The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes

While it may have been a foregone conclusion that I would sing the praises of any book offering a confluence of Sherlock Holmes and chess, this is nonetheless a volume that can appeal to many readers: chess enthusiasts, puzzle aficionados, amateur Sherlockians, really anyone who enjoys crime novels or mysteries. One need not be a chess expert to appreciate the book. Indeed, the type of chess problem presented (retrograde analysis, i.e., discerning what happened *before*, instead of solving in the other direction, i.e., White to Move and Mate) is unique and thus even very good chess players will benefit from Holmes' elucidation. Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes is the perfect match: Holmes here is detective at the chessboard instead of the crime scene, although that comes later. Smullyan gets the timbre of the Holmes-Watson dialogue right. This is, at minimum, an enjoyable pastiche. Even Moriarty makes an appearance, and, as it turns out, leaves a legacy of ten retrograde problems. Solutions (sometimes exceedingly lengthy!) are included for all puzzles at the end of the book. The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights was a subsequent effort (1981 vs 1979), and is not readily available here, having been published by Oxford University Press. For the record, I did not enjoy that quite as much, probably due to my own dovetailed interests here. Painfully, I must dock one star for the typos (enumerated at the Web site provided in the Comments section below) which, while not diminishing from this very unique book, may frustrate would-be solvers.