The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VIII
Eliminate the Impossible: 1892–1905
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
Part VIII - Eliminate the Impossible: 1892-1905 features contributions by: Deana Baran, Tim Symonds, Sandor Jay Sonnen, Ben Cardall, Andrew Lane, Michael Mallory, Wendy C. Fries, Aaron Smith, Arthur Hall, Robert Perret, Nick Cardillo, Paul D. Gilbert, Cindy Dye, Tracy Revels, Derrick Belanger, William Meikle, Marcia Wilson, David Friend, Roger Riccard, Craig Janacek, Jeremy Branton Holstein, Will Murray, David Ruffle, Daniel McGachey, and David Marcum, with a poem by Christopher James, and forewords by David Marcum, Lee Child, Rand Lee, Michael Cox, and Melissa Farnham. In 2015, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories burst upon the scene, featuring adventures set within the correct time period, and written by many of today's leading Sherlockian authors from around the world. Those first three volumes were overwhelmingly received, and there were soon calls for additional collections. Since then, their popularity has only continued to grow, with six volumes already released, and now two more, Eliminate the Impossible, featuring tales of Holmes's encounters with seemingly impossible events - ghosts and hauntings, curses and mythical beasts, and more. In “The Sussex Vampire”, Holmes tells Watson: “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.” In each of the stories presented in this massive two-volume collection, Holmes approaches the varied problems with one of his favorite maxims firmly in place: “. . . . when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth . . . .” But what, exactly, is the truth? 2017 is the 130th anniversary of the publication of A Study in Scarlet, the first recorded adventure of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson. What an amazing journey it’s been! In addition to the pitifully few sixty tales originally presented in The Canon, published between 1887 and 1927, there have been literally thousands of additional Holmes adventures in the form of books, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies, manuscripts, comics, and fan fiction. And yet, for those who are true friends and admirers of the Master Detective of Baker Street, where it is always 1895 (or a few decades on either side of that!) these stories are not enough. Give us more! The forty-eight stories in these two companion volumes represent some of the finest new Holmesian storytelling to be found, and honor the man described by Watson as “the best and wisest . . . whom I have ever known.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marcum's eighth anthology of Holmes pastiches intended to be faithful to the spirit of Conan Doyle's originals, his second (after part VII) featuring "what seemed to be supernatural tales, but with real-world rational endings," is another testament to the depth of lesser-known talent capable of channeling the canonical Holmes and Watson. The 25 entries pit the great detective against a range of otherworldly terrors, ranging from a banshee whose howling shatters windows and cause bleeding from the ears (William Meikle's "The Case of the Little Washerwoman") to a demon possessing the body of a young girl (Nick Cardillo's "The Haunting of Hamilton Gardens"). All the stories are high quality, but several stand out. In Ben Cardall's "The Case of the Biblical Colours," four dead men are found in a sealed room, each with a pocket handkerchief with a different color representing one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Andrew Lane's "The Inexplicable Death of Matthew Arnatt" demands that Holmes explain how a man, who happened to be a childhood friend of the detective's, was shot to death inside a carriage by an unloaded gun that had never been fired. The imagination of the contributors in coming up with variations on the volume's theme is matched by their ingenious resolutions.
