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"
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes entry for Doyle suggests that the short stories contained in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" tend to point out social injustices, such as "a king's betrayal of an opera singer, a stepfather's deception of his ward as a fictitious lover, an aristocratic crook's exploitation of a failing pawnbroker, a beggar's extensive estate in Kent." It suggests that, in contrast, Holmes is portrayed as offering a fresh and fair approach in an unjust world of "official incompetence and aristocratic privilege". "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" contains many of Doyle's favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1927, he submitted a list of what