[A three pipe Problem] is historically based … in a contemporary sense: the action takes place today. But the detective is Sherlock Holmes! Rather, he is an actor named Sheridan Haynes who is playing the great detective in a long-running TV series, and occupies a flat in Baker St provided by the television company as part of their publicity drive. Haynes is, too, a Holmes connoisseur: he knows the books intimately, and he treasures the values they represent, as well as the skills of the great detective. In many passages of fine and ambiguous writing Mr Symons almost makes Haynes over into Holmes. Finally, jeered at by his colleagues, and mocked by his unfaithful wife, Haynes turns detective, and applies the methods of Holmes to the solution of a mysterious series of murders. There are many fine things in the book—including meditations on the changed condition of London, which are especially beautifully done—but perhaps the finest is the way Mr Symons maintains the balance between Haynes's rather dotty ambition, which could so easily have toppled over into farce, the real seriousness of the crime, and the application of the actor's considerable intelligence to its solution. The book is a tour de force of a most uncommon kind; and the best thing Mr Symons has done.
Patrick Cosgrave, "New Developments," in The Spectator (© 1975 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), Vol. 234, No. 7656, March 22, 1975, p. 345.
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