There’s now a website for the forthcoming anthology The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, which features a mix of mystery stories and fantasy & science fiction stories. I’m listed as a “contributing editor” for this book, as I performed various miscellaneous editorial duties, including writing the cover copy and writing all the “color commentary” sections of the story intros. You can read all those intros by clicking on the individual story titles over on the Table of Contents page. Here are a few of the sections I wrote:
For H. Paul Jeffers’ “Adventure of the Mummy’s Curse”:
“Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh.” This inscription was supposedly found carved on a stone tablet by British explorers Howard Carter and George Herbert when they opened the tomb of the Egyptian king Tutankhamun. It’s said that when the men entered the tomb, all the lights in Cairo went out and Herbert’s three-legged dog dropped dead. Herbert himself soon followed, felled by a mosquito bite. Carter’s pet canary was also killed, in a freak cobra accident, and before long two dozen members of the expedition had died under mysterious circumstances, victims of the mummy’s curse. Or that’s the story anyway. Numerous explanations have been advanced to explain the misfortune that befell the expedition. In 1986 Dr. Caroline Stenger-Phillip proposed the intriguing notion that the explorers had been sickened by exposure to mold and bacteria that had been preserved in the hermetically sealed tomb. However, a 2002 statistical analysis in the British Medical Journal concluded that members of the expedition had not in fact died significantly faster than the general population. The “curse” was a media myth, albeit one that’s inspired a lot of great entertainment, including our next tale.
For Dominic Green’s “Adventure of the Lost World”:
When Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty toppled to their deaths from Reichenbach Falls, the reading public was outraged. People loved Sherlock Holmes, and just didn’t want to accept that he was dead. People have had much the same feeling about dinosaurs, ever since the first dinosaur fossils were widely exhibited in the early nineteenth century. Dinosaurs were just so great, so awe-inspiring, so fun, that people didn’t want to believe that the dinosaurs were all dead, and novelists fed this hunger. Maybe there were dinosaurs in South America. Maybe at the North Pole. Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, wrote one of the best-known of these dinosaur romps, called The Lost World. As exploration foreclosed these possibilities, dino-loving authors resorted to increasingly desperate ploys. Maybe there were dinosaurs inside the Earth. Maybe you could clone dinosaurs from dino blood found in amber-encrusted mosquitoes. Sadly, the Earth has turned out to be depressingly un-hollow, and there’s not much chance of genetic material hanging around for sixty-five million years. This next tale takes us back to a simpler, happier time, when one could more easily imagine gigantic, blood-crazed lizards haunting the forests of the night.
For Tanith Lee’s “The Human Mystery”:
If you were to ask readers what makes Sherlock Holmes such an intriguing character, many people would probably answer that it’s what he knows — his encyclopedic knowledge of mud stains, handwriting, postmarks, poisons, etc. Holmes’s intellect is certainly captivating, and often we can only gape in awe, as Watson does, at the great detective’s recall of some obscure fact. Who doesn’t fantasize about having a mind so well honed? But when you think about it, what really makes Holmes so fascinating is not just what he knows, but also what he doesn’t know. A character who always knows everything would be a bit dull and predictable. Holmes is such a genius that it sometimes seems that he knows everything, but we often forget that Holmes is able to recall so much information relating to detective work because he has purposely remained ignorant about so much else. In “A Study in Scarlet,” Holmes claims not to know that the Earth orbits the sun, because that fact does not directly relate to solving crimes. Fascinating. Our next adventure, which involves a lady, a house, and a curse, takes Holmes deep into one of those territories about which he still has much to learn.
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