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"
Minor Sherlock Holmes characters and, later, husband, an aging Sherlock Holmes. Raffles Holmes, the son of Sherlock Holmes, is a fictional character in the 1906 collection of short stories "Raffles Holmes and Company" by John Kendrick Bangs. He is described as the son of Sherlock Holmes by Marjorie Raffles, the daughter of gentleman thief A.J. Raffles. Wold Newton family theorist Win Scott Eckert devised an explanation in his "Original Wold Newton Universe Crossover Chronology" to reconcile the existence of Raffles Holmes with canonical information about Sherlock Holmes and A.J. Raffles, which fellow Wold Newton speculator Brad Mengel incorporated into his essay "Watching the Detectives."