Encounters of Sherlock Holmes

March 25, 2013
The 14 mostly first-rate if occasionally gory selections in Mann's anthology of all-original Holmes pastiches will delight fans of "one of the world's best known and most loved fictional creations." Mark Hodder starts things off with "The Loss of Chapter Twenty-One," in which eccentric poet Algernon "Algy" Swinburne screeches into Baker Street seeking help for ailing explorer Sir Richard Burton, a translator of Arab erotica who's seeking a work that includes a vital chapter missing from his own copy. Holmes encounters an alien-betrothed H.G. Wells in Eric Brown's "The Tragic Affair of the Martian Ambassador," an improbable yet tragic tale of interplanetary politics and suicide. London becomes a virtual slaughterhouse in Cavan Scott's graphic "The Demon Slasher of Seven Sisters," a case that nearly breaks Holmes according to news reports chronicling the horrific episode. Blood and viscera flow freely in dingy London alleyways as the discovery of a decapitated corpse leads Holmes and Watson to pursue a malformed monster suggestive of Frankenstein in Nick Kyme's "The Post-Modern Prometheus." Other fine stories, such as "Adventure of the Locked Carriage" by Stuart Douglas, are reminiscent of the original brilliance that Conan Doyle gave us more than a century ago.