TALES FROM THE DEED BOX OF JOHN H. WATSON MD by Hugh Ashton

By now, Sherlock Holmes pastiches are everywhere, and you can't turn around in the mystery world without stumbling over one. I may have written about this before, but really, they're almost inevitable. Some get annoyed by them, but if you take a good look back at the early 20th century, there were Holmes knockoffs, parodies, and pastiches everywhere. (And, in the latest news about a long-lost Holmes story which some now say may not be by Doyle at all, there's some we don't know about.) Even Maurice Leblanc included a thinly veiled Holmes in some of his Arsene Lupin stories, copyright be damned.

So I'm of the opinion that Holmes pastiches are not to be shunned. Enjoy them, but don't take them too seriously.

Anyway, I got this on a whim for my Kindle, figuring for 99 cents I won't feel cheated if it's crap. And, well, I wasn't cheated. In fact, this is a very nice little ebook for the price.

It's three tales, all three inspired by references that Doyle drops in the canon to untold stories. In the first, "Sherlock Holmes & the Odessa Business," Holmes investigates a murder at a girls' school in Brighton, which happens to be run by a never-mentioned Holmes sibling, Evadne Holmes, who is also a mathematician and foreign policy consultant. It seems to be about an attempt on the life of a Russian noble attending the school, but turns out to be more about Evadne's work with the Foreign Office. Diverting, but definitely the least of the series.

Second was "The Case of the Missing Matchbox" and this is the story of Isadora Persano and the worm that was unknown to science. This really works and is the closest to coming to Doyle's level. Isadora Persano is a journalist and known duelist who savages a composer's new opera; he ends up stark staring mad, as Doyle said, but the circumstances are interesting and it's got a macabre edge.

Third was "The Case of the Cormorant," which is based on the Doyle reference to the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant. Holmes and Watson go on holiday to Cornwall, only Watson discovers something's afoot. Holmes has been asked to investigate a politician who lives locally, an amateur chemist who lives beyond his means. There's smugglers, dastardly doings, and a trained cormorant. It's not bad but there's an annoying issue with a story element that's dropped abruptly and forgotten, and how Holmes seems to automatically know right away that the newly-discovered drug heroin is badly addictive.

What annoys me about many pastiches is that they tend to throw dozens of real-life Victorians in the mix, or they clumsily do crossovers with other fictional universes. This avoids all that literary name-dropping. Also, they often try too hard to plunk Holmes down in the author's favorite geographic area, be it Brazil or Minnesota, and that's avoided as well.

This little collection is enjoyable, but does have its drawbacks. The introduction of Evadne Holmes is intriguing but she is not developed much; I wonder of Ashton uses her more in his subsequent stories. The introduction of heroin as a plot element in the third story was a bit jarring; Doyle's description of drugs seldom went further than opium. And there's occasional interactions that seem out of character.

Still, it's a fun little collection, and for 99 cents, you can't complain too much.

THE SCIENCE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES by E. J. Wagner

I freely admit I'm a total science nerd, and Sherlock Holmes should be near and dear to every Dust & Corruption reader. I'll be honest, I don't plan on covering much about Holmes here, mainly because there's tons of other sites that do it much better than I do. But we're Holmes-friendly here.

And forensic science is fun. Of course, there's the whole CSI phenomenon. But for me, it goes even further back. When I was a tender youth, in the late 70s and early 80s, I remember getting a plastic "Crime Lab" set one Christmas and immediately going mad taking fingerprints and bagging "evidence." Later I got a "Build-Your-Own Lie Detector" set that I loved, and I recall my high-school friends having fun with it at gatherings.

So looking at Victorian-era forensics is right up my alley. And author E. J. Wagner does a good job. This isn't in-depth; it's light pop science, but it's good light pop science.

Chapter by chapter, he examines different facets of criminal science in Victorian times, not only looking at their development but where they went in more modern times. Autopsies, superstitions, insects, toxicology, disguises, crime scene analysis, the Bertillon method, ballistics, footprints...it goes on and on. She gives glimpses into the personalities of those involved, like Bertillon's arrogance, or Edmond Locard's dry sense of humor.

Oh...who was Bertillon? Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who established a system of measurements (finger length, width of head, etc.) that were recorded at the time of arrest and later used to identify criminals. He predated fingerprinting and when they were developed, he resisted adding them to his system...and as we're all aware, fingerprinting is now the most prevalent ID system used by the police. However, Bertillon established the standards for mug shots and crime scene photography, so he's not completely forgotten.

Edmond Locard was "the Sherlock Holmes of France," a pioneer in forensic science who established "Locard's exchange principle," or "every contact leaves a trace," and also founded the first police laboratory in Lyons. He died in 1966, with a huge career behind him.

