the big book of sherlock holmes stories by otto penzler

A few quick strokes - pipe, brain, violin, Watson - call him into being, while beyond these scant markings an abyss of personality instantly suggests itself. What’s his secret? In a sense Holmes is the perfect literary creation: a caricature with depth. I slipped through his grip.” Slippery, unkillable Holmes! “We tottered together upon the brink of the fall,” Holmes explains to a not unreasonably astonished Watson in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House.” “I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. He quickly overcame his creator, of course: Having plunged Holmes - for good, it seemed - into the Reichenbach Falls in the fatal embrace of his shadow-self, Moriarty, in 1893’s “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle found himself, 10 years later, rewriting his own story. But the fact that Bret Harte, revered and shaggy forebear, of whose stories Conan Doyle felt his own early efforts to be but “feeble echoes,” could come out in 1900 with such a spot-on and beautifully modern satire of a Sherlock Holmes story tells us something of the immediacy with which Holmes franchised himself into popular consciousness.

need no convincing of the imaginative vitality of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock, Jonny Lee Miller Sherlock, etc. We in 2015, we the entertained, who live in a fun house of Sherlocks - Cumberbatch Sherlock, Downey Jr. “So overpowering was his penetration,” declares the narrator in a fit of purest proto-Kafka, “that although I knew myself innocent, I licked my lips with avidity to hear the further details of this lucid exposition of my crime.” There can be only one culprit: the narrator himself! Jones lays out the case, deduction by damning deduction. On Hemlock Jones’s shelves are glass jars containing “pavement and road sweepings” and “fluff from omnibus and road-car seats.” When he thinks, his head shrinks, “so much reduced in size by his mental compression that his hat tipped back from his forehead and literally hung on his massive ears.” Jones’s diamond-encrusted cigar case, a present from the Turkish ambassador, has gone missing.

You will, however, be able to find stories about Sherlaw Kombs, and Solar Pons, and Picklock Holes, and Shamrock Jolnes, and Warlock Bones and (my own pick of the pseudo-Holmeses) Hemlock Jones, who in Bret Harte’s “The Stolen Cigar-Case” almost destroys the ardently worshipful Watson-like narrator with the sheer puissance of his intellect. Shadrach Voles, Upchuck Gnomes, Rockhard Scones and Blowback Foams: None of these great made-up detectives appear in Otto Penzler’s giant compendium of fake Sherlock Holmes stories, or Sherlock-Holmes-stories-written-by-persons-other-than-Sir-Arthur-Conan-Doyle.

The big book of sherlock holmes stories by otto penzler