Wiggins: Son of Sherlock

This ungainly Sherlock Holmes pastiche from Palmer (When Fenelon Falls) takes considerable liberties with Conan Doyle’s characters. Early in 1891, Holmes summons Wiggins, the resourceful street urchin who led the Baker Street Irregulars in the original stories, to Baker Street, where the detective asks the 14-year-old to fake his death as part of a plot to forestall the machinations of Professor Moriarty. As the subtitle indicates, Wiggins is Holmes’s son in Palmer’s telling, a fact of which the sleuth is initially unaware. Holmes goes on to explain that this scheme involves his later faking his own death. During their conversation, Holmes dismisses Watson as “a certain scribbling physician” and otherwise denigrates his friend. The overly busy, meandering plot includes speculation about Jack the Ripper that identifies him as a certain canonical character. Labored prose (“If you find this Sherlock excessive, Perplexed Reader, you have yet to meet the bodacious bedlam of the rest of my irregular family,” Wiggins asserts) doesn’t make swallowing all this any easier. Only the most broad-minded Sherlockians will enjoy this one. (Mar.)