hose new to the world of Sherlock Holmes often get confused by the term “pastiche”. According to the Oxford, a pastiche is an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist or period. A pastiche, in our case, refers to a (semi-)serious tale that respects the Holmes of the Canon. Therefore, Watson is usually the story-teller, the time is usually the latter part of the nineteeth century or the beginning of the twentieth, and Holmes is an observant and deductive reasoner who dedicates himself to the cause of good. Rules are made to be broken, of course, and pastiches have placed him in today’s world, the far-flung future, the dawn of man, and so on. He may face dinosaurs, travel to the north pole, be psychoanalysed by Sigmund Freud, battle Jesse James, meet [insert notorious modern killer here], go toe-to-toe with Dracula or Frankenstein, save Abraham Lincoln, defeat any of a hundred different Jack the Rippers, and so on. And don’t get me started on the various Watsons, which can range from female lovers to robots. I’ve heard tell the estimate of some 16,000 pastiches written to date.

Note that a pastiche differs from a parody, which is meant to be humourous. Sometimes the line is a blurred one. The notion of a mighty-hewed Holmes alongside a Watson android, facing down a tyrannosaurus rex in order to save an imperiled Princess Adler… well, it can stimulate the giggles, even if it wasn’t intended by the author.

Ah, to the point of this post…. The BBC Cult site for Sherlock Holmes has a series of five original pastiches: The Spy’s Retirement by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Lady Downstairs by Christopher Fowler, The Lost World by Dominic Green, A Shambles in Belgravia by Kim Newman, and The Deer Stalker by Paul Cornell. These stories can be read online or downloaded to your PDA (which is what I did). Also in the site may be found a gallery of the original illustrations created for these stories –which were apparently broadcast as readings on BBC7– and an interview with the always-fascinating Bert Coules, the writer of the new Sherlock Holmes BBC radio plays (now scheduled for a third series).

These stories range from quite good to rather mediocre, but all of them certainly have their merits. Note that the BBC Cult sites are no longer being maintained, so don’t be surprised if any of this material suddenly disappears.