The very striking cover of Mark Ellis’s nove, designed by the author’s wife Melissa Martin-Ellis, has Holmes and Watson as you have never seen them before. If Holmes is a precursor of Bond, he is definitely more the saturnine Timothy Dalton than the smooth George Lazenby, while Watson is perhaps a hunky Indiana Jones.

Between them, not Enola Holmes, but Loveday Brooke, heroine of Catherine Pirkis’s series of stories which, in the late nineteenth century, earned her the sobriquet ‘the female Holmes’.

Our heroes are young and sexy, just setting out on their investigative career in Baker Street which provides something of a cover for their other activities, working in secret for Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, and through him the British Government. There has, of course, to be a fiendish plot, very much in the Bond tradition. An organisation called the Hephaestus Ring plans to unleash terror in Paris at the opening of the Eiffel tower, prior, naturally, to taking over the world. The Ring is led by a criminal mastermind, Madame Koluchy, an exceedingly nasty, if beautiful and clever, piece of work, assisted by more familiar baddies, Professor Moriarty and Colonel Moran.

Involved in their plot too, against his will is Nikola Tesla [right], in real life an eminent inventor and electrician . In fact, it is his kidnapping that drives much of the story along as Holmes, Watson and Loveday race against time to track him down.

There are thrills aplenty here, including several vividly described violent confrontations between heroes and villains which made me think what a great film this would make. I was also delighted that Mark Ellis, an American now living in the west of Ireland, brings his characters to my native land, to picturesque Skibbereen in Cork for part of the story.

The clever interweaving of fictional and real characters contemporary with the canon, as well as references to bizarre inventions such as Mephisto the Chess Playing Android (real) or H.G. Wells’s fictional growth hormone, Herakleophorbia IV (from Food of the Gods) is part of the joy of the book. All is explained in the Afterword: Who and What They Are, the skill of the author ensuring that the narrative isn’t burdened down by the evident formidable body of research.

As well as a prolific novelist, Mark Ellis is a journalist and comic creator. His most recent books, apart from this one, are Death Hawk: the Complete Saga, Nosferatu: Sovereign of Terror, Knightwatch: Invictus X and Lakota: Serpents of Aztlan. They sound…. interesting.

221B On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is available from MX publishing from September 24: https://mxpublishing.com/products/221b-on-her-majestys-secret-service-paperback or from Amazon or similar online outlets.