Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets by Guy Adams, Kasey Lansdale, Glen Mehn

Introduction
David Thomas Moore
    S HERLOCK H OLMES OWES a lot to the revisionists.
    Or, I suppose, I owe Sherlock Holmes—the Sherlock Holmes in my head; the fey, frantic, brilliant man that drove me to put together this anthology—to the revisionists.
    I have a confession to make: I wasn’t particularly into Holmes as a younger man. I encountered him first on film and TV, as you do. Basil Rathbone in the old black and white, Jeremy Brett in the ’80s TV show, striding across the screen, sneering and smug; pompous, superior, and so terribly, terribly dry . Dr. Watson as a gobsmacked, foundering sycophant: “Egad, Holmes, how do you do it?” etc. Tedious, tedious, tedious.
    Watching them again now, I can see that I was being extremely unfair on some genuinely wonderful performances, but at the time I found them all so off-putting. It felt—and I still feel this, at least to an extent—like the actors got as far as the word ‘Victorian’ in the character description and allowed all that implied, all the hauteur and formality of Empire, to dominate their interpretations.
    Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a Victorian ; or if he was, he was more Wilde than Queensbury. Reading Doyle’s work, you encounter a man rebelling against the standards and constraints of the Victorians. Frequently wild, often despondent, the world’s first (and only) consulting detective had no interest in the politics, manners and niceties of his time. He lived for the hunt, for the exercise of his brilliance, and couldn’t give a damn for appearances. He took cocaine when bored, kept his tobacco in a Persian slipper, and pinned (stabbed?) his unopened letters to the mantelpiece with a jack-knife. He disdained class and privilege, and would devote weeks to his poorest clients, if the case interested him. This was not a man who strode about London with a top hat and cane, exchanging banter with aristocrats.
    That’s Holmes. I love that Holmes.
    But sadly, that’s not the Holmes I saw, or not back then. And then the Robert Downey, Jr. film came out, five years ago. Okay, it was steampunky, silly, an action flick. But here was a totally different Holmes; frenetic, twitchy, bleak, storming about the place with little regard for social mores, prize-fighting for the distraction. Jude Law’s Watson is tough, capable, brilliant in his own rights, and frequently clashes with his friend and companion. I thought, “What an amazing Holmes! What a great Watson! How original!”
    And then I dipped into the canon, and do you know what? That stupid, noisy, big-budget, steampunky Hollywoodisation comes closer to Doyle’s Holmes—closer, at least, to my reading of Doyle’s Holmes—than all those dry, traditional, Victorian takes put together.
    And then there’s Benedict Cumberbatch’s brilliant borderline - autistic (not actually sociopathic, whatever he says) modern-day Holmes, and Johnny Lee Miller’s New York-based recovering addict. Holmes is huge now, and all in the reimaginings, unfolding the beating heart of a complex character many of us completely missed in its original context.
    And it occurred to me: I owe my Sherlock to the revisionists. By seeing Holmes and Watson away from their Victorian roots, I see the men (or women!) themselves, as Doyle imagined them: troubled, broken, quite possibly dangerous.
    I N T WO H UNDRED and Twenty-One Baker Streets (although there aren’t really more than two hundred stories, I’m ashamed to say), you’ll find fourteen Holmeses and Watsons you’ve never thought to see.
    You’ll find a female Sherlock with a male Watson, and a male Sherlock with a female sidekick. You’ll find Holmes running a travelling carnival in the US in the ’30s, and refurbishing derelict buildings in rural Australia. He’s clearing a seventeenth- century housemaid of murder by witchcraft, and capturing a real witch in modern day South Africa. He’s Turning On, Tuning In and Dropping Out in Andy Warhol’s Factory, and being summoned