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.