The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part VIII: Eliminate the Impossible

Marcum’s eighth anthology of Holmes pastiches intended to be faithful to the spirit of Conan Doyle’s originals, his second (after part VII) featuring “what seemed to be supernatural tales, but with real-world rational endings,” is another testament to the depth of lesser-known talent capable of channeling the canonical Holmes and Watson. The 25 entries pit the great detective against a range of otherworldly terrors, ranging from a banshee whose howling shatters windows and cause bleeding from the ears (William Meikle’s “The Case of the Little Washerwoman”) to a demon possessing the body of a young girl (Nick Cardillo’s “The Haunting of Hamilton Gardens”). All the stories are high quality, but several stand out. In Ben Cardall’s “The Case of the Biblical Colours,” four dead men are found in a sealed room, each with a pocket handkerchief with a different color representing one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Andrew Lane’s “The Inexplicable Death of Matthew Arnatt” demands that Holmes explain how a man, who happened to be a childhood friend of the detective’s, was shot to death inside a carriage by an unloaded gun that had never been fired. The imagination of the contributors in coming up with variations on the volume’s theme is matched by their ingenious resolutions. (Oct.)