Dear Holmes “Friendly Hand of Death”: Reviewed on Co-Op For Two

My last post mentioned how my Dear Holmes play-by-mail mystery, “The Friendly Hand of Death,” would be reviewed over four upcoming episodes of the Co-Op For Two YouTube Channel.

“The Friendly Hand of Death” consists of three clue letters and a fourth letter from Sherlock Holmes where The Great Detective solves the mystery and reveals the steps he followed to reach his resolution.

Now I’m delighted and proud to announce that all four episodes are now available!

Co-Op For Two is hosted by computer programmer and all-around good guy Jesse Reichler, who invites viewers to (according to the site’s description) “Join us for narrative mystery, detective and escape room games, and other cooperative boardgames. Full playthroughs, comprehensive reviews, and long sidebar discussions, with an eye towards game design.”

This has been a unique and insightful experience. It’s one thing to get feedback from readers and critics, or to listen to comments in a writing class from students, but it’s a way different ballgame to watch strangers from around the world reading and trying to solve a mystery I wrote in real time. Humbling is an understatement, especially when two typos made by the Dear Holmes editors and one error made by me, myself, and I reared their ugly heads. Fortunately none of these prevent the solving of the mystery, as I took the liberty of explaining in the comments section for the Letter Three episode.

I learned a great deal watching these episodes, and I would like to extend my thanks to Reichler and his viewers. And if you would like to see what I’m talking about, or would just like to listen to “The Friendly Hand of Death,” just click on the links below:

Letter One (broadcast 6/8/25) in which the writer confronts the horror of the typos:

Letter Two (broadcast 6/15/25) in which the writer confronts the horror of his own boneheaded mistake:

Letter Three (broadcast 6/22/25) in which the writer becomes impressed with the viewers’ efforts to solve his mystery and enjoys the various hypotheses:

Letter Four, Solution (broadcast 6/29/25) in which the writer can relax and breathe again:

This was my first experience writing a play-by-mail story, and it was challenging and intimidating. It had to be a play fair mystery that revealed its clues in a logically gradual progression each week while also being able to stand on its own two feet as a piece of entertainment. As I cast about for a concept to build upon, I chanced upon a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams near the end of their lives: “I forget for a while the hoary winter of age, when we can think of nothing but how to keep ourselves warm, & how to get rid of our heavy hours until the friendly hand of death shall rid us of all at once (12 October 1823).”

I’m old so that phrase stuck in my head, but in a sing-song way it also recalled the phrase “a friendly hand of poker,” which put me in mind of my recent Holmes fantasy “My Tombstone Days by John H. Watson, M.D.” In that alternate-universe adventure, I indulged in my admiration for John Henry “Doc” Holliday by having Holmes and Dr. Watson participate in events leading up to and including the Gunfight at the OK Corral. One of those events has also stuck in my mind for many years:

My fondness for “Doc” Holliday came into play in an indirect way in “The Friendly Hand of Death.”

“…in perhaps the most famous and certainly the strangest game in the history of poker, several of the leading characters of the following day’s gunfight were gathered at the Occidental Saloon for an all-night session. One wonders what the new governor, John Gosper, might have thought. His report had stressed that the county sheriff and the town and deputy U.S. marshals couldn’t get together; now [Sheriff] John Behan, [Deputy U.S. Marshal] Virgil Earp, Ike Clanton, Tom McLaury, Wyatt [Earp], and Doc Holliday sat in the Occidental for nearly five hours playing poker and watching each other. What was discussed? No one knows. In later testimony the game wasn’t even mentioned. That Ike Clanton and Doc Holliday could have spent nearly five hours together drinking and playing poker without trying to kill each other is practically impossible to believe [Inventing Wyatt Earp, pp. 166-7].”

I asked myself, “How about a mystery that involves an unfriendly hand of poker like the one at the Occidental? A friendly hand of death?”

But what mystery?

I wanted both one hell of a hook and a unique plot, and eventually I remembered a peculiar event of my own in which I apparently dodged a bullet.

Long story short, in 1983 I moved back to my childhood home of Cedar Rapids after working in Des Moines for about a year. A few months after moving into my new apartment, a nondescript young man knocked on my door late one night claiming that his car had broke down and asked if he could borrow my phone to call for help. He made his call, thanked me, but before departing he looked around my apartment and asked what I did for a living. I wasn’t in the mood to tell him anything about myself, so I said I wrote comic books. I certainly wanted to write comics for a living, and my apartment certainly looked like I could write comics for a living, but he said, “No, you don’t.”

Yeah, I was lying, but I didn’t like being called a liar, so I told him, “Yes, I do.”

He still didn’t seem to believe me, but he left and I forgot about the incident… until about a year later when the town newspaper ran a story about a Cedar Rapidian named Steven P. Jones. This Steven P. Jones somehow got confused for a second Steven P. Jones who worked as an accountant whose clients included some very bad guys. An accountant who had done something stupid and naughty, like embezzling money from the bad guys. For several months the first Steven P. Jones was put through the wringer as he was threatened by the bad guys, but all the police could do to help was suggest he move to another town, since no crime had been committed.

In time the bad guys eventually figured out their mistake and the threats stopped, but suddenly that late-night visitor’s accusation regarding my occupation made sense.

Now, if you’d like to see just how I reworked that Tombstone poker game and the peculiar incident of the Steven P. Joneses into a mystery, you’ll have to check out “The Friendly Hand of Death.”