Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets

Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets, ed. David Thomas Moore – 2014

The first adult book that I read to myself was The Hound of the Baskervilles. When I was 6 my mum had a little Inverness Cape made for me as a Christmas present. One of my favourite games to play with my grandparents as a child was myself as Holmes, my grandfather as Watson and my grandmother as Mrs Hudson, and, when I was fourteen, I made a half-hour film of Hound with my friends and family.

So it's safe to say that Sherlock Holmes is a pretty huge part of my life.

I am also hardly a purist. Much though Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing and Jeremy Brett are my favourite performers (though a loud shout out to the phenomenal Clive Merrison in the BBC Radio productions of the 90's!) I adored the revolutionary BBC Sherlock, enjoyed the steampunk romp of Guy Ritchie's two films and revel in non-canon writing, such as Neil Gaiman's superlative A Study in Emerald.So when my friends got me a copy of David Thomas Moore's anthology Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets, I leapt in, and continued to swim around in it for some time.

(For ease, I am grouping the stories together by trope, rather than by order in the book)

The largest group features the classic male Holmes and Watson pairing, simply set in a different time or place, such as Kelly Hale's Black Alice, in which a 17th Century Holmes investigates a case of murder by witchcraft. It is a well written, Holmesian tale, and it's biggest flaw may well be how close it stays to the original, to the point that it feels like only a few key period details have changed at all. The Adventure of the Speckled Bandanna, by JE Cohen, again feels exactly like one of the more outlandish Doyle tales, featuring a case of stolen waxworks, but set in the 1970s, with the obligatory period conspiracy theory added in. In The Rich Man's Hand, Joan de la Haye provides us with a very creepy tale set in a South African town, involving 'an actual case of transmogrification'1. It is genuinely unsettling, but has quite a tonal issue in that we are presented with a realistic, if horrific murder, and discover that, unlike in Black Alice, the killer had employed real witchcraft, at which Holmes states that he 'had my suspicions'2. The reader, meanwhile, has been unprepared by anything in the story that such an outcome is possible within the world of the narrative, and wonders why no one in the story seems particularly stunned to learn that magic is real. Less bloody, but far more chilling is Kaaron Warren's sparsely written The Lantern Men; eerie and haunting, the only issue I have with it is that it could have done with being longer, so that the reader can spend more time in the mournful setting and allow the tension to build. However, the most original of these more orthodox tales is The Innocent Icarus by James Lovegrove, who gives us a world in which most humans are born with a class of superpower, such as being an Icarus, who can fly, or a Cassandra who can see into the future. Watson is an indestructible Achilles, and Holmes is a Typical, without any special ability, which has led him to train himself all the more deliberately to 'inhabit a unique category...Elementary'3. It features some of the best detective work of the collection and is an interesting inversion of Holmes’ usual near-superhuman status.

Gini Koch, meanwhile, gives us one of the few female Holmes' in the book in All the Single Ladies, which is set on a college campus, where a reality TV show is being filmed and murders committed. College physician John Watson is under suspicion and the witty, flippant Sherlock Holmes arrives to uncover the real culprit. While the culprit is slightly obvious, the sheer charm of Koch's Holmes, and the role reversal that leaves John the more angst ridden of the two, makes this one of the most engaging stories in the collection. Perhaps the best aspect of this story is that the dynamic between them, and by the end their plan to live together, remains entirely platonic, despite John's observation that Sherlock is an attractive woman.

Moving on to a different trope, we come to what I like to call 'The Actual Holmes(TM) of Conan Doyle's original somehow transported into a different setting'. The Patchwork Killer by Kasey Lansdale, features a clone of Holmes created from the ashes of the original by Watson the dentist, a great grandson of the good doctor. This rather grisly tale is, unfortunately, one of the weaker stories in the book; it takes itself too seriously for the clone conceit to work, while the actual mystery is so convoluted that it takes two pages of solid explanation from clone-Holmes to explain it. In Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Conjuration, however, we find all of the fun lacking in the previous story. It is a glorious epic fantasy in which a servant wizard occasionally summons a demon, in order to solve problems for his master, the mighty Green Wizard. This demon is Holmes, who views the imaginative world before him as a 'phantasy of my idling mind'4. Tchaikovsky carefully weaves in references to the Canon, enriching the tale, and making it one of the most delightful in the book.

