LOVE CANDID INTERVIEWS with writers, and especially with those who expose both personality and writing process without shielding themselves by a thin veneer of propriety or pomp. The Sacramento Bee has a fascinating interview with Sherlockian author and bad boy Michael Kurland, the author of the recent Moriarty series and the editor of a series of pastiche anthologies.

From Elementary, My Dear Kurland:

“I didn’t want to write a pastiche,” Kurland says. “I don’t like doing what somebody else has done. If I write a Holmes story and let Dr. Watson tell it, I can’t win. I’m going to be compared to Doyle and I’ll lose. Why would I do that? A lot of people do just that because the books sell. But if you write a Watson story and add anything to it, 10,000 Sherlockians are going to hate you.” […]

“Holmes is a bit of a prig,” Kurland points out. “He’ll occasionally break the law, but he won’t break the social bond, no matter how stupid it is. In Doyle’s day, Holmes was the perfect Victorian. Not as we think of Victorians today, as lacy and uptight. But the way Victorians thought of themselves, as modern, scientific and logical.

“Moriarty thinks all that is bull. Basically, Moriarty is a late-20th-century man living in the late 19th century.”

(From what I can tell, the Sacramento Bee website allows you to read this article without registration the first time, but if you revisit the site, you have to undergo a free registration to see it again.)