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Sherlock Holmes Pastiches recommendations!


chongjasmine

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Hi, chongjasmine -- it's good to see you here again!   :wave2:

I've read only a few pastiches, and I cannot wholeheartedly recommend any particular one.  Seems like some have faithful characterizations, some have interesting plots, and so on, but not all in one story.  Fortunately some other members have read far more widely than I have, and I'm sure they will be along shortly with their recommendations.

As for my favorite semi-pastiches, I'm fond of the Enola Holmes books.  They're set fairly early in the Holmes-Watson era.  Even though their focus is on Sherlock's kid sister, when Sherlock, Mycroft, and/or Dr. Watson do appear, I find them true to form for that era (and Watson isn't dimwitted!).  Also, the author gives her teenage target audience credit for some basic maturity, so the books are enjoyed by a number of adults as well.

 

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On 6/30/2023 at 11:14 PM, chongjasmine said:

I like pastiches which maintain original voice or style and looks something like what Doyle will actually write and set in the canonical universe. So no female sherlock, sherlock in mars, or things that go out of characters.
Kindly recommend them here, please.

Welcome to the forum!

You can find some of the best pastichers now working collected in The MX New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series edited by David Marcum.   He releases two or three volumes of short stories a year since 2015.  Denis O. Smith, Michael Kurland and Donald Thomas are names you should know.  Also Lyndsay Faye.  Happy sleuthing!

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  • 6 months later...

Collecting personal opinions of a handful of books is a start.  I've compiled a list of individual volumes of collected Holmes short story pastiches.  Never mind that there are no doubt as many or more pastiche novels -- the number of post-Doyle anthologies is approaching 550 and growing every year.  Is that really a good thing?  How indeed does one decide how to chose say 25 short story volumes in hopes of reading some of the best of the lot?  I've read or sampled a little over 50 post-Doyle anthology books and continue to update a list of what I see at the top 25, but who really will ever read all of them, never mind rank them all (and never mind all the novels)!!  Have we entered the brave new world of having too much of a good thing?  RoyH

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Hello, SherlockRoy, and welcome to Sherlock Forum!   :welcome: 

I've read very few professional Holmes pastiches myself.  Just off the top of my head, I can think of only one, the highly-rated novel House of Silk, which I found quite disappointing in general.  (I've actually been happier, on average, with the few BBC Sherlock fan-fiction stories I've read on AO3.)  I've also read several Nero Wolfe pastiche novels that might as well have been written by AI (i.e., there was nothing specifically wrong with them, but they had no spark).  I suspect that many pastiche writers are better at mimicry than they are at creativity.

 

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