Book Club Case File: My Dearest Holmes
First published in 1988 by the Gay Men’s Press, My Dearest Holmes by Rohase Piercy is a very special pastiche that boasts something very rare—it’s one of the very few and certainly among the earliest published gay pastiches about the great detective and his good doctor. It celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2018.
We're thrilled to have Rohase on the podcast today in our very first interview! We discuss her depiction of a Holmes and Watson romance, it's reception, how queer readings have and haven't changed since the 1980s, and lots more.
Find My Dearest Holmes (and many other pastiche recommendations) on our Bookshop!
Rohase Piercy was born in London in 1958 and now lives in Brighton (on the South Coast of England) with her husband Leslie, dog Spike and a fluctuating number of racing pigeons. She has two grown-up daughters.
When her debut novel My Dearest Holmes was published by the Gay Men's Press in 1988 it provoked howls of outrage from the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and from the mainstream media - (SHERLOCK HOMO! He's gay in new book!) However times have changed, and during the last ten years or so it has gained an appreciative readership and has been published in Italian (Mio Diletto Holmes, Tre Editori, 2011) and Japanese (Shinshokan, 2015). At first glance Rohase's writing may seem confusingly diverse, but all of her novels present well known characters, stories or events from an alternative perspective - usually with LGBTQ overtones.
Her Twitter Account - The Raven’s Bunker
Music credit: The songs “Denmark (Live)” by the Portland Cello Project is featured with an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).