Short of revisiting Arthur Conan Doyle’s original texts, you may not have more fun with the great detective than in Night Shade Books’ collection THE IMPROBABLE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. For this anthology with a nearly all-star cast of authors, editor John Joseph Adams has rounded up 28 genre-hopping mysteries, as old as 20 years and as new as this year. A handful have never seen print before.
Clearly, Stephen King has a barrel of fun with the saucy, locked-room mystery “The Doctor’s Case,” while the late, great Edward D. Hoch reunites Holmes with the lovely Irene Adler as she seeks her missing son, in “A Scandal in Montreal.” Ms. Adler becomes the focus of “Commonplaces” by Naomi Novik, in which she deals with news of Holmes’ death … the first one.
Darrell Schweitzer tells of one of Holmes’ rare failures — thanks to the truly unknown — in “The Adventure of the Death-Fetch,” which works just as well as an old-fashioned horror yarn. The evil behind Egyptology is examined in H. Paul Jeffers’ “The Adventures of the Mummy’s Curse, while the alien invasion behind Geoffrey A. Landis’ disturbing “The Singular Habits of Wasps” recalls Donald A. Wollheim’s short story “Mimic.”
Other Victorian literary superstars figure in to the mix, as Holmes joins H.G. Wells in Stephen Baxter’s “The Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor,” Lewis Carroll in Tony Pi’s “Dynamics of a Hanging” (which will appeal to codes and ciphers nuts), and Bram Stoker in Peter Tremayne’s ghostly “The Specter of Tullyfane Abbey,” which finds Holmes between semesters at Oxford. In “The Adventure of the Lost World,” Dominic Green ingeniously finds a way to work in another Doyle character —Professor Challenger — in an odd romp that puts the “roar” in uproarious.
Three come from the Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft anthology SHADOWS OVER BAKER STREET, one of the better Holmes pastiche collections in recent years, with Neil Gaiman, Tim Lebbon and Barbara Hambly.
From pirates to spirits, IMPROBABLE covers a lot of genre-fiction tropes, yet every author hews closely to Doyle’s winning, winsome storytelling style. Other brand names contributing their tales include Anne Perry, Anthony Burgess, Laurie R. King (whose career, one argues, hinges upon Doyle’s creation), Sharyn McCrumb, Michael Moorcock, Chris Roberson, Tanith Lee and Robert J. Sawyer. As the game is afoot, you’re in able hands. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• BY BLOOD WE LIVE edited by John Joseph Adams
• THE LIVING DEAD edited by John Joseph Adams
• WASTELANDS: STORIES OF THE APOCALYPSE edited by John Joseph Adams
