Conservative author Jack Cashill has set himself up as a literary Sherlock Holmes, and the mystery he is determined to solve is why the eloquent President Obama couldn't possibly have written his best selling 1995 memoir "Dreams From My Father." The book is beautifully written and yet, in Cashill's opinion, Obama is - and always was - a crappy writer.

Hence, the stink that fills the detective's nose.

The clues Sherlock has uncovered point to one man as the mastermind behind Obama's pearls: Bill Ayers. He's the one-time Obama acquaintance and 1960s radical who prompted Sarah Palin to quip during the presidental campaign that the Democratic candidate had been "palling around with terrorists."

Cashill lit the fuse on his literary bomb last year during the presidential race and it burned feebly for a bit then sputtered out.

Now he's back with it.

On Sunday, he posted on the conservative website American Thinker what he calls the latest breakthrough in his research - following on four earlier installments beginning in October 2008. The National Review called Cashill's first blast on October 9 a "thorough, thoughtful, and alarming" analysis.

Salon deemed the latest offering "the sort of crazy that tends to get purchase in the fever swamps." The Cashill campaign has yet to click with mainstream conservatives.

A busy scribbler himself, Cashill has published five books, including "Hoodwinked: How the Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture," has written for mainstream and fringe media, and is executive editor of Ingram's Magazine, a Kansas City business publication.

To reach his conclusions on "Dreams," he compared Ayers's language in his books, such as "A Kind and Just Parent" and "Fugitive Days," to the words and phrasing in Obama's memoir.

Here's a sampling of the clues that convince Cashill that Ayers is Obama's secret wordsmith.

Both Obama and Ayers cite poet Carl Sandburg and misquote him in the same way. They use the phrase "hog butcher to the world" when Sandburg wrote "hog butcher for the world."

Both authors use the phrase "beneath the surface" repeatedly.

Both speak of power, its use and misuse. In Ayers' "Fugitive Days," the word "power" or some form of it crops up 75 times; in Obama's "Dreams" 83 times.

Both write excessively about eyes. In Ayers' work, there are "sparkling," "laughing," "twinkling" eyes; in Obama's, there are "sparkling," "laughing," "twinkling" eyes.

Both men are fixated on eyebrows, to the point of a fetish, Cashill asserts: six references in "Fugitive Days" - "bushy," "flaring," "arched." Seven references in "Dreams": "bushy," "heavy," "wispy."

Both authors summon the phrase "bill of particulars," a legal usage that sent Cashill racing to his dictionary.

Sherlock has benefited from anonymous sleuths digging on their own and supplying him with clues. One, whom he refers to as Mr. West, came up with "759 striking similiarities between Dreams and Ayers' work."

In his earlier writings, Cashill identified a shared usage of cooking metaphors: Ayers calls his students' immersion in cultural study a "thick stew." Obama makes reference to a "stew of voices." Both use the word "skillet."

Both men write of rage in its many varieties. Ayers: "justifiable rage," "uncontrollable rage," "blind rage." Obama: "suppressed rage," "coil of rage."

Why does Cashill obsess on all of this? He's out to prove that Obama has fraudulently sold the American public on his intelligence - Obama just ain't smart enough, in Cashill's eyes, to pull off what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

"Even if someone benign had ghostwritten the book it would present a problem for Obama," Cashill writes. More to the point, he adds, "If it were revealed that the ghostwriter is Ayers, it would suggest that Ayers has played a major role all along in the shaping of Barack Obama."

Surprisingly, few people have taken Cashill to task for his claims. Yet following Cashill's announcement Sunday, a blogger named Scott Eric Kaufman, who says he has a PhD in English from the University of California at Irvine, did a little of his own sleuthing.

Among his findings:

"Hog butcher to the world" - not an uncommon slip-up.

Kaufman did a Google book search and found that a legion of authors have made the same mistake. Count among them: Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman, Ezra Pound, Paul Krugman, Langston Hughes, Andrei Codrescu.

Fascination with eyes. Eyes have mesmerized writers throughout history. Kaufman quotes passages from Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett.

"Bill of particulars." This legal phrase that stumped Cashill would understandably be part of Obama's vocabulary, Kaufman points out, because the president is, after all, a lawyer. Ayers, though he's not a lawyer, would likely know a thing or two about legal jargon, given his history.

