Neil Gaiman, "A Study in Emerald"

All of this talk of the new Sherlock Holmes movie has me in mind of Neil Gaiman's short story "A Study in Emerald," which was published in his collection of short stories Fragile Things.  Gaiman is a Sherlock Holmes fan, and his love for the quintessential detective shows through in this delightful intricate work.

When I first read the story, I didn't realize that Gaiman had written it for an anthology of stories which combined Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft.  I came to it cold, and it took me several readings before I even realized what was going on.  (Had I been a Sherlock Holmes fan, I doubtless would have been tipped off by the title, which riffs on the Sherlock Holmes novel titled A Study in Scarlet.)

Nothing is quite what it seems with "A Study in Emerald," which takes place in a Victorian London that never was, in a world that has been ruled by Lovecraft's Great Old Ones for hundreds of years.  One of the delights of the story is all the little touches of strangeness, as when the narrator identifies a character as being German thanks to the unusual number of limbs he has.  Or the advertisements which break up the text, including magazine ads for Springheel Jack, Dracula, and other contemporary fictional characters.

The narrator and his friend, a man of extraordinary deductive skills, is hired by the Queen (a horrible creature who speaks with a buzzing sound that echoes inside your head) to find the person who killed the German nobleman.  The narrator and the detective are led to a stage show, where an actor named Sherry Vernet stars in a show about how the Great Old Ones usurped humanity's rule over the Earth.  Vernet and the detective engage in a bit of verbal jousting, but Vernet escapes.

I wish that Gaiman would re-visit the world of "A Study in Emerald," because I think he's on to something.  The German nobleman was killed by a group of humans working covertly to overthrown the Great Old Ones' rule over humanity.  Gaiman paints the world so perfectly, and tells the story so succinctly, with so many layers and turns of phrase, that I really wish there was more of it.  Although given the Big Secret (which is revealed through a collection of small things that eventually add up to a big realization) (and which I won't reveal by the way) perhaps it wouldn't hold up to a novel length treatment.

Gaiman is at the top of his form with "A Study in Emerald," which is a remarkable feat of world-building for such a short story.  It won the 2004 Hugo Award for "Best Short Story," a title which it surely deserved.  You can read "A Study in Emerald" in PDF format at Neil Gaiman's website here, or listen to Gaiman read the story aloud in the free MP3 audiobook version from the Harper Audio website here.  Honestly, I recommend both versions!