Martin H. Greenberg (1941–2011)

Quick review: Overall it was probably more good than bad. I liked that the variety in stories meant that even the bad ones didn't matter much. There were a few really good stories too. Not something I'd recommend to many people but if you're into this sort of thing then it's good.

Best stories: The Adventure of the Field Theorems, The Greatest Detective of All Time
Worst Stories: The Mouse and the Master, The Adventure of the Pearly Gates

Short review of all the stories because hey why not right. Will contain minor spoilers for things revealed in the first few pages of a story, anything that's clearly intended to be an interesting reveal or is nearer the end is in spoiler tags.

The Musgrave Version: Sherlock Holmes meets Fu Manchu except narrated by the client from The Musgrave Ritual. The digs at Watson are a little amusing and I appreciate the attempts to talk about the racism with the Fu Manchu character while still keeping him an evil mastermind but nothing really happens. Dull but OK.

The Case of the Detective's Smile: Another crossover with Alice from Alice in Wonderland, except her real life inspiration. Again nothing much happens except MAGIC IS REAL. I found it a bit mawkish and excessive, it relies entirely on the interest of (kind of) seeing the crossover. Poor.

The Adventure of the Russian Grave: Holmes in an historical event witnessing a certain comet. The pretext for it is pretty flimsy and nothing much happens till the very end so you have to enjoy the pay off. I liked that it was all a very clever Moriarty trap from the grave though, even if it was a bit unlikely. OK.

The Adventure of the Field Theorems: a funny, clever, affectionate tribute to Conan Doyle, Houdini, magic and UFO stories that I highly recommend. Probably one of the best non-Doyle Holmes stories I've read. Probably benefits from the slightly extended length but makes the most of it and gives Holmes a chance to show his appreciation of other masters of a craft. Good character writing for Holmes and just enough detail to make a convincing mystery and retain a sci-fi element but without making it the centerpiece. Loved it.

The Adventure of the Missing Coffin: pretty funny joke story (although told in the third person! what a faux pas) that's another crossover although they only appear at the end. Features vampires and some pretty decent jokes. Obviously not super hilarious but I thought it was a funny play on the typical Holmes story the supernatural while still sticking pretty closely to how they should go. I liked it.

The Adventure of the Second Scarf: Sherlock Holmes... in SPACEEE! Pretty mediocre because it gets tied up too hard in explaining the introduced sci fi elements which make things like the explanation kind of clumsy, but it's ok.

The Phantom of the Barbary Coast: Not really convinced by the attempted Irene Adler connection but hey. There's a reasonably interesting mystery revolving around some stuff I'd never heard of before the equivalent of pressganging except in the US but that are explained and are interesting and the villain is a corrupt policeman so that gets points in my book. Not brilliant but enjoyable enough.

Mouse and the Master: I really don't get this one, I feel it's a reference to something but I have no idea what. The main character is a stereotypical noir detective and the story is basically about how the accepted Holmes stories are all wrong and actually Holmes and Watson are very different etc but it's just... weird and doesn't pull it off at all. There are a couple funny lines but not much more. Watson gets turned into an old fool who makes up all the stories based on mishearings and Holmes is an arsehole. And then Holmes sends the detective to a spiritualist meeting which Watson has been taken in by where a load of fictional characters are trying to make contact with the other side. And then the detective stops the criminals by listening to a voice in his head. What??? It's just incoherent> Very strange

Two Roads No Choices: A time travel story and a pretty cool one. More like a "traditional" sci-fi story with Sherlock Holmes as a character, but I thought it dealt with the topic in an interesting way with a good set up, an attempt at a moral problem and an interesting ending with regards to determinism and the paradoxes of time travel. Good story.

The Richmond Enigma: Another crossover and also another time travel story, this time with the most famous time travel story of all time (probably) Quite a bit of it is repeating the story of its source material, which is a little silly, and the conclusion is a little dull. Holmes doesn't do any detecting and the time traveller just says "oh well I'll fly around a bit and destroy my time machine. woo" it just ends. Eh.

