Lyndsay Faye is a consummate player of The Great Game, and this book was a lovely little treat.
If you’re somehow unaware, The Great Game is the practice of Sherlockians to act as if Holmes and Watson were real, and to make existing canon and facts fit together. This book plays into that in that Faye acts like she is just the editor of these stories, which are all told from the first person perspectives of people in Sherlock Holmes’s life who aren’t Dr. John Hamish Watson. This collection, which was supposedly originally collated by former Baker Street Irregular Henry Wiggins, was “found” and then published by Faye. It features a compilation of letters, journal entries, and the occasional telegram to give us new more outside perspectives on the famous duo, but mostly on Holmes himself.
All of the stories in here were good; I rated none of them less than 3.5 stars. Most of them were four, and the one told by Wiggins himself earned a fifth star. I had a cozy weekend reading these. The other contributors here are Irene Adler, Inspector Lestrade, Inspector Hopkins, A. Davenport Lomax (an incidental character), and Mrs. Hudson. The focus here, you should know going in, isn’t really the mystery or the solving of, but instead on the relationships that pepper Holmes’s life, despite him claiming that he only has one friend in the world (Watson). Each story does contain at least a small mystery, but they are never mind-blowing, because the focus is on character and relationships instead, which felt a lot more like fanfic than these pastiches usually do, and I loved that about it. Faye is always really good about bringing in the human element ACD’s stories lacked a lot of the time, but here she really leans into it.
Basically, friendship <3.
