Oh give me a Holmes on the range

Sherlock Holmes has lent himself to many genres, with each author reinventing the character to his own ends whilst retaining the core elements of Doyle's creation. But you don't have to write about Holmes to draw influence from the immortal tales as popular western writer, Chap O'keefe, editor of the Ezine Black Horse Extra, creator of Misfit Lil here explains:

The most popular Backtrails numbers of the ezine
are for March 2007 and
September 2008. One had a lead on crime/western
fiction crossovers; the
other on "western noir". I'd always subscribed
to the widely held view
that westerns were closely aligned to crime
fiction, and tried to appeal
to that audience, particularly with the
stories of Joshua Dillard,
former Pinkerton detective. Perhaps it
 was inevitable the great Sherlock
Holmes would one day come into the picture. And he did with BLAST TO
OBLIVION, which is loosely based on the same source material as Valley of
Fear. (See March
2009 Black Horse Extra.)

As others have correctly pointed out, THE VALLEY OF FEAR
was closest
among the Holmes novels to being "hardboiled". But it had
 a way to go.
Unlike Holmes, Dillard could not be a virtual bystander
to the
hardboiled action, which in VALLEY is contained in a
flashback forming
the core of the book. The new book also had to
have some fresh plot
twists, so that it couldn't be dismissed as
nothing but a rip-off, which
was my biggest worry.

Fortunately, it worked. The book quickly went
out of print at the
publishers, and the readers were pleased. In
its newsletter, the
District Messenger,
 the Sherlock Holmes Society of London
 said, "Mr
O’Keefe has reworked the plot of a Sherlock Holmes
 story as an exploit
of his ex-Pinkerton protagonist Joshua Dillard. The
result is clever,
atmospheric and exciting." Peter E. Blau, a trustee
and secretary of the
society's famed New York counterpart, the
Baker Street Irregulars,
similarly circulated his members with the
advice that the book "opens
with an epigraph from THE VALLEY OF FEAR,
and with good reason: the book
is a western, with plenty of color and
atmosphere and violence, and a
mystery that will not be a surprise to
those who have read and remember
Conan Doyle's story." There were other
 favourable reviews or mentions at
Mystery File, the Tainted Archive, and
from Rafe McGregor.

Some online dealers may still have stock
and the book will be out again
in January in a large-print edtion.
You can read the first chapter at
chapokeefe.webs.com.