A Study in Sussex: Amazing. Genius. I highly recommend just reading it yourself unless you're scared of bees but given someone else has spoiled it I'll put the plot in spoiler tags because it deserves commemorating somewhere: Holmes has been injecting himself with bee venom, which has healed his old age complaints. He decides to inject himself with a massive amount with Watson watching. Overnight, he turns into a giant swarm of bees with his own conciousness and flies away. The ending is Watson injecting himself with the rest of the venom. Fin I wish I had this person's creative imagination to be honest. Bloody hell.

Holmes Team Advantage: There's a cloning machine used by evil people! And then Holmes clones himself! And the clones do stuff not described and then they die because they didn't get "molecularly stabilised". Eh. Does very little with the concept. Pretty dull.

Alimentary, My Dear Watson: OK, I was not expecting this. At all. Very short and that it's an Alice in Wonderland crossover is obvious from the first page. Worth warning for child sexual abuse (yeah) Makes a marked contrast to the reverent tone towards Carroll in the earlier story, here he gets eaten by the Cheshire Cat after all the characters from Alice in Wonderland trick him into a trap because he's been abusing Alice. Like. I mean. I wasn't expecting to read a story with a premise like that. At least Holmes immediately sympathised and helped cover the "murder" up

The Future Engine: There's an engine... that can predict or maybe even affect the future!! That's why it's called the future engine. Involving a descendant of Babbage. I laughed so hard when it was said the maths used to operate it is the "binomial theorem" and Holmes collapses in paroxysms over Moriarty. An alright caper, doesn't do enough with the concept, but it's ok. Oh also at the start Holmes gives a ridiculous speech extolling the incredible progressive virtues of the British empire and how the world is being lead into a glorious new age and then at the end he says actually progress is bad, because Moriarty was able to predict stock markets using a primitive computer. Incredible stuff, really makes you think

Then starts the modern/future stories, most of which resort to having Holmes be a computer program because I guess it's hard to find excuses to have him appear otherwise. The language used to talk about computers is pretty funny in general - I feel some of the authors had never used a computer. But only in an era where there was a sudden craze for all things "cyber" could a line like "computer, delete MORIARTY.DAT" be considered a fitting climax to a story. It's beautiful in a way.

Holmes Ex Machina: A guy uses computers to create a virtual "actor" of Holmes from the books, virtual Holmes solves a very simple mystery, nothing much happens. Oh, and instead of films everything is on "holos". The future!! Eh.

The Sherlock Solution: Another one that gets some points for creativity. Basically the entire staff of a company have been turned into Holmes through some transferral of a computer program that also released Moriarty into the world as an evil villain. Has a few funny bits and the ending clearly cries out for a sequel. It's alright.

The Fan Who Molded Himself: This is a pretty wild one that makes novel use of time travel and changing up our preconceived notions of the Holmes character. I liked the concept a lot anyway - I don't usually like Holmes was an arsehole or ~dark gritty~ stuff but I thought this was clever/creative enough that it worked well. And it's pretty scary!. I liked this a lot.

Second Fiddle: The descriptions of the murder are pretty brutal. Definitely much more "modern" crime style than a lot of the others. Holmes gets pulled to present day California by time travel to solve a murder (the only sci-fi bit is to get the plot started) with an investigator who's mad at being upstaged. By the end, he has a healthier view of things. Kind of. Possibly. Pretty decent, although I could have done without some of the ~grittier~ stuff.

Moriarty by Modem: Another "Holmes is a computer program" thing. Not very exciting, nothing much happens, although I liked the attempt at a dramatic ending in the CYBERWORLD. Kind of. OK.

The Greatest Detective of All Time: Fun premise, Holmes is literally what the title says so he and Watson get consulted on things by many time travellers to solve mysteries in their own times. And Moriarty acts as the counterpart for future villains. Does some cool stuff with the concept/time travel, has a mystery of sorts, entertaining ending, pretty good.

