Basil Rathbone, in the 40s; Peter Cushing, in the 50s and 60s, plus a last gasp in the 80s; Jeremy Brett, in the 80s and 90s; and now Benedict Cumberbatch, edging out Robert Downey Jr in the 21st century. Everyone’s favourite Sherlock Holmes is surely one of the above – at the expense of so many other of their deer-stalking, pipe-puffing, violin-scraping kin, who almost always get overlooked. To attempt to fix that terrible problem, Alan Barnes, author of Sherlock Holmes On Screen, which comes out this week, presents, in chronological order, ten criminally under-rated Great Detectives for your reconsideration. Click through to check out his picks, and let us know your own favorite incarnation of the famous sleuth in the comments!

Read More »

This past week, Jack Kerouac’s first-ever novel, The Sea is My Brother, was finally published 40 years after his death. The novel, long thought to be lost by experts, was unearthed in Kerouac’s personal archive by his brother-in-law. We are constantly inspired by the way that our over-processed world still hangs on to its secrets, and even more by the way that bits of history can hide in plain sight, so to celebrate this newest development in the literary canon, we decided to take a look at Kerouac’s newest/oldest book and other lost novels that were eventually found again. Click through to see our list of lost and found novels, and if you’ve ever had a literary relative, get ready to go hunting in your attics for your own treasure chests. Read More »

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of working on Hemingway Deadlights, a mystery featuring the Nobel Prize-winning writer as its sleuth. Plenty of real-life authors have made appearances in novels — Arthur Conan Doyle in Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George, for one — but none that I know of has been so driven by booze as Papa Hemingway. And though this book’s mystery may be fictional, the old man in a sea of alcohol certainly isn’t. Read More »