Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, had a sizeable ego, but even he would have been surprised to find his ace detective, as well as himself, cast as the star of other people's fictions. Doyle (already played by Peter O'Toole to perfection in the underrated 1997 film Fairy Tale) teams up with the Reverend Charles Dodgson (better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, the creator of another timeless character, Alice) in a polished, poignant first novel by Roberta Rogow. The lovely resort town of Brighton is the setting for this story of Doyle and Dodgson's search for the daughter of a crusading politician. Rogow manages to describe the dark details of Victorian child prostitution with total honesty while also being nostalgic and very funny. --Dick Adler