There are also the meta-fictional stories, in which Sherlock Holmes exists as a fictional character. In The Small World of 221b, Holmes and Watson, after encountering Lizzie Darcy, nee Bennett, and having a near-miss with HG Well's time-traveller, discover that they are the fictional creations of Arthur Conan Doyle, preserved in a matrix by academic aliens after the fall of the human race. It sounds somewhat silly, and perhaps it is, but what saves Ian Edginton's piece is Watson’s admiration at meeting in Lizzie Bennett a mind almost as sharp as Holmes'. Jenni Hill's Parallels, on the other hand, presents us with a schoolgirl, Jane, who writes Sherlock/John fanfic online, while her best friend and fellow pupil Charlotte solves mysteries and smokes. The key to this charming tale, is that it is far more about their evolving relationship than about solving a particular mystery, though it does give a wonderful nod to the fire-alarm trick in A Scandal In Bohemia, by suggesting that some tricks only work once.

Likewise, more concerned with the relationship, and again, of a romantic nature, is Half There/All There by Glen Mehen, which features the only openly gay pairing in the book; John 'Doc' Watson, a drug dealer at Andy Warhol's Factory, meets Sherlock Holmes, drug taker, and they become lovers, getting involved in an investigation as time goes on. The writing is lovely, and again the relationship is key, but the mystery here feels quite forced. Indeed, despite the mournful ending of Holmes growing colder, as he blames himself for not stopping the assassination that ends the story, it is not entirely clear how he could have done so.

Despite transdimensional aliens and colour-coded wizards, Guy Adams' A Study in Scarborough is probably the most entirely different story within the collection. I'll be honest, for this one, it really helps if you have a fondness – or are even aware of – BBC radio comedies of the 40/50s such as the Goons, and the careers of comedic double acts such as the Two Ronnies, or Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, because here, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were Radio/TV actors and now, many years later, a keen fan arrives at John's house to discuss their careers. It is a pitch black, deeply bitter tale and, uniquely in this book, there is no observation and deduction or mystery solving, though, as we learn, a crime has certainly been committed.

In contrast, A Woman's Place by Emma Newman, is a very simple idea, but superbly executed. As well as giving us a 'rosy cheeked and cheerful'5 female Watson, Newman elevates Mrs Hudson to an entirely new role, as well as explaining her consistently patient and understanding responses to Holmes' actions as a tenant. Newman won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for the piece, but to say any more would be to spoil it!

And finally we come to Jamie Wyman's A Scandal In Hobohemia, the best story of the collection. It features the first meeting between Jim Walker, ex-serviceman and now Pinkerton agent, and Sanford 'Crash' Haus, owner of a travelling American carnival. Both are different enough to be characters in their own right, while staying perfectly true to the original Holmes/Watson dynamic. The writing is beautiful, with an exotic, evocative atmosphere that you want to cling on to when you reach the last page. I am delighted to hear that Abbadon books are now producing a collection of three novellas based on this anthology, and that Jamie Wyman's Crash will be featured, as the best I can say for A Scandal In Hobohemia, its world and its characters, it is that of all of these tales, it is the one that I want more of!

Overall, the stories in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets range from enjoyable to engaging, with only a couple of near-misses and one or two direct bullseyes. Occasionally the stories see, but do not observe, but when an author judges it perfectly, as several do, the result is quite simply... elementary!

Link to Abaddon Books page aboutTwo Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets, from which you can purchase: http://www.rebellionpublishing.com/tag/twohundredandtwentyonebakerstree

1 De la Hayle, Joan. 'The Rich Man's Hand' in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets ed. Moore, David Thomas, Abaddon Books, 2014, p. 84
2 De la Hayle, p. 85
3 Lovegrove, James. 'The Innocent Icarus' in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets ed. Moore, David Thomas, Abaddon Books, 2014, pp. 215-6
4 Tchaikovsky , Adrian, The Final Conjuration, n Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets ed. Moore, David Thomas, Abaddon Books, 2014,pp. 186
5 Newman, Emma, A Woman's Place, in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets ed. Moore, David Thomas, Abaddon Books, 2014, pp. 118