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By Root 779 0

largely ignored, throughout my childhood. Sherlock Holmes, turned out to be calm, cool, insightful, larger than life fantastic hero and best of all, he lived in my Victorian fantasyland. By the next day I was in a used bookstore looking for a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I found myself reading the words “To Sherlock Holmes she was always the woman”, and considering I was floundering after a bad break-up with my girlfriend, I was utterly and completely hooked. By the weekend I had Peter Haining’s The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook and discovered there was a whole world of Sherlock Holmes related material out there, including something called a pastiche. Back to the used bookshops I went. Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File fell into my hands, Loren D. Estleman’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes followed suit, then Manly Wade Wellman’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds, and oh look, Phil Farmer’s Wold-Newtonry was back in my life with The Adventure of the Peerless Peer. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought the Victorian era was a literary fantasyland, but best of all, my new hero, a classic one that seemed to embody the best qualities of all my childhood interests, served as a guide through this nightmare world. To be sure, some of it was truly dire in terms of quality writing, but it was the most fun I’d had in a lifetime of reading, and fun is the key to entertainment.

Flash forward some 20-odd years and here I am, still having fun in my Victorian fantasyland and exploring the ever-expanding world of Sherlock Holmes. From the distance an early 21st century vantage point provides, the idealized Victorian and Edwardian world Sherlock Holmes inhabits is to the modern reader, in its own way, as strongly realized and alien a fantasy setting as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Baum’s Oz and just as much fun! Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes will, I hope, communicate some of that sense of fun that I’ve been enjoying all these years.

Throughout this rambling rumination I’ve made mention of a number of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries and successors who worked the rich vein of fantasy fiction. In the stories ahead you will perhaps find echoes from some of their works or their characters. The connection may be very subtle or it may come through loud and clear as it does in Barbara Hambly’s “The Lost Boy”, a bittersweet tale of Sherlock Holmes and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Considering Conan Doyle’s one-time collaboration and longtime friendship with Barrie, it is a perfect starting point for our collection. Christopher Sequeira’s “His Last Arrow” is a cautionary tale, possibly inspired by Sir Richard Francis Burton’s translation of The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night, which drives home the adage that you should be careful what you wish for as Watson appears to have brought home more than a war-wound from his time in Afghanistan. Barbara Roden’s “The Things That Shall Come Upon Them” contains our first pairing of Holmes with a classic ‘psychic detective’, in this case Hesketh-Prichard’s groundbreaking Flaxman Low. Holmes and Low both find themselves investigating, from decidedly different perspectives, strange occurrences in a house that is sure to be familiar to readers of M. R. James’ “The Casting of the Runes”. The Flaxman Low stories are a perfect example of Conan Doyle’s direct influence on a contemporary, as the Low stories began appearing in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898, less than a year after Hesketh-Prichard met Conan Doyle at a writer’s dinner. Another, earlier, writer’s dinner was also a meeting point for Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, who’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray, seems to have an echo in M. J. Elliott’s “The Finishing Stroke”, a grisly tale of art gone wrong. Martin Powell brings in Conan Doyle’s other great creation Professor George Edward Challenger in a Boy’s Own/pulp styled two-fisted adventure tale that could only be called “Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World”. In Rick Kennett and A. F. (Chico) Kidd’s “The Grantchester Grimoire”, Holmes meets his second ‘psychic detective