Irene Adler novels
 

Anyone read the Irene Adler books by Carole Nelson Douglas? I've just begun "Good Night Mr. Holmes" and it looks to be a good yarn.

The thought of such a thing makes me shudder.

Why? Are you a BSI?

BSI?? I'm not familiar with the term.

No, I think that she's a graverobber.

Baker Street Irregular - Manic fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories who pass a trivia test to join.

As to the other - I enjoyed "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" too. Both the movie and the stage versions I've seen. It's the same concept.

I've also enjoyed the "Thieves World" books where all the authors share a common universe. And that's not so very different either.

Thieves World is very different. It was developed as a "shared universe" ... it's meant to be a collection of stories and novels by different authors using the same world, social rules, characters, etc.

By graverobbing I specifically mean using well known characters, like Holmes or James Bond, and writing them new adventures. They can even be done by otherwise decent authors, as with the Gardner Bonds ... it's NOT a Bond book unless Fleming wrote it ... I feel the same way about the vast mountain of books based on Star Trek. (I have a signed copy of Imzadi by Peter David that I still haven't read ... his dad was a friend of one of my friend's dads, and I usually ended up sitting next to him at the Passover Seders at my friend's house, and it was one of those "Oh, you like the Star Trek, I'll get you my boy's book".)

I have read some of these sorts of books. I admit it, but am not proud of it ... Brian Herbert raping his father's literary legacy has been particularly painful, but strangely not as painful as God-Emperor of Dune.

I don't know about very different, but I agree that it is different. That's why I listed it second. The Adler novels are really more like R&K are dead - inverting the story so that the minor characters are now the major. In the Adler novels, Irene is the major character and Holmes is secondary. Otherwise I wouldn't have interested in them either.

So wait, the writer wasn't even capable of coming up with her own PLOT??? The novels are based on the behind the curtain events in known stories?

That's the idea behind "Wicked" - the story of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Another book I decline to read.

Now, it's kind of a neat trick in a literary sense, and one that I've even seen used well (by Piers Anthony in the Incarnations of Immortality series, and I think also in the Cluster Series, and by Robert L. Forward in Dragons Egg, which was of course really interesting in it's use, since the two races in the book lived at such different scales of time ...

But having someone not the original author writing something like that?? The person doing the writing should probably get a more respectable job, like being a Scientology Auditor or a prostitute or something.