The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [Paperback]

There have been innumerable Sherlock Holmes theme compendiums out there, and most of them have been "one trick ponies" with 2 or 3 good stories in them combined with many lame and / or inept pieces padding things out. The talened anthologist Mr. Adams has cherry picked what would generally be considered the finest pieces from various themed anthologies and presented a uniformly excellent mix herein.

Three caveats: first, not all stories necessarily feature SF, fantasy, or horror elements. Some stories start out with seemingly paranormal events that are eventually explained (a la "straight up" Conan Doyle... or Scooby Doo!)and some are "merely" conventional mysteries. All are credibly written, and the variety makes things reasonably interesting. Anthologies of entirely supernatural Holmesian themes can quickly grate on the reader (e.g. "Shadows Over Baker Street") and the Adams approach is a better solution.

Second, though there is a brief "intro to Holmes" article kicking things off, if you are unfamiliar and / or hostile to Holmes and his typical literary appearances, this book will do little to enlighten you or change your mind. Adams suggests one can use this volume as an intro to Holmes, but realistically this would be a stretch. If you've never read Conan Doyle at all, start there first and then come here.

Third, as with the original stories, you can't read these in big sequential chunks. Read one or two then come back a few days later and read some more. If you read them all back to back, you will find characters and details blurring into one big mess. Follow a course of moderation and you will enjoy this anthology more. Assuming you are not taking this book to a brief desert island stay, this should not be a problem for most.

As with any anthology, you may personally loathe some stories (Valentine for me), feel others are too long (IMO the Baxter piece here) and may feel others are just right (for me Hambly, Gaiman, King). All in all, lots of great pieces here, few bombs, and admirable editorial discretion shown by Mr. Adams.

If you like Holmes and would like to see him explore some new ground, I think you will enjoy this book very much. Novices to the Baker Street world and Holmes-ophobes need not apply.

Inevitably every fan of Sherlock Holmes will reach the final story and sadly realize that there will be no more trips to 221B Baker Street from Arthur Conan Doyle's pen. The tantalizing hints dropped by Watson of other adventures seem to be destined to be forever untold. Happily others have taken up the task of chronicling these and other adventures of Holmes and/or Watson. Some have produced tales worthy of being included in the 'Canon' of Doyle's stories and others....well others make the reader appreciate Doyle's work even more. These works have appeared in various forms, full length novels, screen and stage plays and short stories - many, many short stories which have appeared in various publications. There are quite a few collections of these stories, often selected in a particular theme.

This particular anthology features stories that share a fantasy or science fiction slant, in some the stories are set in an alternative universe, in others the stories fit in with the original canon almost seamlessly. Many of these stories are meant to be taken seriously, others are strictly for fun. The quality of these selections also varies, many are page turners equal to Doyle's own stories, others are surprisingly amateurish, and a few a just boring.

This is a worthwhile read for fans, although it is not a place to begin reading the Holmes' stories. The gems found in this collection are wonderful additions to the canon, well worth wading through the lesser selections. Dedicated fans may have run across some of these stories before, most have been published elsewhere.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, *however improbable,* must be the truth," declared Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four. No doubt Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his heyday, thought it improbable that 120 years after the appearance of the first Holmes story, people would still be writing adventures of the Great Detective, whether novel-length or less, but the fact--the truth, as Holmes would have said--is that Holmes is probably the most written-about and pastiched character or author in literature short of Shakespeare. (I count over 100 examples on just one list.) Despite its title, most of the adventures in this collection aren't all that improbable, and although quite a few were written by authors well-known in the fields of sf, fantasy, and horror (among them Stephen King, Tanith Lee, Vonda N. McIntyre, Michael Moorcock, and Neil Gaiman), most don't have any real elements of any of those genres: as is usually the case in such Holmesian gospel as The Hound of the Baskervilles: 150th Anniversary Edition (Signet Classics), what seems to the uninitiated to be a question of occult influence generally turns out to have a perfectly rational explanation (as Holmes says in one of the stories, "I have never yet met with a case which is not capable of a rational solution, however irrational it may appear at the outset," and for the most part these pieces continue that pattern). Some do cross Holmes with H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos Universe, and indeed in one of these the Great Old Ones prove to be, for the most part, benevolent; at least two take place in alternate universes; in two of them Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, is still alive 20 or 30 years after the date of his death in our reality, and in two Prof. Moriarty is a "consulting detective" and Holmes his respected adversary; in one a young Arthur Doyle dies suspiciously; another, though otherwise prosaic enough, ends with a note suggestive of near immortality; and yet another posits a science-fictional explanation of the infamous Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. The dates range from the late '70's till after Holmes's retirement to Sussex, and the locales, though mostly in London, include Ireland, Louisiana, and Montreal. And as in many of his pastiches, Holmes interacts with or refers to a number of historic personages, including humorist Stephen Leacock, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, King Umberto of Italy, Oscar Wilde (who, notably, also appears in Nicholas Meyer's The West End Horror: A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D.), an unnamed but sufficiently described George Bernard Shaw (ditto), and C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and fictional ones created by other authors, including Flaxman Low ("the first true psychic detective"), Max Carrados, Martin Hewitt, Paul Beck, Eugene Valmont, and Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. (There's also mention of a "crazy American, something-or-other Jones, who carried a bullwhip and fancied himself an archaeologist," though his appearance occurs at a time when Harrison Ford's Indy was, at best, a very young boy.) Watson's "voice" and the atmosphere of late-Victorian London are well captured throughout. Of these 28 stories, I marked 14 as being enjoyable enough to reread, which is a pretty good figure. (Of course, with anthologies, as I've said before, your mileage may vary.) On the whole, though not as "improbable" as the title suggests (it's rightly filed in Mysteries in your bookstore), it's a satisfying addition to the authorized continuation of The Canon, which shows little sign of not enlarging continuously.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 15 reviews  3.9 out of 5 stars