The Case of the Purloined L'Isitek: A story existing for the sake of a few abominable puns. Here Holmes's place is taken by an alien that shares his name. Pretty pedestrian mystery but it's OK. Having someone who's not Holmes but acts like him as a joke makes it a bit better than average generic mystery.

The Adventure of the Illegal Alien: Holmes as AI in an incoherent and mercifully short story. Takes on a client, solves the mystery by calling in a favour of a descendant (?) of Mycroft by saying he's Holmes even though he's an AI and the dude somehow totally accepting it, then lies to the client because Holmes is some sort of British patriot who covers up murder for commercial gain now apparently?? Oh and the AI computer gets wiped but he disappears into the Internet somehow. And a policeman is a dolphin. Just really bad and insulting and makes a mess of the character of Holmes as well as barely making sense through sloppy writing.

Dogs, Masques, Love, Death, Flowers: Two bad stories in a row! If anyone has the slightest clue what's going on in this story please tell me. Set on a spaceship where people are in cold storage or something with a load of stream of conciousness passages that are incomprehensible because they hint at a setting behind the story that's impossible to understand or guess at. I have no idea what happens at the ending, what the motive for the murder was, how it happened, why any of the things in the story happened in fact. Just a total mess. The idea of robots based on fictional detectives is cute though.

You See But You Do Not Observe: This is a kind of "cute" story, where Holmes solves the Fermi paradox - in the most ridiculous way with a load of gobbledegook "science", of course, but it's fun nonetheless. Ending spoilers: Of course, the problem is that Holmes got resurrected by the power of people's will to see him again after his death at Reichenbach, putting Earth out of sync with the rest of the universe and preventing contact with aliens! What a great totally ridiculous idea. It's at least coherent within itself and takes an interesting angle compared to a lot of the stories. I liked it a lot.

Illusions: A fun, short story with Conan Doyle as the main character. He attends a spiritualist seance in the hope of making contact with the great beyond and meeting someone: his uncle, who demands he make more Sherlock Holmes stories. A cute, amusing, light story that'd have been a great ending to the collection imo.

The Adventure of the Pearly Gate: But instead, we get this. Congrats to the author for saying that 3 of Jack The Ripper's victims are in hell! What an unpleasant thing to say, especially as it's pretty easily guessable why he'd think that (and it's a really really bad reason). The rest of the story is naff as heck - I don't think Holmes meeting St Peter is something even the best authors could write well, and it certainly doesn't come across well here. Features Holmes being *bored of heaven*, which is uh... yeah. It's just a really ridiculous view of heaven that's both not interesting and also would probably be kind of insulting if you believed in it. The whole way Jack the Ripper and his victims are talked about is also really insulting and just bizarre too - like because he's "insane" he can't recognise "fake" Pearly Gates unlike everyone else?? None of his victims are in heaven?? I dunno. Just a bizarre, unpleasant story that's a shame to end the book on.
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As a teenager I found this anthology fascinating - admittedly, possibly more for the concept than for the stories actually included. Certainly, coming back to it 25 years later, I don't have a lot of memories of these tales, and I think time has worked to distance me (and probably anyone else) from many of them. Several of the stories are written in the rather stark, procedural voice of science fiction that dominated the immediate post-war era, and quite a few of them are laced with misogyny in a way I'm sure I overlooked as a kid but find far more tiring today.

However, having said that, it's not a bad collection if you're in the mood for something definitively of that 1950s-70s era. I do think it's easy to misinterpret the book's premise (or at least, I did); it's not thirteen styles of mystery in science fiction, it's literally thirteen styles of crime story, and there's a difference. There are genres here like "spy story," "trial," and so on, which I wasn't expecting alongside the more anticipated "locked room," "whodunit," and "why-done-it," and occasionally a story seems somewhat arbitrarily chosen. But overall, it's not a bad set.

The best stories in the volume - by about a country mile - are Philip K. Dick's "War Game" and Clifford D. Simak's "How-2." These both demonstrate a somewhat sly sense of humor that gives them a bit more reach, and even if they feel almost self-consciously retro, they both land with a pretty good punch in the gut.… (more)