Seven cases from the extended adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as Sherlockian superfan Nick Cardillo indulges in adding to the reminiscences of Dr. John Watson.

Nick is, of course, a friend of the blog, having appeared in two episodes of my In GAD We Trust podcast, but it’s somehow taken me 18 months since buying this collection to get round to reading it — through no lack of eagerness on my part, I assure you. So, how do these stories stack up?

“Would you think me mad, Mr. Holmes, if I told you that for the past three weeks, I have been able to predict the future?”. Such is the difficulty Mr. Augustus Larkin — ‘The Scholar of Silchester Court’ — finds himself in, with softly murmuring voices telling him of events yet to occur, not least a murder of an unknown man. Which would be worrying enough in itself, but the rooms Larkin inhabits were previously tenanted by Elias Silchester, who also heard such voices and was prompted by them to murder his own family. So, is Larkin’s sanity at risk, or can a rational explanation be found?

Cardillo does good work in this opening story capturing the spirit of Conan Doyle’s originals, with the relationship between Holmes and Watson lifted effortlessly from the canon. The solution is far from the most surprising, but given the author’s well-documented love of Jonathan Creek I’m choosing to interpret this as a double homage — and on those grounds, it works very well indeed. Though, I’ll be honest, I’d love to hear the “six cogent explanations” Holmes apparently comes up with — a Poisoned Chocolates Case-esque examination of this situation would be wonderful!

Some superbly atmospheric Foggy London writing pervades ‘The Adventure of the Deadly Inheritance’, with “the flickering orange glow of the gas lamps rendered [as] tiny points of light in the unforgiving shroud” as Holmes and Watson learn of the death of solicitor Adrian Crawley, found battered to death in a room locked from within. And before this has time to settle, a second problem presents itself: Edmund Ainsford seeking Holmes’ help following the disappearance of his brother Cedric from a similarly locked room in an abandoned house in deepest, darkest Wapping.

The double impossible crime here is — perhaps unsurprisingly, given the length of the average Holmes story — resolved with less rigour than I would like, but at the same time the disappointment of that locked room bludgeoning, in particular, is no doubt deliberate. I picked up on a clue that gave me an idea of what was going on before the eventual direction was revealed, and it’s certainly a cleverly-constructed layering of schemes, which is always pleasing. Also, at this early stage I do have to commend Cardillo for the tight focus of only three or four characters per story as befits Arthur Conan Doyle’s approach. The temptation to expand must be strong, and he’s resisting it well.

Third story ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’ is, of course, a callback to one of the most famous unwritten cases in the canon, referred to in the Conan Doyle story ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ (1924). I’m aware that many people have written their own take on this most enticing of titles, but, not being that much of a reader of Holmes pastiches, this is the first I have encountered. Cardillo’s take is set in Whitby, and follows the murder of two thugs, the Connolly twins, suspected of desecrating a grave in the local churchyard and found “savaged by a hand which cannot be entirely human”.

I suppose the title renders the eventual solution of this somewhat obvious, but the classic pattern of Holmes keeping things close to his chest and then leading everyone on an exciting nighttime chase is followed very well. Bonus points for folding in Toby, the bloodhound from The Sign of Four (1890), who now — in 1895 — must be long in the tooth and yet still throws himself into his work with admirable gusto.

‘A Ghost from the Past’ takes the intriguing route of being a direct sequel to a Doyle story, namely ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’ (1924) — even to the extent of repeat appearances from certain characters — and providing a deliberate callback to another, ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (1891). Cardillo also, interestingly, uses this as an opportunity to explain the rather sudden retirement of Holmes as dropped into the canon with all the care Doyle exhibited in the matter of continuity, promising that these events constituted “one of the darkest hours that Sherlock Holmes and I ever saw together”.

There’s a superb mid-story shock, and another subtle clue that will key the canny reader into one element of the later developments, but especially interesting is the acknowledgement from Holmes that “the world is changing” — perhaps simply an accidental turn of phrase, or, as I choose to see it, an acknowledgement that, towards the end of the canon, the environment in which Doyle was publishing was no longer set up to venerate Holmes and his ilk as it had; the Golden Age had started and the predominating style of fictional detection had evolved. Lovely to see these two ideas folded together.

I find it unusual, then, that, having just retired Holmes, ‘The Adventure of the Weeping Stone’ finds the detective, in retirement, positively champing at the bit to get back into a murder investigation when a scientist is found dead of unknown causes on the beach bearing the eponymous rock. There’s a distinctly Doylean shape to this investigation — the invocation of ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’ (1926) is fitting — as the cast are all drawn in by organic means, and the puzzle gets only odder, and then more bizarre, as it develops.

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of this type of solution, it reeks rather too much of the ‘poison unknown to science’ (which, in fairness, the Holmes canon used at least once…), but the imagery is strong and the pace lively. Less successful is the rendering of Holmes and Watson, in the 1911 setting of this, as two men “pushing sixty years of age” since this would have made them in their 30s when then met thirty years earlier in A Study in Scarlet…when Holmes was a recent university graduate. Have I got that right? And even if this chronological error comes from Doyle himself, I’d have been tempted to either a) leave it out, or b) push the date of this one back a bit.

The award of Best Title for a Sherlock Holmes Pastiche goes to ‘Death in the House of the Black Madonna’, which leapfrogs forwards to 1919 and takes us — via a quick visit to Sherlock’s brother Mycroft at the Diogenes Club — to the newly-formed republic of Czechoslovakia and into a tale of espionage which recalls some of Doyle’s later stories like ‘His Last Bow’ (1917).

One does indeed wonder, as Holmes suggests himself, whether a man soon to be in his eighth decade — hell, two such men, since Watson is of course pulled along as well — is quite the right choice for such an undertaking as this, but the travelogue and meetings with foreign counterparts have the ring of an early 20th century story about them, and the chases through Prague are redolent with urgency. It’s just a shame that the scheme at the heart of this is both so simple and so simply discovered (seriously, Roger Sheringham couldn’t mess this up), even if, in that regard, it does fit in with Doyle’s own shape to his creation’s later excursions. And I did for a moment or two forget that I was reading a pastiche, so it’s certainly not a failure by any means.

Finally, ‘In the Footsteps of Madness’, which revels in Doyle’s tendency for jumbling his timelines by once again introducing Toby, the bloodhound, but making it clear that this case precedes Toby’s earlier appearance in this very volume (“Not since the strange affair of Jonathan Small…had Holmes and I employed Tony’s remarkable tracking skills.”). But since that means we can be in 1895 at the very latest, how could reference be made to a work of fiction not published until 1896…?

This, I have to say, is my least favourite of the stories herein; Holmes was always at his best when incongruous trifles were expertly spun out into unexpected patterns, and we take a leap here into pure fantasy which, while by no means uncommon in the uncountable pastiches that have sprung up featuring the Great Detective, is very much not the type of Holmes story I enjoy. But that’s fine — every collection has one dud, and this, for me, is it.

The joy that Nick Cardillo clearly takes from the Sherlock Holmes canon shines through practically every line of this collection, and he’s to be commended for capturing, at times, the spirit and style of the originals so cleanly — I genuinely did forget I was reading pastiches at times, and t wouldn’t be too difficult to see the likes of ‘A Ghost from the Past’ folded in with Doyle’s works. I read the entire collection in a day, too, which gives you a sense of how easily it passes and, dare I say it, I’d be tempted to dip more of my foot into the world of non-Carr (John Dickson and Caleb) and non-Horowitz Holmes pastiches following this. I’m aware it’s a bit of a chancy business, but if you have any recommendations, feel free to pass them on for consideration.