Starred review from September 5, 2022
The 12 gifted contributors to Rosenstock’s outstanding second all-original anthology (after 2019’s Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of Seven) each depict a different chapter in Holmes’s life. Standouts include the opener, Stuart Douglas’s “The Adventure of the Spiritualist Detective,” set so early in Holmes and Watson’s relationship that the doctor is having second thoughts about continuing to share their Baker Street rooms. Those doubts are triggered by Holmes’s illogical acceptance of a female client who complains that a male stranger has accessed her home, leaving behind a partially drunk bottle of beer and the odor of cooked kippers. The entries proceed chronologically from there. The last selection, Eric Brown’s “Peril at Carroway House,” finds a wheelchair-using Holmes abandoning retirement in Sussex in 1926 and tackling a case featuring Irene Adler’s daughter. Some of the best tales are particularly faithful to the originals, such as David Marcum’s “The Tragic Affair at the Millennium Manor” and Philip Purser-Hallard’s “The Elementary Problem.” Sherlockians will enjoy watching the beloved detective’s character evolve over the years.
August 12, 2019
This high-quality Sherlock Holmes pastiche anthology collects seven original novellas, most of which succeed in recreating the tone and personalities of Conan Doyle’s originals. The most memorable entry, Lyndsay Faye’s “Our Common Correspondent,” consists of a series of diary entries written by Inspector Lestrade, who emerges as a three-dimensional figure instead of a stereotyped Scotland Yarder either jealous of or amazed by the great detective. Lestrade must find a missing housemaid while dealing with an even ruder than usual Holmes, who’s unsettled by Watson’s impending nuptials. Faye blends an intriguing mystery with a plausible deepening of the relationships among Lestrade, Holmes, and Watson that could well have Sherlockians hoping for more cases recounted from the inspector’s viewpoint. Derrick Belanger offers the best straight pastiche, “The Adventure of the Heroic Tobacconist,” in which Holmes looks into the stabbing death of a Boer War veteran, despite a confession to the crime. Stuart Douglas, James Lovegrove, and David Stuart Davies also demonstrate their talents for traditional pastiche. Fans of the Baker Street sleuth won’t want to miss this one.
August 15, 2022
The eight Sherlockian short stories in this collection from Seabrooke (The Haunting of Swain’s Fancy) offer imaginative concepts weakly executed. In the title story, set early in Holmes and Watson’s association, a former army colleague of the doctor’s, Charley Lyndley, asks for his help, and Holmes tags along to probe a puzzle. Lyndley’s sister is bereft because her fiancé abruptly canceled their engagement, possibly after suffering some odd hallucinations. In “The Naval Man,” Holmes teams up with Poe’s Chevalier Auguste Dupin, who’s in London on the trail of the man he suspected of a murder decades earlier, a case based on a real-life New York City cause célèbre. At one point, Watson says of their arrival at Scotland Yard: “Inspector Lestrade met us at the entrance, his thin sallow face almost aglow with glee.” Such awkward prose matches thin characterizations and plots lacking the kind of clever turns that distinguish the work of the best pasticheurs. Those willing to accept less fidelity to the canon are most likely to enjoy these.
November 24, 2014
Lovegrove's second Holmes pastiche is more traditional than its steampunk predecessor, 2013's The Stuff of Nightmares, and is mostly successful at portraying Holmes and Watson in character. In 1913, the doctor visits his retired friend on the Sussex Downs, where the pair happen upon the corpse of Patrick Mallinson, the victim of a fall from a great height. While the man's father, Craig, a mining magnate, believes that Patrick took his own life, he asks Holmes to determine the truth to avoid damage to his business from rumors that something else had happened. Elizabeth Vandenbergh, Patrick's lover, reveals that he had some Egyptian hieroglyphs tattooed on his body, raising the possibility that his death was the work of a secret and sinister society. The chapter titles sometimes spoil what's to come, and Lovegrove does strike some false notes. For example, Holmes's use of a magnifying lens to look for evidence is cited by Watson as evidence of his declining vision, although Conan Doyle had a much younger Holmes use such an aid in A Study in Scarlet. Still, the mystery and its solution are creative ones.
August 17, 2015
In Lovegrove's entertaining third Sherlock Holmes pastiche (after 2014's Sherlock Holmes: The Gods of War), Malcolm Quantock, a professor at Oxford's Balliol College, claims to have invented a machine that's capable of solving crimes, and Lord Knaresfield, a newspaper mogul, bets £500 that no oneânot even Holmesâcan outsmart it. The case chosen for the test, which Holmes accepts, is the deadly stabbing of Tabitha Grainger and her two daughters. The obvious suspect is Tabitha's husband, a brutish bricklayer, but he has an unshakable alibi. The thinking man and the thinking machine match wits on several more cases as a number of unrelated murders are committed in the university town. Meanwhile, Professor Moriarty's number two, Col. Sebastian Moran, has escaped custody and is on the loose. The resolution is a bit disappointing, but Lovegrove does a solid, if not superior, job of faithfully rendering Holmes and Watson.