THE INCREDIBLE UMBRELLA

Kaye, who recently collaborated on a piece of relatively serious science fiction (The Masters of Solitude, p. 575), is back to his more accustomed Sherlockian pastiche, accompanied this time by the kitchen sink and virtually the rest of the kitchen. J. Adrian Fillmore, harassed academic underling, is transported by an unorthodox umbrella straight off to Gilbert-and-Sullivan-Land, where run-ins with the personnel of H.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado, etc., efficiently land him in the Fleet (the prison, not the navy). Thenceforth, literary allusions take over the story with the alacrity of typhoid bacteria invading the bloodstream. Fillmore blunders from the company of Samuel Pickwick to the lair of Professor Moriarty (who of course made the umbrella) and eventually to Abbott's Flatland, by way of haft a dozen other literary universes. Other participants include Dracula, Abu Hassan, Fielding's Jonathan Wild, and Frankenstein's monster. For whimsy-wallowers only.