A collection of 11 non-canonical takes on Sherlock Holmes by eleven different authors, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1985) has lingered long on my shelf, and its day in the sun is finally here.

This was, I believe, my very first exposure to the idea of a Holmes pastiche, since my copy, pictured above, came in the boxset of the orange Penguin editions which were my first instance of owning the Holmes stories. Being callow in my reading of the World’s Greatest Detective it seemed odd to me that anyone would write — or read! — stories about Holmes not by Doyle, but the years have mellowed me and opened my eyes, and so we’re finally here and ready to have my horizons expanded.

Tune your violin and let’s go…

‘The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage’ (1947) by Ronald A. Knox is a well-realised story to open with, Knox having an understandably strong sense of his Watsonian voice. This diverts from Doyle’s original stories only in that the conclusion crashes down upon us quite suddenly, but this story of a semi-impossible vanishment of a man from a railway carriage is sharp, clever, and beautifully observed.

Intriguing, too, that Knox posits the investigation into the disappearance of James Philimore — he who vanished when returning to his house to collect an umbrella, as per ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’ (1922) — was one of Holmes’s failures. This story is a good one, but I’m almost more interested in Knox’s take on that case.

Sending someone to Switzerland after a long illness has decidedly more, er, fatal connotations these days, but when Mrs. Watson makes this trip — to recover, old boy, to recover — it allows ‘The Adventure of the Sheffield Banker’, a.k.a. ‘The Case of the Man Who was Wanted’ (1948) by Arthur Whitaker. Though I’m not sure what in a simple case of forgery would capture Holmes’s interest, despite Whitaker’s protestations on his behalf that great intrigue from little acorns grows.

Still, it’s a good pastiche, and shows much of the lightness of foot and plot that made Doyle so very readable. Interesting to note, too, that in the 130 years since this was set the train from London St. Pancras to Sheffield takes about the same amount of time. British railways, eh?

‘The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet’ (1920) by Vincent Starrett is another zestful pastiche, written and privately printed at a time that Doyle’s Holmes was still very much a going concern. It’s an excellent adoption of the core principles — a small cast, in which the villain is obvious yet some element remains obscure — and reworks one of the most famous tenets of the canon very well.

I wasn’t a fan of Starrett’s writing in the one novel of his I’ve tried, but he does a wonderful job aping Doyle here. See also: a very slight link here with (as-yet-unwritten) The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) by John Dickson Carr, who would go on to write several Holmes pastiches with Doyle’s son Adrian, of whom more later.

We continue a largely positive experience in pastichery from authors whose own works I’ve been rather underwhelmed by with ‘The Adventure of the Marked Man’ (1944) by Stuart Palmer. When a man who has lived a blameless life finds his existence threatened, he rushes to Holmes and Holmes is quick to identify the characteristics of the culprit…only to be told that no such person is to be found in the small Cornish town.

It speaks to the quality of this volume that this is the first story which I didn’t love, with Holmes being boorishly impudent (“And why, Watson, are you not already packing?”) and then, in the closing stages, saying that he will be recommending a man who has carried out a campaign of intimidation on the way to murder for a job at Scotland Yard. It seems…so un-Holmes somehow.

I had already encountered — and recently, too — ‘The Adventure of the Megatherium Thefts’, a.k.a. ‘The Strange Case of the Megatherium Thefts’ (1945) by S.C. Roberts in the British Library’s Murder by the Book [ss] (2021) collection, but I enjoyed it then and enjoyed reading it a second time here. Pleasingly, too, Green’s ordering of means that the early reference to “that little episode in a lonely west-country village” makes it seem as if this really does follow on directly from the preceding story. Ingenious!

‘The Adventure of the Trained Cormorant’, a.k.a. ‘Holmes in Scotland’ (1953) by W.R. Duncan Macmillan is the first of these stories which feels like it’s not written by Doyle, a statement I shall quantify no further. There are some lovely moments — Holmes planning a route to avoid a certain stretch of the Highlands which have been likened to the Khyber Pass since he “though, perhaps, that [Watson] would rather not be reminded of any part of the North-West Frontier”, Watson “[k]nowing better than to question Holmes’s inscrutable ways” in an investigation — but they feel more Lyndsay Faye than anything wrangled by Doyle.

This story of a vanishing jewel is also spectacularly minor, in no way justifying Holmes and Watson undertaking the journey they do. And while it ends on a nice note or two, the whole edifice takes positively months to shudder into motion, its love of scenery and flora reminding one of Freeman Wills Crofts‘s Inspector Joseph French. Macmillan has a good idea here, but it stumbles for me in its execution.

