The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (ed. John Joseph Adams)

Honestly, I just need to reread the actual Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, but I kind of wanted to try these out just for a bit of entertainment. This may sound a bit rude, but I have never read an American fantasy story or novel that has not been complete rubbish, so I just skipped all the American authors in the collection. The British and Canadian stories are a bit of a weird mix; some of them are very formulaic and even dull, others are quite fun and inventive, and two are completely hysterical. The central theme of this collection is the supernatural and sci-fi (or at least something which defies belief) and how Sherlock Holmes deals with it. The title, of course, alludes to the much-quoted 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth'. These stories set out to stretch the bounds of the 'improbable' to include ghosts, curses, gravity-defying inventions, Cthulhu, etc, etc. As I said, many of the stories were too formulaic and very easy to predict, but a few had some interest. My two absolute favourite ones were 'Murder to Music' by Anthony Burgess and 'The Adventure of the Lost World' by Dominic Green, both of which are parodies and absolutely hilarious in different ways. I have never actually read anything by Burgess before (having been utterly terrified by the film of The Clockwork Orange a few years ago), but maybe I should read him more. I was somewhat disappointed in Neil Gaiman's story, 'A Study in Emerald', because I'm not fond of alternate universe stories, but it did have a good twist at the end. Also, thanks to Robert J. Sawyer's Doctor Who-like (actually, a lot of these stories have plots that belong on Doctor Who) 'You See But You Do Not Observe', I finally understand the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.