It’s been a good twenty-five years since I read my dad’s copy of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”; I remember really enjoying it but also being aware that the author was smarter than I was, that there was a lot going on that was over my head. It made an impression, though; I bought my own copy a few years ago, when I saw it on the shelf at Twice Sold Tales, but I didn’t get around to starting in on it until last night.

Not twenty pages in, I’m astounded: how on earth did I completely miss the fact that it’s a blatant Sherlock Holmes homage? I was a big fan of the Holmes stories back then, too, so you’d think I’d have noticed. The style, the mannerisms, the physical description, the whole deduction-from-seemingly-insignificant-details performance-art thing, with the narrator playing his Watson role to a T. And then Eco names his Franciscan monk character “William of Baskerville“, just to really drive the point home…