Never Trust a Partner [ss] (2021), another collection from Crippen & Landru, is composed of two complete series by Robert Edward Eckels: 12 stories revolving around art forgery with Lang and Lovell, and five tales of “the world’s greatest adjutant”, Major Henry T. McDonlevy (ret’d).
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Fourteen alternative takes on the Great Detective — editor Sebastian Wolfe is unable to distinguish “parodies, pastiches and burlesques” from each other — fill out The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1989). No, not the Ellery Queen one. This is different.
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As Northern Hemisphere summers get increasingly sweltering — I wrote this post during the heatwave that the U.K. underwent in late June 2026 — let’s enjoy 18 tales of people murdering, cheating, lying to, and generally mistreating each other, selected for our enjoyment once more by the fabulously knowledgeable Martin Edwards.
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I thoroughly enjoyed the very readable set of stories collected in Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018), which gave a variety of almost crossover mystery interpretations to the Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson pastiche. So I’m back for the original volume in this brace to see what other twists have been put on that classic and enduring setup.
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I’ve read, in my general perusal of the crime and mystery genre, some of the Union Club mysteries by Isaac Asimov, but this collection of 30 of them was a chance to diver deeper into the canon, and so I snapped it up.
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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.
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Well, the penultimate Lord Darcy story was fucking awful, so the final one has to end things on a more positive note, right? Right?
Continue readingWith an uptick in quality in the previous two Lord Darcy short stories, I was very much looking forward to the penultimate one — also the longest, by a significant amount — continuing this trend. And, wow, was I mistaken.
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The idea of a collection of Golden Age short stories based around a theme of animals seemed like an unusual one, until I remembered that one of the genre’s foundational short stories and one of its most famous novels both have animals in fairly central roles. So that’s all right, then.
Continue readingAnd so, a new-to-me story from Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy oeuvre, since I definitely didn’t read these last three in this collection at first encounter (no, I’m not sure why).
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The Invisible Event 