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Rating: "In 1890 London was the largest city in the world, but not big enough for the epic clash between the two most popular characters in world literature: the prince of detectives and the lord of darkness".
With this, in my opinion, eloquent phrase, the back cover of "Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula" entices us to purchase and subsequently read this work, which is classified within the genre of "pastiche" that, in the case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "creature," also includes "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes," also by Loren D. Estleman, and "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," by Nicholas Meyer (the latter narrates the encounter between the London detective and Freud).
The novel in question opens with the shipwreck of the Russian ship "Demeter" in the port of Whitby. This episode, which, beneath the guise of a simple naval disaster, hides a terrible secret, a fate of death and horror coming directly from the magical Carpathians. The development of the investigation will lead Holmes and the loyal Watson to put aside their proverbial rationality in order to confront a dark and cunning enemy almost as astute as the Baker Street investigator. The originality of Estleman's work lies not only in having taken two great characters from late 19th-century literature and making them battle each other in a kind of frantic psychological duel, but the focal point is in having accomplished all this without overturning the plot of the stokerian "Dracula". Indeed, our writer, who "hides" behind the narration of Dr. John Watson (as per the finest Holmesian tradition), takes advantage of the dead spots in the aforementioned gothic novel to insert within it the actions of the two English detectives. A clarifying example for those who have read Bram Stoker's text could be this: in the original "Dracula," the heroes (Van Helsing, Seward, and Morris) wait in the cemetery for the neo-vampire Lucy Westerna to stake her and thus free her soul. Based on this, we knew nothing about where the vampire had been during her nocturnal prowl, so Estleman, in a very skilful and delicate manner, places her on a foggy street in London where she encounters Holmes and Watson, who put her to flight, saving a young boy. I hope with this deliberately "hurried" example (I certainly don't want to recount the entire book), to have conveyed to you the originality of a truly well-written novel, constructed with a relentless pace and with meticulous attention to those details that made the character created by Conan Doyle great more than a hundred years ago.
With this, I conclude, hoping to have enticed you to read "Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula," a book that I am sure will not disappoint you, whether or not you are fans of the world's most famous and imitated detective.
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