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’. In this case it is arguably the best known, and certainly best loved, example of the breed, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Kennett and Kidd have previously collaborated on a highly recommended collection of Carnacki pastiche available under the title No. 472 Cheyne Walk (Ash-Tree Press 2002). In “The Strange Affair of the Steamship Friesland”, a direct follow-up to “The Five Orange Pips”, journalist Peter Calamai presents Holmes with a unique method of correcting an early failure after consulting a certain familiar doctor with an address in South Norwood. Lewis Carroll’s Alice may have disappeared into another world, but any comparison with J. R. Campbell’s “The Entwined” stops right there, as the girl in this story dreams of nothing that could be described as a Wonderland. An aging Watson finds himself faced with the horrific power of strong remembrances when Chris Roberson delves into the untold tale of “Merridew of Abominable Memory”. When a private investigator on the mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles finds himself faced with a corpse that won’t stay down he turns to the greatest detective still living for help, bringing together influences as widely removed as Bram Stoker and Dashiell Hammett in Bob Madison’s humorous and hardboiled story “Red Sunset”. Our final entry takes a decidedly different turn in that Sherlock Holmes is nowhere to be found; instead Kim Newman has Professor Moriarty, along with Colonel Moran, waging a highly personal and often hilarious War Of The Worlds in “The Red Planet League”.

At the beginning of this long-winded and wandering introduction I wondered what the impact of fantastic fiction on an impressionable child, might be? Well, now you know, in my case it eventually led to the creation of the book you hold in your hands. A little horror, a little pulp-style thriller, a little comic book adventure, a little ghostly spook story, a little bit mystery and hopefully a whole lot of fun. Not your traditional selection of Sherlock Holmes stories by any means, but what is the fun of that? After all, as Watson noted in The Speckled Band “…he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual and even the fantastic…” so why should we?

Enjoy!

Charles Prepolec, 2008

The Lost Boy

The Lost Boy

by Barbara Hambly

When the Darling children disappeared without a trace from their nursery one night, their father took the case at once to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Mrs. Darling came to me.

“You know how George is,” she said, when the first spate of anguish, of terror, of speculations both probable and grotesque had been talked out over tea. I had been in the Darling night nursery innumerable times, listening to the tales Meg Darling — Meg Speedwell she had been, when first I knew her at Mrs. Clegg’s dreary boarding school in the north of England — would tell small Wendy, smaller John, and baby Michael of pirates, mermaids, red Indians and the fairies that dwell in Kensington Gardens.

I knew the distance from that high window to the street below, and that the drainpipe was at the back, not the front, of that narrow brick mansionette in its row of identical dwellings. I knew how big a dog Nana was, and the sturdy Newfoundland’s ferocity where the children were concerned.

“George says—” Meg began, and then stopped. For a time she sat turning her saucer round and round, forty-five degrees at a time, a habit she’d had when we were girls, and she was thinking about how best to say something that the adults had told us we shouldn’t say or even think.

And I knew then that what — or who — she was thinking about, was Peter Pan.

“Do you remember Peter Pan?” she asked, after a long, long time, in the small voice one usually only hears late at night, when the other girls in the bleak cold dormitory have gone to sleep.

I nodded. I didn’t say, How could I forget? I think Peter Pan was the reason that I didn’t kill myself when I was seven or eight — and it’s a mistake adults make, to think that children who are sufficiently unhappy don’t want to try