Wagner peppers the book with all sorts of true crime stories from the past, such the story of Jessie M'Lachlan, a Scottish woman convicted by way of a footprint in Glasgow in 1862, or the Tulle poison-pen case, a 20's affair in which a French town was flooded with vicious, obscene letters accusing townspeople of various affairs and sexual transgressions; the perp turned out to be highly religious, leading Locard to comment, "There is nothing so dirty as the dreams of a saint." (The Tulle case served as inspiration for Henri-George Clouzot's 1943 film LE CORBEAU, which I may review someday.)

It's a fun, zesty read that goes along at a good pace. Not too gristly, to be sure, but good gruesome fun for your commute, or at bedtime.

GASLIGHT GRIMOIRE

A title like that is just so luscious. And it delivers.

GASLIGHT GRIMOIRE, edited by J. R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec, is a very fun anthology of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, largely with a supernatural or fantastic bent, and overall (barring a couple of false notes) well-written. While most of them refer at some point to the Doyle canon, for the most part they appear to inhabit their own little universes, each one a different take on a fantastic adventure of Holmes. And, with one exception, they avoid the radical revisionism of Holmes that I find annoying and distasteful (yes, Laurie King, I'm looking at you).

There are two stories by big-name authors, Barbara Hambly and Kim Newman, and then there are names I recognize from my perambulations here and there in the genre world, like Chico Kidd (whose PRINTERS DEVIL I read long ago and enjoyed), Barbara Roden of the Ash-Tree Press, and Holmes expert David Stuart Davies, who contributed a forward. But that's not to say this is amateur-hour stuff; there's not a single story in here that struck me as first-timer fanfic. Standards are high here, and I appreciated that.

So, to give a rundown...

"The Lost Boy" by Barbara Hambly, which opens the collection, is a beguiling tale that crosses Holmes with J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, only with real menace. It's also unusual for being told from the point of view of Watson's wife (or one of them, I lose track). Despite the potential for cloying whimsy (and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's cloying whimsy), Hambly gives it a good measure of darkness and real emotion.

The next story, "His Last Arrow" by Christopher Sequeira, is the one I liked the least in the collection. It was certainly well-written enough, and certainly had imagination to spare, but his approach to Holmes and Watson was one that I simply did not like. I'm not saying it's a bad story...far from it....but I just found this story's version of the Holmes canon to be not to my taste.

Barbara Roden's "The Things That Shall Come Upon Them," is roaring good fun for someone of my literary tastes. Holmes and Watson team up with occult investigator Flaxman Low (a creation of Kate & Hesketh Prichard) and investigate the former home of Julian Karswell (the villain of M. R. James' classic short story "Casting the Runes"). Roden knows her subject and has fun with it, and the story is a great ride.

"The Finishing Stroke" by M. J. Elliott is a fun bit of mystery/horror as Holmes goes on the track of paintings that appear to come to life, with the expected deadly results. "Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World" isn't supernatural, but a steampunk fantasia in which Holmes meets up with another Doyle creation, Prof. Challenger, in the infamous Lost World in South America.

Chico Kidd and Rick Kennett had fun with "The Grantchester Grimoire," which features another crossover, this time with Holmes teaming up with William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Thomas Carnacki. Kidd & Kennett know their Carnacki and keep him true to Hodgson while keeping Holmes credible. It's another fun romp.

"The Steamship Friesland," by Peter Calamai, didn't grab me as much as some of the others. It's a valiant attempt at building a supernatural tale around one of Holmes' unsolved cases (a ship that passes into a fogbank only to disappear; it's mentioned in one of the stories), but Holmes suddenly developing mediumistic abilities didn't sit well with me. (OK, OK, so I'm a stickler...) J. R. Campbell's "The Entwined" feels oddly incomplete, but tantalizingly so, with members of a secret brotherhood being killed off by an otherworldly being. It's not a bad story at all, but after reading it there was a sense of something just outside my grasp that left me wanting more information.

"Merridew of the Abominable Memory," by Chris Roberson, sticks out a little for having no fantastic content. However, it is memorably gruesome, with a plausible plot, and actually a bit of an emotional whallop at the end.

Bob Madison's "Red Sunset" gives us an elderly Holmes residing in Los Angeles and summoned by a policeman to investigate a strange crime. Not bad in and of itself, but it's basically set up as a final confrontation between Holmes and an old enemy, and getting some background on it would have made it better.

The final story, "The Red Planet League" by Kim Newman, is the best. Holmes doesn't even appear in it. Instead, it's narrated by Col. Sebastian Moran (and sounding rather Flashmanesque), playing a sort of anti-Watson to Prof. Moriarty's anti-Holmes. It's a delicious tale of Moriarty being insulted by an arrogant young upstart astronomer, and the resulting revenge involving...well, I won't say, but you can take a few cues from the title. The plot borrows cues from at least two H. G. Wells works, and even a bit from Heinlein. Again, this is steampunk rather than supernatural, but it's great fun and a wonderful capper to the book.

So was it worth it? Oh yeah, even with the missteps it's still a fun read and worth getting for fans of Holmes and horror fiction. Look for it. And I hear rumors of a sequel collection in the works....