Did you know there’s a Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium on Cape Cod? Well, there is in fiction, anyway. Let me tell you about it.

The Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series

The emporium is part of the the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series (now ten books - and counting…). It’s run by one Gemma Doyle, an Englishwoman by birth, now transplanted to West London, Massachusetts - a tourist town near Cape Cod. As well as the original Sherlock Holmes books, it also sells a wide range of other Sherlock stories, Sherlock related memorabilia, and other stories set in the “gas-lit” era of Victorian London.

The story goes that her Great Uncle Arthur found vacant premises at 222 Baker Street, and so had a burning desire to set up a Sherlock Holmes book store there. When it didn’t work out so well, he needed someone to take it over. With previous experience running a bookstore in London, Gemma was perfect for the job.

That said, not all of the books are set around the book store. One is set at a Sherlock Holmes weekend in a nearby mansion, while a couple are set in London, England.

An accidental discovery

I found the series completely by accident. I was wanting an audiobook of The Hound of the Baskervilles, searched for “Baskerville”, and one of the results was The Cat of the Baskervilles. I thought “Sure, I’ll give it a try”, liked it, but there were enough references to previous events that I thought I must be in the middle of a series.

Sure enough, Cat turned out to turned out to be the third in the series - so of course I had to read the first two. And after that I just kept reading…

A cosy mystery series

The series fits very clearly into the “cosy mystery” category. There may be one or more bodies in each book, and Gemma and her friends may sometimes be in imminent danger, but of course they have plot armour on their side.

It’s not high stakes, but the main characters do progress in life (friendships, relationships, …). There are engagements and weddings and pets cared for and pets adopted. There’s the small town life, where everyone seemingly knows everyone, the minutiae of running a bookshop, and the details of life in a tourist town when you’re not yourself a tourist.

Introducing our protagonist (definitely not a consulting detective…)

To me, it’s Gemma who really makes the series: observant, acute, inquisitive - but also at times completely clueless about social norms. She frequently complains about the difficulty of running a business at the same time as detecting (not of course that she is a consulting detective, but cases seem to have a way of finding her). Though the ever present Google helps, of course.

Fortunately, she has friends who will accept her as she is, as well as supportive staff that allow her to do investigations during office hours, and thus when the game is afoot, she can be too.

Fortunately she has a supportive staff, so she can do investigations during office hours.

Should you read the series?

I don’t think you need to be a fanatical Sherlockian to read the books - but it probably helps to know something about them. There are a lot of references both to the original Sherlock Holmes stories and the many books and adaptations and legends that have grown up round him.

Personally, I’ve long been interested in Sherlock Holmes. I may have found this series by accident, but if I had known about it beforehand I’d have said “Yes, it’s probably the kind of series I might like”. If you’re not even remotely interested in it, this probably isn’t the series for you.

Reading for enjoyment

This is the kind of series that might sometimes be talked about as a “guilty pleasure”. But I don’t think they should be. Personally, I kept reading the series because I enjoyed them - and that was all that was necessary. If I came away with some interesting insights into the human condition that’s a bonus - but it’s certainly not why I was reading them.

I don’t want all of my reading to be just for enjoyment - but if I ever felt every book had to be deep and meaningful to be worth reading, I’m well and truly over that.

Breadth vs depth

This post isn’t just about this particular series. It’s about a change to the way I read.

I’ve long known that there are far more books around that I could enjoy or find useful than I will ever be able to read. Five or ten years ago, that meant I was more likely to try the first book of a lot of different series, and ones that I liked I might get back to a second one later.

Now I’m more likely to plan to continue a series I start while the characters are still fresh in my mind, and if that means twenty other good series lie untouched, so be it…

If you will, it’s the book world version of bingeing a TV series. For whatever reason, that didn’t feel right to me ten years ago, and it does now.