The Adventure of the Coal-Tar Derivative: The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson Against the Moriarties During the Great Hiatus

The Sherlock Holmes pastiches in this uneven collection from Jones (H.P. Lovecraft’s Worlds—Volume One) play on the under-used concept that powerful elements of Professor Moriarty’s criminal gang remained at large after the professor’s death. There are some clever ideas, such as involving Holmes with the monstrous terror of Conan Doyle’s “The Terror of Blue John Gap” and expanding on a character from “The Lost Special,” generally regarded as an apocryphal Holmes story. Misfires include “The Case of the Unparalleled Adventures,” which provides one of the most anticlimactic identifications of Jack the Ripper ever, and an underwhelming take on the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Ponderous prose is a minus, as in Holmes’s remarking, “It seems as if man is destined to trod ground that has been cursed since Adam on a pilgrimage through the valley of violence in the hopes of reaching the kingdom of wisdom.” Jones’s flashes of talent suggest improvement is possible. (Nov.)