I stumbled over the Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018) collection, in which thirteen authors offer wildly varying alternative versions of Sherlock Holmes, when searching for more criminous tales by Jonathan Maberry, one of the highlights of the C. Auguste Dupin-extending collection Beyond Rue Morgue [ss] (2013).

As it happens, this is the second of two collections and Maberry is only an editor here, having contributed a story to the first collection, called simply Baker Street Irregulars [ss] (2017). But since this is the one I found, this is the one I could read. So, with my main reason for picking it up in the first place now shot full of holes, how did the thirteen authors involved here acquit themselves?

‘The Problem of the Three Journals’ by Narrelle M. Harris sees Sherlock ‘Lockie’ Holmes and John ‘Doc Caffeine’ Watson running a hipster coffee spot, The Sign of Four, in Melbourne. The tone here is delightfully breezy, and when a regular customer disappears while researching family trees it’s not long before a code is cracked and the game is on.

If the central mystery is a little light, Harris is to be commended for the telling details that fill out her story: the shop is famous for Sherlock deducing customer’s coffee orders before they reach the counter, and John’s history, updated but mirroring the canon, is neatly folded in. As an opener, this is a great way to whet the appetite for the invention that hopefully lies ahead.

I’d have thought that the fun of being involved in an undertaking like this would be in having a free hand to take such a versatile character and do whatever you want with them. Which is why I’m a little baffled and disappointed that ‘Six Red Dragons’ by Keith R. A. DeCandido simply retells ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ (1904) down to identical plot developments and motive.

Okay, his Sherlock is Shirley Holmes, a young girl in modern New York City, but this is really just a gender-swapped Elementary (2012-19) and would fit into that canon except that Gregson says “Sweet goddamn holy motherfuck,” at one point here, which is about the only interesting thing to report.

And so ‘The Adventure of the Diode Detective’ by Jody Lynn Nye stands out in even greater contrast, much to its own credit. Here we have Sure-Lock Home and Dr. What’s-On?, the former a home security system and the latter an entertainment guide built by a young programmer.

This is fun, with Sure-Lock compromised at the hands of a genius hacker, and having to reason through how to beat this very flesh-and-blood man who has him at a disadvantage. The futuristic world is sketched neatly in the background, the conceit by which our program triumphs is excellent, and the ending hints at many interesting possibilities. What a great little story.

‘Investigations upon Taxonomy of Venomous Squamates’ by R. Rozakis takes its inspiration from ‘The Speckled Band’ (1892), with PhD. student Helen Stoner suspecting Dr. Roylott, her supervisor, of some shenanigans in altering her friend Julia’s data, Julia then vanishing and leaving a note declaring “Beware of the snake”. Can Physics graduate student Lock come to their aid?

Of course, we all long for an age when Python is dismissed as “an archaic programming language”, and the A.I. filling the role of Watson has a nice air of the updated familiar about it (“We always played this game. I would do my best to be hyper-observant, and then he would explain to me how I missed the critical step.”). This is perhaps a little overlong, but it shows good judgement in how to update without merely parroting.

We find ourselves in Ancient Egypt for ‘Papyrus’ by Sarah Stegall, in which a disputed document sets up all sort of skulduggery and et ceteras. Stegall doubtless knows her ancient customs, but this feels more like a generic historical whodunnit than anything approaching a genuine adaptation of Holmes.

‘My Dear Wa’ats’ by Hildy Silverman lets you know it’s SF by putting distracting apostrophes all over the place — Captain She’er, intergalactic cruiser Ba’akre 221B, Crew Ca’ar — and making up contractions (Scoyard, Londland). A no-doubt deliberate lack of personal pronouns also makes this hard reading (“Pulling free of Wa’ats’s grip, She’er raked fingers through a tangle of curls.” — are these curls just…there on the wall?), so I gave up on this and never found out how they captured Mori.

Back to Earth for ‘A Scandal in Chelm’ by Daniel M. Kimmel, which bring us to 221B Babka Street in Chelm, home of Rabbi Shlomo. When the wedding of the son of a prominent rabbi is threatened, Shlomo and his chronicler Velvel set out to avert the problem…and do, with a minimum of difficulty.

This is very slight, and doesn’t really feel like a Holmes mystery at all, but I love the way Kimmel gets Jewish culture to bleed so completely into things, making this at times an unfamiliar as the SF tales which have accompanied this version of the Great Detective yet feeling much more lived in. Far from the most imaginative take on Holmes you’ll encounter, this is nevertheless easy to read and enjoyable in a transitory way.

‘The Affair of the Green Crayon’ by Stephanie M. McPherson reimagines Holmes, after getting several degrees, employed as a teacher for young children at a prestigious elementary school. I liked the brisk pace and tone of this, told by ex-Army medic and now school nurse John Watson…

Each morning Holmes tried to break into my apartment by one method or another. Each morning I tried to outwit him. The balance stood in his favor.

