The author discusses the people, animals, and events he has encountered while searching for lost or stolen pets during his career as the only full-time professional pet detective in the United States.

The author examines some of his best cases of finding missing animals.

This is a classic, standard resource for collection building and on-the-spot readers advisory absolutely indispensable for school and public libraries.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most recognizable—and most parodied—names in western literature. Bill Mason, BSI, collects and annotates these parody names, from the first one that appeared in 1891, to the present day. As Mason says in his introduction: One of the great aspects of Sherlock Holmes is the fact that, just as the character himself is subject to endless variation, so is his name. Ellery Queen noted that the name itself “is particularly susceptible to the twistings and mis-shapenings of burlesque minded authors.” Surely, Arthur Conan Doyle, who struggled a little with what he was going to call his detective hero, could not have known just how perfect the name he finally selected—Sherlock Holmes—would be for parody, for rhyme, for the transposing of letters and sounds, for the substitution of suggestive words in the name of a comic character. Mason’s listings are an invaluable resource for the Holmsian scholar, researcher, or for those interested in whiling away a few hours with a delightful and chuckle-inspiring volume.

Between 1887 and 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, and his great Canon has become the most praised, most studied, and best-known chapter in the history of detective fiction. Over twenty thousand publications pertaining to the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon are known to have been published, most of them historical and critical studies. In addition, however, almost since the first stories appeared, such was their uniqueness and extraordinary attraction that other authors began writing stories based on or derived from them. A new genre had appeared: pastiches; parodies; burlesques; and stories that attempted to copy or rival the great detective himself. As the field widened, there was hardly a year in the twentieth century in which new short stories or novels did not appear. Many hundreds are now known to have been published, some of them written by authors well-known for their work in other literary fields. The non-canonical Sherlock Holmes literature not only constitutes a literary field of considerable historical interest, but includes many stories that are both enjoyable and fascinating in their own right. Although a large bibliography on these stories exists, and a few limited anthologies have been published, no attempt has previously been made to collect them all and discuss them comprehensively. The Alternative Sherlock Holmes does so: it provides a new and valuable approach to the Sherlock Holmes literature, as well as making available many works that have for years remained forgotten. Presented as an entertaining narrative, of interest to both the aficionado and the scholar, it provides full bibliographic data on virtually all the known stories in the field.