From Publishers Weekly
In Edgar-finalist Hockensmith's rollicking third mystery to feature Old Red and Big Red Amlingmeyer (after 2007's On the Wrong Track), the Sherlock Holmes–loving cowboy brothers do some detectifying in 1893 San Francisco, the world's wickedest city. After their disastrous tour of duty as railway policemen, the Amlingmeyers join forces with the alluring Diane Corvus, another veteran of the railroad. Together, they investigate the death of Dr. Chan, whose luggage was thrown from the same train that the brothers patrolled and who was possibly done in by Chinese highbinders, or hatchet men. Working with local law enforcement and Chinatown's Napoleon of Crime, Old Red and Big Red follow a twisted trail that leads from cabbage vendors to whorehouses. Despite a jam-packed plot, Hockensmith takes longer to reach full speed than in previous outings. Still, readers will delight in the hilarious climactic Mandarin standoff between Chinatown's underworld and Frisco's hapless police force. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
In the summer of 1893, Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer and his brother Otto (a.k.a. “Big Red”) find themselves down and out in San Francisco. Though cowpokes by training, the brothers are devotees of the late, great Sherlock Holmes and his trademark method of “deducifying.” But when they set out to land jobs as professional detectives, they land themselves in hot water, instead.
First their friend Dr. Chan mysteriously takes a potshot at them, fatally wounding Big Red’s new hat. Then a secretive young woman from their past pops up and convinces them that Chan’s in trouble -- and they’re just the men to get him out of it. Unfortunately, they’re too late: By the time they track Chan down again, he’s dead. The police call it a suicide. Old Red calls that a lie. When he and his brother set out to prove it, they put themselves on a collision course with shady S.F.P.D. cops, brutal Barbary Coast hoodlums and the deadly Chinatown tongs.
Before long, all sides are in a race to uncover the secret that could rock the city. And their only clue to what’s actually going on is the enigmatic, exotic and extremely difficult to find “Black Dove.”From the Back Cover
“Inspired…dazzles with colorful language, vivid images, and hilarious asides. Sherlock Holmes in a Stetson turns out to be a dandy idea.” – Boston Globe, on Holmes on the Range
“…a delightful, hilarious, action-packed tale…” – Mystery Scene on On the Wrong Track
“A great reworking of the Holmes conceit…Hockensmith will have a steady readership as long as the Amlingmeyers are on the case.” – Booklist (starred review) on Holmes on the Range
“[Big Red’s] foot-in-a-bucket narration will keep the reader snorting with laughter...Hockensmith has been nominated for the Edgar Award, and if he keeps writing like this, he'll win one soon.” – Library Journal (starred review) on The Black Dove
“Uproarious…As this fast-moving express hurtles toward a spectacular ending, Gustav searches for ways to apply Holmes's crime-solving genius to the comic bedlam." – Publishers Weekly (starred review) on On the Wrong Track
“Well written, fast-paced and filled with historical atmosphere…Highly recommended.” – Mystery News on Holmes on the RangeAbout the Author
Steve Hockensmith is the author of the novels Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track, as well as numerous short stories. His first novel featuring Big Red and Old Red, Holmes on the Range, was a finalist for the Edgar, the Anthony, the Shamus and the Dilys Award. He lives in Alameda, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
It wasn’t just fear I felt as I faced those highbinders and their hatchets. I was almost as surprised as I was petrified. Not that I was about to die, mind you. It was more the manner of it.
An early death was a possibility—perhaps even a probability—of which I’d been acutely aware almost from birth. As a lad on the family farm in Kansas, I figured it was smallpox, starvation, or Sitting Bull that’d get me. After most of my kin were indeed got (by a flood, as it came to pass), I took to drovering with my brother Gustav, thus giving myself ample opportunity to meet my maker via stampede, saddle-dragging, bull’s horn, or rustler’s bullet. On top of which, my brother had me half-convinced my big mouth was going to get me brained in a saloon brawl sooner or later.
So imagine my dismay upon learning I’d end my days being chopped into chow mein in Chinatown. That one I didn’t see coming. Though perhaps I should have, given our luck of late.
Our detour into the peculiar began a full year earlier, in June of 1892, when a fellow puncher passed along a magazine story he thought might amuse us: “The Red-Headed League” by Dr. John Watson. The joke being that Gustav and I could be charter members of any such league ourselves, since we each have hair the crimson of cardinal feathers.
But handing us “The Red-Headed League” turned out to be much more than just a jape. It was like giving lil’ Chrissy Columbus his first toy boat, or telling Paul Bunyan he’s just not working out as a seamstress and shouldn’t he consider a line of work more suiting his size?
It was, in other words, the sort of seemingly meaningless gesture that can change lives (and perhaps end them).
You see, Gustav had long been chafing in the saddle, and not just in the way that leaves you walking bowlegged. A finer cowhand than he you could not chance to meet, yet my brother was feeling ever more thwarted nursing other men’s cattle for a dollar a day. Life as a cowboy requires much in the way of skill and grit, but your brains you can leave wrapped up in your war bags. And Gustav—he was itching to unpack his and put them to work.
“The Red-Headed League” showed him how, for at its center was a man who made his way in the world not by the sweat of his brow but by the shrewdness of the mind beneath it. Details and data were his stock in trade, and these are free to all . . . who have the keenness of vision to see them clearly.
The man called himself “a consulting detective,” and his name, of course, was Sherlock Holmes. He was dead, we later learned—lost to a waterfall under circumstances most mysterious. But in my brother his spirit found itself a new vessel.
An imperfect one, though, as even Gustav would admit. Sharp of eye though he may be, my brother is also utterly void of learning. The only letters he knows are the ones he’s seen on brands, and if they’re not burned into cowhide, he can’t make head nor tail of them. But that hasn’t stopped him (and his tag-along baby brother) from pursuing a career in the detectiving trade—though it does partially explain why said pursuit has largely been in vain.
