1) "The Angel of the Opera" by Sam Siciliano
Hot on the heels of Nicholas Meyer's indifferent The Canary Trainer (1993) comes another meeting between Sherlock Holmes and the Phantom of the Opera. This time Holmes wears a bowler, speaks like an imposter (at one point he ``roars,'' at another he says, ``I'm fine''), loses his amanuensis, Dr. Watson, for his own colorless, presumptuous cousin Dr. Henry Vernet, and shines only feebly as a detective. The result is less Conan Doyle than Gaston Leroux. All the principals of Leroux's Phantom--the hopeless love, soprano Christine DaaÇ; the rival, Vicomte Raoul de Chagny; even the late Joseph Buquet and the disappearing horse CÇsar--are trotted out yet again, but they don't seem to have any more to do than actors taking their curtain calls, and by the time they come together for the obligatory group portrait in the cellars deep beneath the Opera, you'll be hoping they all get blown up together. Sorry, Sherlock--no joy in these lukewarm leftovers.
2) "The Dark Water" by David Pirie
The creator of Sherlock Holmes does battle with his own Moriarty and unravels an eerie village legend.
Neophyte physician Arthur Conan Doyle awakens to find himself trapped in a dark room, with no memory of recent events and no means of escape. At length, he learns that his captor is Thomas Neill Cream, a dashing real-life figure of unmitigated evil. To facilitate his plot, Cream has insinuated himself into the lives of Doyle’s friends, the Morland family. Daring and painful physical effort gain Doyle his freedom. Half-dead, he treks the countryside until he’s eventually reunited with his mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh University. After initially questioning the frenzied Doyle’s sanity, Bell nurses his old student back to health. The duo tracks Cream to the remote town of Dunwich and the eerie legend of its heath, haunted by a centuries-old witch. In the late-17th century, Dunwich outsider Mary Goddard was visited by angry neighbors who accused her of witchcraft. She escaped into the dense woodland of the heath, repeatedly eluding her would-be executioners. A catalogue of local atrocities followed, all attributed to her. Recently, wealthy eccentric Oliver Jefford, a newcomer to Dunwich Heath, has disappeared. Doyle and Bell hope and fear that tracking this mystery will lead them to the villainous Cream.
Pirie’s third Doyle homage (The Night Calls, 2003, etc.) again boasts deft period yarn-spinning and terrific writing.
3) "The Crack in the Lens" by Steve Hockensmith
The cowboy Sherlocks ride again (The Black Dove, 2008, etc.).
Otto and Gustav Amlingmeyer, disciples of the Gospel According to Holmes, are once more on the prowl. With a bit of cash in their pokes, they are temporarily freed from cow-punching and can focus on an even meatier case of murder. Dour, doleful Gustav was once passionately in love with Gertie, a gold-hearted lady of the night. Five years earlier, under circumstances shrouded in mystery, Gertie got herself done in, resulting in an anguished, distraught Gus. Why he has taken five years to decide to investigate those circumstances is also somewhat mysterious, but he informs Otto, “We’re goin’ to Texas,” in a tone that brooks no argument from his younger but not smarter brother. Predictably, their arrival in San Marcos finds them greeted not by open arms but by sidearms. The boys are roughed up, shot at and nearly lynched several times over. Do Holmes’ methods come to their rescue? Sure do, partner, though Watson might have been hard put to recognize them.
The Holmes on the Range series has seen better days: The boys still charm, but not enough to redeem some dreary plotting and tired prose.
4) "The Sherlockian" by Graham Moore
Another resurrection of Sherlockiana, the conceit here being the story of tracking down Arthur Conan Doyle’s missing journal from 1900—and solving a murder associated with the journal.
Owing to a couple of scholarly articles on Sherlock Holmes, Harold White has just been inducted into the famous but secretive Sherlockian society; at 29 he’s one of the youngest members ever invited to join. A game’s afoot, however, for Alex Cale, perhaps the most prominent Sherlockian of all, has recently announced that he’s found Conan Doyle’s famous missing journal. His plan is to reveal the contents at the annual meeting of the Sherlockians at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, but Cale is found murdered, with the word “Elementary” written on the wall near his body. White decides to solve both the case of the missing journal and Cale’s murder. In his investigation he’s abetted by Sebastian Conan Doyle, the great-grandson of the author himself (who feels he’s the rightful owner of the journal), and Sarah, a reporter bent on following White because she’s sure he has the best chance of finding the journal and solving the mystery of Cale’s death. Throughout the narrative White’s mantra is “What would Sherlock Holmes do?” and his answers to this question lead him from New York to London to Cambridge and finally to the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, the site of Holmes’s putative death. Moore cleverly alternates his chapters between White’s story in the present and Conan Doyle’s activities in the fall of 1900, so the reader can better understand the reasons why Conan Doyle—or more likely his friend Bram Stoker—would want to suppress the journal. Along the way, Stoker winds up playing Watson to Conan Doyle, much as Sarah becomes a Watson figure to White.
