The Game’s Afoot – review of ‘Eliminate the Impossible’

A slim but nonetheless impressive collection of new Sherlock Holmes short stories has recently come my way. Paula Hammond’s new book is entitled Eliminate the Impossible, after Holmes’s famous remark, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

There’s a deal of improbability in these yarns, among them a case of apparently spontaneous combustion, a shooting presided over by the Angel of Mons and the apparition of Lady Hatton holding her heart in her hands in the self-same Bleeding Heart Yard where centuries before she had sold her soul to the devil. With his customary disdain for the supernatural, Holmes manages to blow away the fogs of irrationality to reveal the very physical explanations for these events.

What I particularly enjoyed, apart from the tales themselves, were the notes following each story, showing them to be grounded in historical accuracy. Real people make appearances, usually with their names changed. Thus Hiram Maxim, inventor of the Maxim machine gun, appears as Dodson Hughes; Hannah and John Courtoy, whose Egyptian style mausoleum is one of the sights of Brompton cemetery in London appear here as Hannah and John Chester (deceased).

The Courtoy mausoleum in Brompton cemetery

There’s fascinating and sometimes grisly incidental detail, too, regarding the combustibility of pigs or the fact that in certain circumstances quicklime preserves bodies rather than destroys them, the deleterious effect of prolonged ultra-low frequency sounds on the human brain, causing fear, vertigo, disorientation and even heart attacks, used to sinister effect in certain regimes to this day.

The story in the collection that particularly caught my attention, since I myself am in the process of finishing a new Mrs Hudson novel set in Constantinople, is The Case of the Impossible Assassin, in which Holmes and Watson travel via the Orient Express to the then Turkish capital. It’s an intriguing tale and one which, I am relieved to say, bears no resemblance to my own story, apart from the setting.

What is a well-established fact, however, is that Sultan Abdul Hamid II was a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes. When Sir Arthur and his new wife, Jean, honeymooned in Constantinople in 1907, the Sultan conferred on him the Order of the Medjidie (second class) and on Jean The Order of the Chefakat, which (spoiler) Mrs Hudson too may hope to receive quite soon.

All in all, a thoroughly engaging collection. I shall certainly look out for more of Paula Hammond’s books.

Sherlock Holmes: Eliminate the Impossible by Paula Hammond, edited by David Marcum (MX publishing, 2024)

https://mxpublishing.com/products/sherlock-holmes-eliminate-the-impossible