Sixteen salty seadogs sallying seaward in search of scurrilous…stuff, that’s what you’ll more or less find in Deep Waters [ss] (2019), another anthology of short fiction in the British Library Crime Classic series edited by the some-might-say-too-knowledgeable Martin Edwards.
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As a fan of the impossible crime novel You’ll Die Laughing (1945) by Bruce Elliott, I was delighted when I accidentally discovered that Stark House Press had put out a collection of Elliott’s short fiction, Do You Know Me? & Other Aberrations (2025). I was aware that You’ll Die Laughing is atypical of his output, but curiosity reigned nonetheless and here we are.
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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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