Crossover Cover: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Volume 12

 

This anthology includes three stories with crossovers.

In I. A. Watson's "The Nottingham Crakster," Holmes is visited by a police inspector who seeks a gem belonging to Lord Roger Roxton, which has been stolen by criminal and “crakster” (a Northern slang expression for a trickster) Jemmy Wilson, and which he believes Holmes himself has stolen. Holmes deduces that the so-called policeman is in fact Wilson himself. A footnote to this story suggests that Lord Roger Roxton may be the father of Lord John Roxton from Doyle and Malone’s The Lost World and other Professor Challenger tales. To square this with Philip José Farmer’s genealogy for Lord John in Tarzan Alive, we must conclude that “Lord Roger Roxton” is a Watsonian pseudonym for George Wimsey, the 14th Duke of Denver, Lord John’s adoptive father. Obviously, Edward D. Malone used the same coded surname as Watson in his written accounts of his, Roxton, and Challenger’s exploits. Jemmy Wilson is from Doyle’s “Selecting a Ghost: The Ghosts of Goresthorpe Grange.”

In Barbara Doran's "The Adventure of the Counterfeit Secretary," Holmes and Watson team with Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, aka the Thinking Machine, and his companion journalist Hutchinson Hatch to thwart sabotage of the Berlin International Trade Exposition. Professor Van Dusen and Hutchinson Hatch are from Jacques Futrelle’s detective stories and novels. 

In Brad Mengel's "The Adventure of the Stolen Tattoo," Watson has dinner with Dr. Stamford and his new wife, who honeymooned in Australia, where they were robbed by the bushranger known as the Stingaree. During the Second Opium War, a chap by the name of Flashman came by the Barrington house and told Richard Francis Barrington’s mother of her husband’s death. The Stingaree is from E. W. Hornung’s Irralie’s Bushranger and Stingaree. Flashman is Harry Flashman, whose service in the Second Opium War is described in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Dragon.

These crossovers are among over a thousand covered in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, coming this summer from Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!