While occasionally heavy-handed and coincidental, Moore’s fiction provides a shrewd take on the noted author and his legendary scion.
5) "Shadows Over Baker Street" by Michael Reaves
Conan Doyle’s immortal creations Holmes and Watson battle enigmatic forces of darkness in this smartly conceived collection of 18 new tales of intrigue, detection, and horror.
Each story proceeds from the premise that the dauntless duo are engaged to solve crimes whose perpetrators are eerily reminiscent of phenomena described in H.P. Lovecraft’s grisly Ctulhu Mythos stories. The manual of black arts studied by such creatures is the dreaded Necronomicon, conveniently described (in editor Reaves’s “The Adventure of the Arab’s Manuscript”) as “a compendium of ancient lore and forbidden knowledge concerning various pre-Adamite beings and creations, some of extraterrestrial origin, who once ruled the earth and who anticipate doing so again”). Several stories do too little with the core idea of overreaching antiquaries who unwisely summon slumbering supernatural entities. But there are several noteworthy exceptions. The volume is neatly bracketed by ever-dependable Neil Gaiman’s witty imagining of Holmes’s first encounter with his archenemy Professor Moriarty (“A Study in Emerald”) and Simon Clark’s “Nightmare in Wax,” in which Moriarty gains possession of the Necronomicon, with amusingly ghastly and surprising consequences. The best of the remainder: a delicious battle of wits between Holmes and a Balinese beauty who pits herself against a man-eating demon (Steve Perry’s “The Case of the Wavy Black Dagger”); the combined efforts of Holmes and his sedentary, brilliant sibling Mycroft to rescue a sea captain cursed by an exotic stone carving (Brian Stableford’s “Art in the Blood”); John P. Vourlis’s nicely plotted tale of an entire village overcome by an unnatural sleeplessness (“A Case of Insomnia”); and F. Gwynplaine McIntyre’s stunning “The Adventure of Exham Priory,” an ingenious reworking of the familiar incident of Holmes’s misadventure at the Reichenbach Falls. Other notable contributions are by genre veterans Barbara Hambly and Tim Lebbon and less familiar authors Steven Elliott-Altman and James Lowder.
A few clunkers aside: a very entertaining volume.
6) "The Whitechapel Horrors" by Edward B. Hanna
7) "Good Night, Mr. Holmes" by Carole Nelson Douglas
The centenary of the first Sherlock Holmes short story, ""A Scandal in Bohemia,"" finds Irene Adler, Sherlock Holmes's most formidable opponent, speaking for herself in this 350-page prologue to Conan Doyle's story. Not that Irene actually speaks for herself; she has her own Watson, demure parson's daughter Penelope Huxleigh, who's just as worshipful as her male counterpart. In prose whose Watsonian rhythms soon fade away, Penelope tells how the first cab she and Irene shared was driven by one Jefferson Hope; how Irene avenged Penelope's dismissal from Whiteley's emporium after an unjust accusation of theft; how she and Holmes both accepted a commission from Charles Tiffany to recover Marie Antoinette's Zone of Diamonds; how her search for clues brought her to a tea party Brain Stoker gave for the likes of James Whistler and Oscar Wilde; how she traced the Zone to the dying father of barrister Godfrey Norton and eventually deciphered the clues to its location Norton Senior left behind; and how, in the meantime, she became embroiled with the Crown Prince of Bohemia, solving the mystery of his father's murder only to be discarded and pursued on his accession to the throne--before concluding the tale at Irene's immortal London home at Briony Lodge. Irene's adventures are offered as an anti-Victorian romp, and the tone throughout is smug with hindsight: Irene could have stepped from the pages of Ms., and Holmes's conceit is played for the maximum irony. Sequel-minded Douglas (Probe, Counterprobe, etc.) hints in a poker-faced ""Scholarly Afterword"" that more revelations may be on the horizon. This installment is mainly for confirmed Baker Streeters--though anti-Holmesians will probably enjoy it more.
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