Thirteen Authors with New Takes on Sherlock Holmes

January 2, 2017
When an author writes a story featuring Sherlock Holmes as a “bio-synthed, augmented, 7 percent human, upgraded, unmortal, consulting extrapoloid,” as David Gerrold does in “The Fabulous Marble,” he sets the bar pretty high. Unfortunately, Gerrold fails to clear that bar. But, then again, none of the 12 other contributors to this anthology do any better. As Ventrella says in the introduction, the editors “invited some great writers to give us their interpretations with the only limitation being that we needed a mystery solved by a personality that was clearly Sherlock’s.” Readers get Sherlock as the host of a reality show, as a transgender detective in Charleston, and as a parrot. The results only demonstrate that putting Sherlock’s personality in such unusual forms isn’t as easy as it sounds. Even one of the more clever conceits—Austin Farmer making the sleuth a violinist in Beethoven’s Vienna orchestra in “Beethoven’s Baton”—is undermined by anachronistic language and an over-the-top denouement. Holmes purists should look elsewhere.

April 16, 2018
Ventrella and Maberry’s second anthology to feature Sherlockian protagonists who are “not white British males in frock coats” is only slightly more successful than 2017’s middling Baker Street Irregulars: Thirteen Authors with New Takes on Sherlock Holmes. Several of the 13 entries lose their punch by signaling the particular Conan Doyle adventures that they are inspired by. The table of contents’ teaser descriptions (e.g., “Sherlock is a home security system,” “Sherlock is a teenager on a Moon station,” “Sherlock is Santa Claus”) may indicate the originality of the contributors’ concepts, but nearly all the stories fall short of making a non-white, non-British detective a plausible homage to the original. The one notable exception is Narrelle M. Harris’s amusing “The Problem of the Three Journals,” which features an “Australian hipster” Sherlock who becomes the “resident smartarse” at the Sign of Four coffee bar that he sets up with his new friend, barista John Watson. Readers looking for creative stories that aren’t pastiches and yet capture the canon’s spirit will be better served by the theme anthologies of Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger (Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, etc.).