Take our last visit to an actual detective agency, for example.
“Fill these out,” a dapper, slender, profoundly bored-looking fellow told us when we walked in and (after a good three minutes being ignored) caught his eye. He opened a desk drawer and produced a pair of forms bearing his employer’s seal: the all-seeing eye of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
He tossed a couple stubby pencils atop the sheets of paper, then jerked his head at a bare table in a corner at the back of the room.
“Over there.”
“Yessir. We’ll have ’em back to you in two shakes,” I said with a smile.
The Pinkerton just stared at me silently through droopy-lidded eyes. Two shakes or two million, it clearly made no nevermind to him.
“I’ll fill one out for you first,” I whispered to my brother as we walked past the filing cabinets and mahogany desks that filled the smallish office. “Then we’ll trade sheets, and I’ll do one for myself.”
We sat down and huddled together over the employment forms.
“Make sure the handwritin’ don’t look the same,” Gustav said softly. “Booger one of ’em up a bit. You know—write it out left-handed or upside down or somethin’.”
“Yeah, yeah. Sure.”
I got to work on my brother’s application.
Name: Gustav Dagobert Amlingmeyer
Aliases: “Old Red,” “That Little Quiet Feller”
Address: The Cosmopolitan House (Hotel), 511 Eighth Street, Oakland
Telephone exchange/number: I have no earthly idea
Date of birth: October 22, 1866
Place of birth: Marion County, Kansas
Height: Five feet, six inches (I guessed.)
Weight: 125 pounds (I guessed again.)
Hair: Red
Eyes: Blue
Scars, birth marks, disfigurements, or other notable physical features: Bullet hole on right side below rib cage; old rope burns on hands; various and sundry nicks, cuts, and abrasions; freckles on arms and shoulders; an exceptionally thick mustache; an exceptionally hard head
Education: Enough (I lied.)
Previous occupations: Farmhand, cowhand, freelance genius
Law enforcement/private investigation experience: Oh, shit (I almost wrote.)
I leaned closer to Old Red, who was hunched over pretending to scribble on the form before him.
“They’re askin’ if we ever been lawmen before. Should I mention the S.P.?”
The memory of our brief, disastrous tour of duty as agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police puckered up Gustav’s puss like a big chomping bite of raw lemon.
“Well, hell,” he groaned. “It is the only time we had real badges pinned to us.”
“But we was fired.”
“We quit before we was fired.”
“Yeah, but a lot of folks died before we quit.”
“Most of ’em woulda died whether we’d been there or not,” my brother pointed out halfheartedly.
“How ’bout the train that got blowed up, then? It’d still be haulin’ folks up and down the Sierras if we’d never stepped aboard. And if the Pinks check on us with the S.P.—and the Pinks bein’ the Pinks, they will—then it’ll all come out.”
“Fine, then. Don’t mention the S.P. Just say that . . . .”
Gustav screwed up his face again, silent for a moment as he dictated in his head.
“Say we’ve made a scientific study of the detectin’ and deducifyin’ methods of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”
“Got it.”
I looked back down at the line about experience.
None, I wrote.
Old Red was watching me, though, so I added a few more words for appearance’s sake.
But we’re young and eager to learn—and cheap, to boot.
“Alrighty,” I said. “Let’s trade.”
We swapped sheets fast, Gustav hacking out a phony little cough to cover the sound of rustling paper. He needn’t have bothered—no one was paying us any mind. The slick-looking Pinkerton was filling out paperwork of his own, while the only other person in the room—a prim, pretty office girl who had so far evaded my every attempt at eye contact—was clacking away on one of those ear-pummeling “type-writing” contraptions.
I licked the tip of my pencil and got back to work.
Name: Otto Albert Amlingmeyer
Aliases: “Big Red” (frequently used by friends and colleagues), “You Handsome Devil You” (frequently used by female acquaintances)
Address: The Cosmopolitan House, Eighth Street, Oakland
Telephone exchange/number: If the Cosmopolitan House has a telephone, it’s used about as often thereabouts as a broom, feather duster, or mop—which is to say never.
Date of birth: June 4, 1872
Place of birth: The kitchen table
Height: Six feet, one inch
Weight: 200 pounds, more or less (It was actually more at the time—city living does tend to soften a man.)
Hair: Red
Eyes: Blue
Scars, birth marks, disfigurements, or other notable physical features: Damned ugly knees and elbows (from being dragged halfway across Texas by a roped steer); bite marks on foot (from finding a Gila monster in my boot the hard way); Cross J brand on right buttocks (it’s a long story)
Education: Six years of formal schooling; a lifetime of informal schooling via newspapers, magazines, books, open ears, open eyes, and an open mind
Previous occupations: Farmboy, granary clerk, cowboy, drifter, yarnspinner
Law enforcement/private investigation experience: I am pleased to report that I remain unmolded clay, unmarred by the fumbling fingers of employment with government authorities or private parties unequal to the exacting standards of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
“There,” I said, jabbing down the final period. “Done.”
Old Red glanced back at the thin Pink, who was listening listlessly to a pair of mumbly men who&...
From AudioFile
If you have yet to enjoy one of Hockensmith's Holmes on the Range novels, run, don't walk, to your nearest audio outlet and let the good times roll. Our two crime-fighting brothers, called Big Red and Old Red, due to the color of their hair, catch the bug after being given a copy of the Sherlock Holmes classic ³The Redheaded League.² This episode finds them in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1893. Much has been said about the great abilities of narrator William Dufris, and concerning this production it must be said that he approaches the material with gung-ho rollicking, side-slapping intensity. He just flat out seems to be having a fabulous time. D.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
