Start with the greatest character in the history of criminal literature. Put him in the context of the gaslit Victorian era, which so many of us look back upon with a nostalgia that, if truth be told, it doesn’t deserve. Give him an array of fascinating adjuncts, such as a brother even smarter than he is; a loyal sidekick and amanuensis who drops everything to accompany him on one wild adventure after another; the longest-suffering landlady who ever lived, always ready with a hot cup of tea or a sprawling breakfast; and a small army of ragamuffins able to scour every alleyway and corner of London to snap up essential clues as needed.

Whom you have, of course, is the great Sherlock Holmes.

What I want to know, given all the ingredients for a three-star cassoulet, is how you can produce a bucket of slop unfit for starving hogs or French politicians. Yet, analogously, that is what some recent writers of books featuring Holmes have done.

To provide context, it’s only fair to go on record as saying that I love the original canon of 60 Holmes stories and have found enormous pleasure in scores of pastiches and even many parodies.

Rick Boyer’s “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” may be the best, although another novel with the same title by Alan Vanemann has its merits as well. Perhaps the greatest of the books based on the Holmes saga did not feature the detective at all, but starred his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in the two masterworks by John Gardner, “The Return of Moriarty” and “The Revenge of Moriarty.”

While I admire Nicholas Meyer’s “The Seven Per-Cent Solution,” I did not appreciate Holmes being portrayed as a drug-addicted paranoid. The same is true for the excellent series by Laurie King, in which Holmes serves mainly as an adjunct to his wife (oy vay), Mary Russell.

In the most recent book in the series, “Locked Rooms” (Bantam Dell, 402 pages, $24), Mary becomes the target of an assassin. Alas, he fails. Well-written, solidly plotted mysteries, with a convincingly illustrated background of time and place, the series has as its only flaw the preposterous fact that Holmes, a borderline misogynist in real life, has married the admittedly charming Mary.

There have been other excellent books, and some flawed ones, that are nonetheless highly entertaining, but someone apparently forgot to shut down a dam somewhere because there has been a flood of pitiable attempts at riding the coattails of the best and wisest man I have ever known.

P.C. Shumway has written “Sherlock Holmes and the Kiss of Death” (BookSurge, 163 pages, $15.99), which I had been eager to read, as it involved the world’s most clever magician. I’m a sucker for magic shows, staged mind-blowing illusions that haunt late-night attempts to fall asleep, and close-up magic, in which sleight of hand is so deft that the only reasonable explanation for the tricks is that they are miracles.

Mr. Shumway has also produced a miracle, in that, after a brief three page foreword, I needed to force myself to proceed. One of the great conceits and joys of the Holmes canon is the moment when, based on the tiniest maguffin, Holmes makes a series of deductions that astound Watson and, of course, the reader. Holmes’s explanation follows, making the extraordinary seem commonplace and his conclusions nothing more than any of us could have accomplished, given the chance.

On the very first page of “The Kiss of Death,” Holmes is given a note from which he is able to deduce a remarkable number of the writer’s features. As expected, Watson is dumbfounded by his friend’s ability and asks how he was able to know all these things.

“Don’t be naive, Watson,” Holmes replies. “It’s called writer’s prerogative.” It’s also called copping out.

Holmes proceeds to decipher the note, employing some arcane mathematical system that again baffles Watson and gave me an attack of narcolepsy. Pages splashed with wincingly bad prose (“poisonous venom,” as if there is another kind; “a steaming glass vile” – vile spelling to match vile usage; and punctuation that might be appropriate only for Urdu).

It would seem that BookSurge is a print-on-demand company. One can only wonder who would demand such a book. While I’m on that subject, permit me to draw your attention to “Sherlock Holmes on the Wild Frontier” (BookSurge, 303 pages, $14.99) by Magda Jozsa.

Some liberties should be allowed to indulge an author’s creativity, but why Holmes is herein described as using pomade to slick his hair back defies explanation. So does the notion that an Australian author can accurately depict an American accent as well as a British one.

Watson assists a woman in the American West with a birth. She speaks exactly as you would expect if she were in rural Mississippi and the dialogue had first been translated into Japanese and then re-translated into English by someone whose first language was something else. She says, for example, “you-all.”

Now, if the author had not tried to spell other words to suggest a regional accent, such as “wrasslin'” and “reckon,” this could be forgiven, but I’ve been in the South scores of times, and know it’s pronounced “y’all.” In another scene, a saloon brawl breaks out when Holmes accuses the casino owner of having a rigged roulette wheel. When Watson expresses outrage over the cheater, Holmes uses a famous quotation that is appropriate but utterly anachronistic.

“Never give a sucker an even break,” he says, a phrase made famous by W.C. Fields, the funniest man who ever lived, but who wouldn’t utter the familiar slogan for many years.

If you feel a need to return to the land where it is always 1895, get a copy of Gabriel Brownstein’s “The Man From Beyond” (W.W. Norton, 298 pages, $23.95), which features Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, or Julian Barnes’s “Arthur & George” (Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $24.95), the story of Doyle’s detective work in freeing an unjustly jailed man. They’re not about Holmes, but they won’t send you screaming into the streets, either.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.