Hollywood and Holmes: recommended reading about real-life superfans and fiction's best-known detective.

Starstruck * Michael Joseph Gross * Bloomsbury * $23.95

Patric and Harrell, a gay couple in their 40s from Irving, Texas, consider moving their bedroom into the garage to make more room for their Dolly Parton paraphernalia collection. Chad, a gay 20-year-old Starbucks barista from Boston, flies to a Burbank taping of Will & Grace to give Debra Messing a four-page letter he'd written--not to her but to that episode's guest star, Madonna. To cap it off, Michael Joseph Gross--the out journalist whose jaw-dropping new book Starstruck reports scenes from the extremes of random--recalls that he once wrote a fan letter to Messing's husband. And Messing remembers it.

That's especially remarkable since Gross estimates he wrote some 5,000 letters during his adolescence, asking for signatures from anyone he'd been told was even a little bit famous. Now a top-tier entertainment journalist (The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Out, and other outlets), Gross no longer asks for John Hancocks, but his former obsession gives him genuine empathy for the people he hangs out with in Starstruck: Michael Jackson fans camped out in front of Neverland, forgotten actors selling their autographs at fan conventions, and hobbit Sean Astin, who soon wraps Gross into the oddly integrated circle of fans and friends who surround him.

Gross's press cred and his disarmingly attentive persona get him amazing access to both the famous--Patton, Astin, Mary Hart, Mickey Rourke, Val Kilmer--and their quirky followers as well as professional autograph hounds, who are simply scary. After reading Starstruck, you may never want to ask for an autograph ever again. But you'll know how it's done.

A Slight Trick of the Mind * Mitch Cullin * Nan A. Talese/Doubleday * $23.95

Sherlock Holmes, the fictional Victorian detective whose global popularry continues to this day, has had more imagined resurrections than Elvis. Holmes's creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, nearly killed the character off several times, only to bring him back for more adventures. Holmes has appeared in many contexts, but the character himself has been consistent: his ubiquitous pipe, disdain for emotion, and his interest only in the facts that solve a mystery.

A Slight Trick of the Mind, by out novelist Mitch Cullin, pits Holmes against his most intractable adversary: love. It's nothing so obvious as romantic love--at 93, Holmes, a retired beekeeper living in a cottage on the Sussex coast, has long given up on that. But the years have dulled his legendary mind just enough to leave an opening for those intruders, his feelings. For readers who picture the ancient sleuth jolted into action on one last case, Cullin's book will disappoint. But as an elegy for human contacts squelched and put away--and a tribute to forgiveness, no matter how delayed--A Slight Trick of the Mind is an achievement.

Passionate Holiness: Marginalized Christian Devotions for Distinctive People * Dennis O'Neill * Trafford * $26.99

Here's something the antigay modern Roman Catholic Church would like to forget: In the early years of Christianity, homosexual saints were worshiped too, as Dennis O'Neill reminds us. O'Neill is a Chicago-based Catholic pastor who 11 years ago founded the Living Circle, a spirituality center devoted to GLBT people and their friends. In 1995 the Circle hosted an art exhibit titled "Passionate Holiness" that displayed such holy icons as Saint Boris and George the Hungarian and saints Brigid and Darlughdach of Kildare. O'Neill's retelling of such stories, plus striking color illustrations, will surprise and inspire any reader, gay or not.--A.S.