Full disclosure: I received an advanced review copy (ARC) of this book in order to conduct an unbiased review.

As a casual reader of Sherlock Holmes, I had forgotten that he never claimed to hold an infinite database of pertinent knowledge stored between those silvered temples. Rather, Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD) has him declaim:

…that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.

― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

And it is this – Sherlock Holmes’s ignorance in a vast many areas, allied with his spectacular cognitive abilities – which forms the premise for this, the tenth collection of Orlando Pearson’s The Redacted Sherlock Holmes. Each story arises from the author’s knack of finding some wiggle room between the known facts of authentic historical events, and the fictitious propósito of unleashing Holmes’s speculative investigative faculties onto this heretofore untilled historical loam.

The first story, ‘An Extinction Level Event’, is rather surprising in that it opens by shining a light on certain of Holmes’s swathes of ignorance, before zooming in to focus on the dinosaurs and the reason for their disappearance from the planet. Long before it was fashionable to bandy around such ideas, Holmes and Watson undertake an investigation into the hypothesis that a large projectile from outer space may have caused their demise.

However, it is the second story, ‘A Double Reconciliation’, that will delight true Sherlock Holmes fans. In its style, language, premise, and use of Holmsian deduction, it captures the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself perfectly. In the interests of authenticity, Pearson is a zealous and unashamed plagiariser of the great man’s words, gleefully and rebelliously interweaving authentic passages from the original stories into his work. That makes it a fun reader game to work out which prose is Pearson’s and which ACD’s. This story ponders certain features in Brahms’ music, such as his use of the dotted crochet, attributing the innovations to Sherlock Holmes’s genius rather than to Brahms himself. It culminates in such a suitably convoluted explanation of events as to qualify for the adjective ‘Holmsian’, along with a surprising ‘proof’ that Holmes’s name is apparently spelled out in the one of the great composer’s pieces. Read The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Vol. X to find out which one.

The story ‘A Celestial Mystery’ takes place in that period when Holmes was presumed dead after his fall from the Reichenbach Falls, when the great detective, in actual fact in the pay and service of Her Majesty’s Government, a.k.a. his brother, Mycroft, travels to Lhasa in Tibet. En route, he is kidnapped and taken forcibly to Saint Petersburg, to meet Igor Mikhailovich Pavlov, head of the Russian secret police, who forces him to collaborate in an operation to entrap the gay Russian composer Tschaikovsky. Naturally, events do not turn out in Pavlov’s favour and Holmes avoids an early demise in the Siberian salt mines.

Orlando Pearson researches the historical premise of each of his stories thoroughly, finding fascinating quirks and little known anecdotes from the historical and famous into which to weave Holmes’s presence. Every time I read one of his stories I learn some bizarre and fascinating true anecdote from history. The result is a charming and whimsical collection of stories, a little like a Victorian menagerie, that will have you reaching for Wikipedia or the Encyclopædia Britannica to winnow the truth from the fiction. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

Get The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Vol. X by Orlando Pearson here.