Now where does all this literary sleuthing take us?

When Cashill received Mr. West's 759 similiarities, he said he was "blown away."

It has come to my attention that Lenny Kravitz used the identical language in describing the first time he saw The Jackson Five perform. "I was just blown away," he said.

Let's not speculate on Lenny Kravitz's influence on Cashill.

Dan Zak points out over in Style that the movie Transformers has received some of the worst reviews ever--"A horrible experience of unbearable length"; "Striking, shrieking incoherence"; and so on--yet its ticket sales are approaching box office records. Which makes one wonder, of course, whether critics have any influence anymore.

The Post's critics have risen in defense of their profession, including Ron Charles who offers a plaintive plea for book reviewing.

But this week has also given us two testimonials from one group of readers to whom critics matter desperately: authors

Testimonial #1: Alice Hoffman responds to a negative review of "The Story Sisters" by tweeting the Boston Globe reviewer's telephone number, among many other angry comments. She has since closed her twitter page.

Testimonial #2: Alain de Botton responds to a negative review of "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" by leaving a comment on reviewer Caleb Crain's personal website that says, in part, "You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review." De Botton also tells Crain that he hates him.

Somebody cares.

Amid all the dismal reports about the death of fiction, here's a refreshingly bold act of optimism: a new bimonthly magazine called Electric Literature. And it's not just MFA kids self-publishing their diatribes against Mom and Dad. The first issue sports stories by such heavyweights as Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham and National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard.

With one foot in the past and one in the future, this new magazine is specifically designed for distribution on all platforms. If you're still enamored of paper, you can own the handsome print version for $10. But if you're too hip for that, download the e-version for $5. (An iPhone app is on the works, too.)

Publisher and editor-in-chief Andy Hunter, 38, used to work for the pop culture magazine MEAN before moving to New York, where he holds down a day job at an NGO at the United Nations. He and his co-publisher, Scott Lindenbaum, put up about 20 percent of the start-up money for Electric Literature and convinced investors to give them the rest. "We've been trying to do things as professionally as possible," he tells me by phone. "We were able to convince a few people of the prospects for literary fiction in the age of new media."

What makes this feasible -- or at least more feasible than some other start-up magazines -- is their print-on-demand structure. "A traditional literary magazine might print 4,000 at $2 each, and then those copies would either go through the mail or to bookstores with about a 50 percent sell-through. The rest would be pulped. But we don't have to do that because every copy is printed as it's ordered."

So far, Andy says they're doing better than they expected. "If there's any kind of hesitation, it's from people who don't really believe that a literary publication is viable. We started this publication to prove them wrong. There's a human need for storytelling that hasn't gone away just because print is having problems. We want to bring short fiction to an age that's more mobile and doesn't have the time to settle into a long text."

Every issue will follow the standard set by their debut: No poetry, no charcoal drawings, no essays, just five short stories, anchored by some big-name authors. (Andy drove five hours to meet Shepard in Western Mass. and convince him to contribute.)

What's most remarkable is that Electric Literature pays real money: $1,000. "We insist on being able to pay writers a large fee for their stories. We just don't believe that this sort of thing should be free." That fee scale has already brought in a large pile of submissions for the editors to paw through. The core staff is four, but they have about 10 "readers" to help them out.

They've got some creative marketing ideas, too, including an upcoming YouTube video based on Shepard's story and an army of street salesmen -- "the kinds of things that sneaker companies would do."

At the moment, they're thinking big -- 20,000 circulation -- and why not? They're off to a good-looking start.

(Disclosure: An old student of mine, Jeff Price, was recently hired by Electric Literature.)

Yes, yes, everyone's sick of all the Michael Jackson coverage, but Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times actually found a new angle on the pop star's tragic life and death: Michael Jackson loved books.

Book stores throughout Los Angeles recalled that he was a frequent visitor when he was in town, sometimes asking the stores to close a few minutes early so he could browse untroubled by fans. He loved poetry, Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular, and according to his lawyer, was quite well-read in psychology, literature and history. At the time of his death, his collection amounted to 10,000 books.