Most of the short stories in Further Extraordinary Tales feel like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Watson, as the narrator, observes the consulting detective as the pair follow the clues of a mystery to their, apparently obvious, conclusion. Along the way, Watson asks questions so that Holmes can explain something in a flippant manner that Holmes feels Watson should have deduced on his own, but in the end, it is only Sherlock who can untie the knots of lies and misdirection that reveal what is truly going on.
In these tales that feel the most like a classic Sherlock story, the book has everything from a Countess hiring Holmes to track down stolen silverware to Holmes and Watson examining some lost art at a nudist colony. Other stories of this group include one involving a supposed master of the occult and another that has a woman who keeps having husbands die on her. Another case appears to be three different mysteries all occurring on top of each other, but by the time Holmes is done with his investigation, he shows that they were all different sides of the same crime. There is even a story where Sherlock is tasked with tracking down a rumor that Prince Edward was actually responsible for his father, Prince Phillip's, death, and as Queen Victoria's health fails, the client wants to ensure that no murderer assumes the throne.
One particularly good story from this book is The Dulwich Solicitor by Martin Daley. Nicely placed soon after The Sign of Four, and just when Watson's relationship with Mary gets started, this mystery starts when Holmes takes notice of a strange series of deceased parents. In each case, one parent dies suddenly, and within a few weeks, the other dies as well. The mystery gets more interesting to Sherlock when he realizes that the wills of all of these couples are handled by the same solicitor.
Rounding out what I would call the more standard Sherlock Holmes stories is one involving Billy, Sherlock's page, when he discovers that his father has just been arrested for murder. Unlike most stories in this book, or even in the original collection, this tale isn't from Watson's perspective, but actually told from Billy's. It also takes place much later than most standard Holmes mysteries, as the detective is wheelchair bound and in the process of moving out of 221B Baker Street and retiring from his crime fighting career.
One of my favorite stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes: Further Extraordinary Tales of the Famous Sleuth assumes that Sherlock and Ebenezer Scrooge live in the same universe. When Sherlock hears about Scrooge's sudden change of character after being visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve, he immediately scoffs at the idea and decides to investigate the matter directly. In a very Sherlockian way, his attention to detail reveals yet again that there is no supernatural force at work, but instead, all too human motivations involving money. While I enjoyed it, the inclusion of other fictional characters puts this story just on the outside edge of what I would call a "standard" Sherlock Holmes tale, though others in this book stray a lot farther than this one. Another, that is just outside of a normal Sherlock mystery, involves a man who realizes his wife is not the same woman he married. What makes this story a little different isn't the mystery itself, but the fact that it is oddly bookended by a story of a writer trying to write a Sherlock Holmes story for an anthology book.
The remaining tales in this book all try to take Sherlock in some rather odd new directions. Two are modernizations of the characters, and one of those portrays the characters as reincarnated versions of Sherlock, Watson, Mary, Mycroft, Lestrade and, yes even, Moriarty. In both cases, the mysteries themselves are okay, but they seem to take a back seat to those attempts to update the characters. And, quite frankly, the non-reincarnated story of this pair was my least favorite of the collection as it had a few too many coincidences to feel plausible.
The remaining stories in this collection include one where the spirit of Sherlock Holmes is talking through a Ouija board forcing some people to talk about uncomfortable events from their past, while another has people from the future going back to Victorian England in the hopes of altering some key events in Sherlock's life in order to change the course of the future, supposedly for the better.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes: Further Extraordinary Tales of the Famous Sleuth wraps up with The Case of the Secret Assassin by David Stuart Davies. As an interesting twist, Davies actually sets the story in 1942 and uses the classic cast of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Like the Rathbone interpretations of Doyle's work, this story is a WWII spy-centric mystery. In this case, Mycroft charges Sherlock with tracking down and stopping an impending assassination attempt of Winston Churchill.
Reading The Book of Extraordinary New Sherlock Holmes Stories: The Best New Original Stories of the Genre left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Many of the stories found in that collection just didn't feel like Sherlock Holmes to me. Thankfully, that is an issue that is not really repeated in this collection. With only a few exceptions, Sherlock pretty much always behaves the way Sherlock did in the classic stories, and to me, that is what makes a good Sherlock mystery. It isn't the setting or the existence of the supernatural, it is how Sherlock himself approaches the mysteries around him. That being said, not every story in here does Holmes justice. Heck, in one, he doesn't actually make an appearance, but in my opinion, this is a much stronger collection of new Sherlock Holmes mysteries than the previous book.
