The new Holmes

Sherlock is popping up in lots of recent novels, Reuters reports.

Caleb Carr's "The Italian Secretary," a novel commissioned by Conan Doyle's estate, hit book stores last month, following Mitch Cullin's "A Slight Trick of the Mind," featuring the sleuth amid the debris of the world's first atom bomb attack.

"I think that he just embodies the modern era's belief that through reason ... we can solve all our terrible difficulties," Carr told Reuters. "That's been challenged recently by the resurgence of fundamentalist religious thinking."

Pulitzer prize-winning writer Michael Chabon's "The Final Solution" puts Holmes in 1944 Britain hunting for a parrot of a German Jewish boy, who is muted by Holocaust horror. Laurie King, in a book due in June, has Holmes tapping repressed memories of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The authors have aged Holmes accordingly in the historical novels. Holmes is 89 in the Holocaust tale. The detective is 93 as he ponders the devastation of Hiroshima.

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