…and the concept of children being fundamentally truthful and observant is a good one. I didn’t, however, believe a single word of the plot — would you really go to all that effort and not bring the, er, key item with you? — so, even though I enjoyed this a lot, and McPherson captures the characters very well, I’m sot sure it will live long in my memory.

Despite an early assertion that “[w]e have a locked-room mystery,” ‘A Study in Space’ by Derek Beebe is nothing of the sort. A dead body having violently decompressed when the escape shuttle it was in opened its doors, the detective this time around is Watson, with Sherlock a teenager living in Armstrong City on the Moon.

I didn’t mind this, but, as is increasingly becoming the case, it’s also a little unmemorable. There’s a looong chase scene, lots of talking, and then a development which makes sense when you consider how few characters have shown up. Sadly, most of the interesting details don’t matter, either, which seems the antithesis of a Holmes story.

History rears its head again in ‘Sin Eater and the Adventure of Ginger Mary’ by Gordon Linzner, in which the concept of a Sin Eater is interestingly explored alongside the story of a fifteen year-old girl found hanged in a tree.

This is one of those cases where the background is more interesting than the story itself, with a couple of fun developments late on that still don’t really add to the overall shape of the plot. I can’t deny, however, that, despite a slightly too bland telling, this has whetted my appetite for more of the same. Some small but good deductions, too, which at least retain the spirit of Holmes even if, once again, the story feels a little too focussed on the history to quite qualify as being Sherlock-inspired.

Some fun is to be had in ‘The Adventure of the Double-Sized Final Issue’ by Mike Strauss, in which a meta-aware Holmes knows he is a character in a comic strip being written by Arthur Conan Doyle and is thus able to both anticipate the story and, by climbing between panels, achieve apparently impossible feats.

It feels like more could be done with this, but it commends itself because it’s one of the few tales herein to really stretch the possibilities. It’s too long, and ends up about half as clever as it should, but Strauss might be someone to keep an eye on if only because he understood the brief so fully. He wrote a story for the first Baker Street Irregulars collection, too, so now I have two reasons to check that out.

‘A Very Important Nobody’ by Chuck Regan sees Theramin Joule — I feel like that’s a pun, but it’s lost on me — undergoing time travel because someone sent him a magazine 500 years ago…yeah, look, I don’t get it, either. There are a handful of wonderfully arch moments here…

This, of course, was the fallback of all conspiracy theorists — the absence of evidence only confirms it has all been covered up.

…but I came to this collection for Sherlock Holmes alternates, and this isn’t that. I love a time travel story, and this more or less does what you’d expect in that subgenre, but it’s not really scratching the itch I was searching for.

Finally, ‘Ho Ho Holmes’ by Nat Gertler, which posits a world in which the retired Holmes set up at the North Pole and became, er, Santa Claus. And, hey, why not? It’s no more ridiculous than anything else you’ve read about him, and the investigation into the death of the reindeer Dancer has about it a few Holmesian traits, and — no footprints in the snow! — a delightfully setting-specific solution that I’m going to call unique. Again, lovely to see what someone can do when it comes to really engaging with the assignment.

So, then, a top 5:

1. ‘Ho Ho Holmes’ by Nat Gertler
2. ‘The Adventure of the Diode Detective’ by Jody Lynn Nye
3. ‘The Problem of the Three Journals’ by Narrelle M. Harris
4. ‘Investigations upon Taxonomy of Venomous Squamates’ by R. Rozakis
5. ‘Sin Eater and the Adventure of Ginger Mary’ by Gordon Linzner

The question uppermost in my mind upon finishing this — and, if we’re honest, while reading it — revolves around precisely what makes something a Sherlock Holmes-inspired story. These aren’t strictly Holmes pastiches, so they’re not trying to fit in with the existing canon, but even then a few don’t feel especially Sherlockian…so why not?

At the moment, I’m no closer to answering that, but it seems that there must be more to Sherlock than just some clever deductions — though how one incarnation works out that someone had two slices of cake for breakfast is never revealed — and an arrogant disdain for others, and I’d love to pick the brains of some of the authors herein to see what they felt was the core Sherlockian tenet they stuck to in their tales. Because some of them really do manage it: Narrelle M. Harris, Nat Gertler, and Stephanie M. McPherson in particular having conjured up an update of Holmes that I’d love to read more about.

On the whole, though, this is going to represent the mixed bag this sort of undertaking always does, with some people managing to keep to the brief and some just writing for it because it pays — the aforementioned C. Auguste Dupin collection had the same mix, and half the stories in the supposedly Ronald Knox-baiting one didn’t even break one of Knox’s commandments. Still, I read this pretty quickly, and I still want to read the earlier anthology in this brief series, so it can’t have been all bad.

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I imagine I will keep track of my Sherlock Holmes pastiche reading here.