This book contains seven short stories that purport to be accounts of files solved by Sherlock Holmes which, for one reason or another, could not be published at the time. Instead they were locked away in a tin dispatch box by Dr. Watson and the box was deposited in his bank. A distant relative inherited them and then had to sell them due to "straitened circumstances". The purchaser, a Holmes scholar named John F. Watson, made copies and deposited the originals with his own bank which unfortunately took a direct hit from a bomb during the Second World War, destroying the box and its contents. Dr. Watson felt he could not publish them having only the copies and he bequeathed them to his nephew Aubrey Watson. Aubrey Watson was an orthodontist and had no reputation to protect so he decided to offer some stories to the public.

The stories are liberally footnoted and, if you are a Holmes devotee, these minutiae will no doubt be fascinating. Although I've read some Sherlock Holmes stories and seen more on TV, I have never been a huge fan and I found the footnotes more of a nuisance than a help. For the most part, the stories are faithful to the originals although the very first story, The Case of the Paradol Chamber, I was able to guess the ending, something I was never able to do with any of Arthur Conan Doyle's books. I think I enjoyed The Case of the Old Russian Woman the most as it dealt with immigrants rather than the upper class as most of the originals and these secret chronicles do. The last story, The Case of the Sumatran Rat, was enough to give me nightmares dealing as it does with huge rodents. ( )

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Another set of seven Sherlock Holmes spin off stories, this set being based on cases mentioned in throwaway lines in Conan Doyle's original works. It's a decent set of stories, though none stood out for me as particular favourites. Once again, the author's depiction of Holmes and Watson is very authentic, with one or two glaring exceptions - the most notable being in The Camberwell Poisoning, where Holmes makes a rather distasteful and anachronistic speech sympathising with a murderess he has exposed, saying society is responsible for her turning to crime instead of her being able to fulfill her potential, even to rise to the heights of Prime Minister. As she has not only murdered an innocent and decent old man, but had framed his equally innocent nephew, who would have been hanged for her crime, Holmes's sympathy for this woman seems misplaced - she is no Irene Adler. ( )

Since I really enjoyed the other Thomson book I had read, Not One of Us, I read this in anticipation of really enjoying it. Instead, I was disappointed. For one thing, the mysteries were all quite simple to solve. For the other thing, the stories had these 'aside' explanations, in the story (set in italics to keep it separate from the story itself) of how these events related to other Holmes events. It was very distracting and annoying. ( )