Adrian Conan Doyle came in for a lot of flack for his handling of his father’s work, and while ‘The Adventure of Arnsworth Castle’, a.k.a. ‘The Adventure of the Red Widow’ (1954) doesn’t exactly stagger you with its rigour — no matter how good Holmes is, I don’t believe he could tell which title Watson’s gaze fell upon when looking at the bookshelf from across the room — or its mystery-making, it’s not a bad addition to the expanded canon.

I enjoy how he allows Holmes’s deductions to stand on their own, like he trusts the reader to understand, for instance, why Holmes dropped the matches on the rug without explaining it once the reason is revealed. The only real niggle I have here it that I desperately want to know what they told Gregson and Dawlish at the termination of the case: did Holmes fill them in, or did he snub them given the clear reminder of his non-official status? Dammit, Adrian!

Why should Captain Joshua Webber, upon receipt of a letter, suddenly pick up his butter dish and cast it into the fireplace? Why does he fire a gun at the feet of his housekeeper, or slash a painting in front of his concerned daughter and a visitor to their manor? These are the questions at the heart of ‘The Adventure of the Tired Captain’ (1958) by Alan Wilson and, I’ll be honest, I still don’t know the answer.

For all that I understand, Webber wished to be thought mad, drawing attention to himself on these grounds, and yet surely, given the sequence of events that Holmes paints — admittedly, without any evidence at all — the last thing Webber would want is people paying close attention to his actions. This wraps up very quickly indeed, as if Wilson himself understands that his explanation is patchy at best, and as such remains rather disappointing despite its very strong Watsonian voice.

‘The Adventure of the Green Empress’, a.k.a. ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’ (1967) by F.P. Cillié, concerning the brother-in-law of an influential man accused of a theft, about which he will speak to no-one except his sister, is superb. It’s a tiny problem, but resolved with the sort of stiff-lipped ingenuity that makes the best of the Holmes canon work, and it explodes what I’ve often felt to be a trope that gets leant on far too heavily sometimes in the Golden Age:

What well-known financier in history has not lost money on an unsuccessful business venture at some time or another in his career? And what intelligent and able financier…has not made good his losses soon afterwards?

True, it recycles a handful too many tropes (deductions about the client from their walking stick, the “curious incident”, the use of a title already applied in the canon), but that’s merely enthusiasm o’erleaping itself. I can find no evidence of Cillié writing anything else at all, never mind any Holmes pastiches, and it’s to be wondered if this is simply his only output. A damn shame, if so.

Despite it filling at least twice the number of pages of almost everything else in this collection, I didn’t feel any verbosity in ‘The Adventure of the Purple Hand’ (1982) by D.O. Smith. I mean, it’s definitely there, but Smith does such a brilliant job with his setup, and reels you in so neatly, that it’s difficult to resent a single one of the words he uses.

The only shame of it is that the explanation is so positively pedestrian, with just about every element easy to guess despite a sudden, and canon-accurate, dumping of extra information very late on. It is also one of the subset of Holmes stories — c.f. ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ (1892) and others — in which Holmes achieves nothing by his intervention that wouldn’t have happened anyway.

It’s a shame, given the strength of some of the Watsonian voices in this collection, that final story ‘The Adventure of Hillerman Hall’, a.k.a. ‘How a Hermit was Disturbed in His Retirement’ (1981) by Julian Symons reverts to a third-person narrative of Holmes being looked up in his retirement by a young lady who fears for her disappeared fiancé.

Symons is to be commended, however, for the acuity of this which, if once again failing to delve much into the depths of surprise, at least has a bit of fun: that final line, appropriately interpreted, is a quite amusing conceit to throw into the mix…though perhaps a few years too late? Given the age of, er, the other party, surely such an interaction would have happened well before Holmes retired…

A top five? You know my methods…

1. ‘The Adventure of the Green Empress’ (1967) by F.P. Cillié
2. ‘The Adventure of the Purple Hand’ (1982) by D.O. Smith
3. ‘The Adventure of the Megatherium Thefts’ (1945) by S.C. Roberts
4. ‘The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage’ (1947) by Ronald A. Knox
5. ‘The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet’ (1920) by Vincent Starrett

There are some lovely stories herein, and it’s a collection which does much to enhance the standing of the Holmes pastiche, written as they seem to be by people with a genuine love of the character and his trappings. Given the spread of original publications dates, too, it speaks to the incredible fascination the Holmes canon still holds for a great may people. If you’re a fan of a faithful pastiche and have not encountered this selection, well, you really could do — and probably have done — a lot worse.

A complete side note, but I looked up editor Green after reading this, and if you’re unaware of the story of his death it certainly bears checking out. I’m not going to call it a case worthy of Sherlock Holmes, because that would be facile in the wake of the death of an actual human being who lived and breathed, but doubtless the great detective would have found a few points about it of interest. It really is utterly bizarre.

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The checklist of extra-canonical Sherlock Holmes works on The Invisible Event can be found here.