Fiction

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes for Christmas by Derrick Belanger
December 22nd: The Christmas Ripper (Conclusion)

For some reason, Belanger seems to be almost obsessed with the word "missus" (as in the colloquialism for "wife"). Someone's clearly told him it's how Brits regularly refer to their/others' wives, and so he's applied it liberally — it's not just in the dialogue of coppers or urchins, but of respectable types, and he has Holmes use it; he uses it in his narrative text too, which is almost more egregious. I double-checked in case it was me who'd misunderstood, but I was right: the word "missus" appears in Conan Doyle's original works precisely zero times. (Is this the worst of Crimes for Christmas' sins? No, but it is a consistently grating niggle. Or a hilarously misguided quirk, depending on your point of view.)