The tale overall is very dark and contains quite a bit of conflict around the nature of faith and sin – not a traditional Holmes story, but very good despite that. Although Holmes comes to embrace the supernatural option in this story, it feels plausible.
This tells of an evil book of sins penned in the 1400s by an ancestor of Moriarty. “The Deadly Sin of Sherlock Holmes” by Tom English is told in the third person, with a few glimpses into the situations or other characters impacted by the story. The story ends up a bit uneven (it’s not clear whether Holmes is actually accepting the supernatural conclusions he’s coming to or not), but overall it’s not bad. It follows along the lines of stories like “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” in which Holmes is presented with a supernatural situation and attempts to disprove it. “The Adventure of Lucifer’s Footprints” by Christopher Fowler is in the classic Holmes formula, a first-person account told by Watson about a case in 1888. The story takes a few twists and turns (which I won’t spoil), and a couple of times it stretched credulity, but overall I found it to be a dark but entertaining story, giving some power and tragedy to Holmes’ choice of vocation. It’s written in first-person from the perspective of Holmes on his death-bed writing a letter to Inspector Lestrade, and talks about Holmes falling in love with a Parisian flower-girl, who then dies mysteriously. “The Comfort of the Seine” by Stephen Volk is set earlier in Holmes’ life, when he was still a young man going to university. In such anthologies, I personally look for two elements: fidelity to the core of the characters and elements of the Holmes canon, and novelty to present a new take or slant on familiar faces. In my collection of books, I own a couple of anthologies that take different directions for Sherlock Holmes – one of science-fiction stories, and one combining Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos – so in reading this, I tried to put aside my “slavish fanboy” hat and read them with an eye towards different takes on the Great Detective. It’s even less of a surprise that I accepted. So it’s no surprise that Flames Rising asked me if I wanted to review a (nearly) all-new anthology of “uncanny tales” featuring Sherlock Holmes.
The price of admission review sherlock series#
I have over a dozen books devoted to the Great Detective, and I have spent more than a year working on a series of essays examining the original stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have been a Sherlock Holmes fan for as long as I have been able to read.
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