Following in the footsteps of August Derleth – who wrote “The Circular Room” as both a Holmes story and a Solar Pons story – Mower’s “The Misadventure of the Norfolk Poacher” originally appeared as a Pons adventure in “The New Adventures of Solar Pons”, and now it features Holmes. “The Baker Street Archive”, Mower’s fifth collection, contains six Holmes adventures. Since then, he’s been reliably consistent with contributions to subsequent anthologies, as well as collections containing both those previously published stories and new ones as well. Mark Mower dipped into the world of Sherlockian pastiche in 2015 when he contributed a story to the initial volumes in “The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories”. Pastiche fans will welcome more from Mower. On the other hand, “A Diplomatic Affair,” centered on Holmes’s decoding of a newspaper ad suggesting a threat to the prime minister, and “The Case of the SS Bokhara,” set when Watson believed Holmes had perished at Reichenbach, fall short of the promise of their openings. “The Misadventure of the Norfolk Poacher,” in which a former Baker Street Irregular is charged with killing a poacher, highlights Holmes’s deductive reasoning grounded in an observation of subtle clues. That fatality was ruled a suicide despite the coroner’s unusual choice not to conduct a postmortem, and the locals link the deaths to the legend of a water monster known as the Neckar. The chief constable suspects foul play, as six months earlier a young woman died in the same place and the same way, wearing a similar necklace with a mermaid charm attached.
In “The Neckar Reawakening,” the detective travels to Sussex after a 15-year-old maid is found drowned in a pond. Two of the six stories stand out as worthy of the best pasticheurs. Mower ably emulates Conan Doyle in his solid fifth pastiche collection (after 2021’s Sherlock Holmes-The Baker Street Epilogue).
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