Sherlock Holmes pastiches old man,' solving the case of the missing parrot belonging to a nine-year-old Jewish refugee boy from Germany. While readily solving the mystery, 'the old man,' as well as the rest of the characters in the novella, fail to see what the parrot's incessant muttering of random German numbers really means. Caleb Carr was approached to pen a tale for the anthology "Ghosts of Baker Street". Carr's short story grew to become a full length novel which became 2005's "The Italian Secretary". An example of Sherlock Holmes pastiche is found in "The Curse of the Nibelung: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery"
Sherlock Holmes pastiches the Cambridge Apostles (Moore, Hardy, Keynes...) Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Annie Besant and of course, Aleisteir Crowley as a perfect villain. Michael Dibdin's novel "The Last Sherlock Holmes Story" (1979) confronts a somewhat psychopathic Sherlock Holmes with the crimes of Jack the Ripper, whom Holmes suspects to be none other than James Moriarty. Raymond Smullyan wrote "The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes" (1979), in which Holmes (with Watson) applies retrograde analysis to solve chess problems. The detective novelist Loren D. Estleman wrote several short stories and two novels featuring Holmes; the novels pit the detective against Count Dracula and Dr.