R. Holmes & Co.

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. R. Holmes & Co. (1906) is John Kendrick Bangs's ten-chapter comic detective novel built around Raffles Holmes — the grandson of the gentleman thief A. J. Raffles and the son of Sherlock Holmes — who sets up a detective agency at 221B New York Avenue and advertises for clients. The stories are narrated in the first person by his friend and chronicler Mr. Jenkins, the "I" of the book, whose quiet drawing-room observations frame each adventure. Holmes junior puts his inherited cunning to work on a string of humorous cases: he introduces himself and his remarkable lineage, recovers a purloined signet ring for a boastful burglar, sells magazine publicity to a self-important millionaire, recovers the famous missing pendants of the Paris jeweler Markoo, blackmails a collector into buying a forged "best seller," tricks an amateur burglar named Blank out of his loot, rescues the young wastrel Billington Rand from the bad path he has chosen, stages the mock abduction of the tuxedoed Mr. Cato to soften up a crook named Darlington, and finally joins the elderly Major-General Cox in hunting down the missing pepperpots of the King of Spain — a hunt that reaches into a royal dinner table, a theatrical hotel and a fabled egg made of gold. Bangs, the American humorist known for his "Bangorian" wit and his stories of the Associated Shades, keeps the whole book light and knowing: the detective's deductions are always clever, his fees are always questionable, and his friend Jenkins is always left to pay for the lunch. The book is one of the many turn-of-the-century parodies that play on the fame of Conan Doyle's detective, and it stands out for its good-natured mockery of the very idea of a consulting detective.

© 2026 Independently Published (Lydbog): 9798179314820

Udgivelsesdato

Lydbog: 6. november 2026