Doyle. It amuses me to think that in his effort to be true to Doyle, Boyer is deliberately flat in this one.