As the Cardinal Flies

Per immediately prior post, this is disastrously late - all the more embarrassing given that my gift for the prior round is genuinely exceptional. It's very much what it says on the tin - a post-ACD letter from Watson to Holmes, describing in eloquently researched detail (complete with a generous set of bibliographic links) the former's activities as a military medic during WW I:

A Letter From France
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Author rabidsamfan
Rating: General Audiences
Category: gen Warnings: none
Words: ~4600
Relationship: Holmes & Watson
Character: John Watson
Additional Tags: Ambulance Trains, Battle of the Somme, Correspondence, Watson knows Holmes can read between the lines, World War I

Watson writes to Holmes after becoming the commander of an Ambulance Train just before the Battle of the Somme.

For my part, I committed a more-than-usually ambitious fusion, merging elements of Laurie King's Mary Russell universe with those of Elementary....

The Really Final Problem
Fandoms: Mary Russell - Laurie R. King; Elementary
Rating: General Audiences
Category: gen, f/m
Warnings: none
Words: ~7600
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson, Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell, Sherlock Holmes & Sherlock Holmes
Characters: Sherlock Holmes (x2), Mary Russell, Joan Watson, Estelle Holmes
Additional Tags: crossover, fusion

Joan Watson's Sherlock Holmes has just come back to life.

Mary Russell's Sherlock Holmes has just come home with a copy of Joan Watson's book.

One Holmes is looking for an inheritance; the other has already bestowed it.

As the title suggests, someone's written me kitten!Holmes fic...and specifically, a story featuring both the most arch of arch-nemeses (-nemesises?) and a purrfectly diabolical pun.

(The link above connects to the very short foundation story in this tiny corner of Holmesian apocrypha, and there's a further link in the headnotes of that story to the tiny snippet of video that inspired the parent work.)

To say I'm delighted is an understatement. I am now harboring more hope than ever that we'll see more and further feline adventures from diverse hands arising from the premise...

The Final Purroblem
(Anonymous)
Fandoms: kitten!Holmes; Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats - T. S. Eliot; Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Rating: G
Category: gen
Warnings: mentions of crime, very light violence, one reference to (human) prostitution
Words: ~1400
Relationship: Sherlock (kitten!Holmes) & Watson (kitten!Holmes) Characters: Sherlock (kitten!Holmes, Watson, Macavity
Additional Tags: Story: The Final Problem...; Alternate Universe - Cats; Crime; Humor

I can still see them now, perched on the edge of the snow-white precipice.

(Or, at the paws of his nemesis, Sherlock meets with a terrible fate...for a kitten.)

I remain mildly amused that I was not immediately tagged for this in the guessing interval (and wholly flattered that the wrong guesses were for some of Holmestice's most talented writers). Likewise, I am still boggling a little at the degree of enthusiasm expressed in the comments on this story over on AO3....

The Mice and the Mastermind
Fandom: Basil of Baker Street, Without A Clue
Rating: all ages
Category: gen
Warnings: none
Words: ~2200
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Basil of Baker Street & Sherlock Holmes, Reginald "Sherlock Holmes" Kincaid & John Watson
Characters: Basil of Baker Street, David Q. Dawson, John Watson, Reginald "Sherlock Holmes" Kincaid
Additional Tags: crossover, AU-Canon Divergence

The Sherlock Holmes of the mouse world has learned all he knows of detection and investigation at the feet of the Master himself. And then one evening in Baker Street, he and Dr. Dawson discover that they may not know Sherlock Holmes quite so well as they think.

The talent pool for Holmestice writers is wonderfully deep, and both the group and the mods (a new team this past round, but one with quite a lot of prior experience; the transition was utterly seamless) have consistently done wonders in dealing with my complicated and eclectic signup posts. My latest gift work was no exception - a thoughtful, perceptive character piece focusing on Joan Watson from Elementary as she deals with single motherhood...and certain related challenges. It's a densely nuanced story, and looking at it again now makes me appreciate it all the more. (Note to self for future rounds: consider requesting fanart so we can get a look at Clyde in all his finger-painted glory.)

Building Blocks
Fandom: Elementary
Author: Merfilly
Rating: General Audiences
Category: gen
Warnings: none
Words: ~1400
Relationship: Joan Watson & Mary Morstan
Characters: Joan Watson, Mary Morstan
Additional Tags: canon-adjacent, gender identity, slice of life, friendship

Late last week two threads crossed on the Letters of Mary email list - a couple of posters noted the arrival of Ms. King's newest novel (not, actually, a Russell book, but rather the start of a sequel-series to her earlier Kate Martinelli novels), and several others found in the change of seasons an excuse for an informal exchange of drabbles (that subset of fic that is 100 words exactly, or occasionally a multiple thereof).

And in the midst of that list traffic, the following dropped unexpectedly into my email, by what appears to be the same back-channel that supplied me with a certain Holmestice entry some rounds back. I tell you, it feels very odd getting these messages, but I'm certainly not going to complain; after all, look where that got (their) Professors Moriarty.

A Family Conference
Fandom: Mary Russell - Laurie R. King
Rating: General Audiences
Words: 300
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Mary Russell
Additional Tags: Meta, Raquel Laing, Laurie R. King, Edited By, Triple Drabble
Series: Part 2 of Holmes & Russell in the 21st Century

Laurie King's newest novel, Back to the Garden, isn't part of the Mary Russell series...or is it? Sherlock Holmes appears to have thoughts on the matter.

You may be looking a trifle askance at the number of exclamation points in that header, but I'm here to tell you that every one of them is deserved. I got a podfic rather than a fic - and it is a gorgeous, skillfully read, delightfully soundtracked version of the story I wrote just last round, in which Enola Holmes and Mary Russell join forces with sometime jungle princess Nell Watson, née Nylephtha Goode Curtis of the Zu-Vendi, to finally defeat the schemes of Von Bork, villainous German spymaster - with, of course, appropriate support from Sherlock Holmes.

To say I am delighted is several orders of understatement. The Women in the Case is fairly close to 7,000 words - it's a 43-minute audio - and between the length and the considerable dialogue (featuring the voices of three different women born on three different continents), creating any podcast at all amounts to a considerable effort on someone's part. Creating one this well-executed is a feat of impressive skill and reflects a high degree of dedication, and I can't begin to thank my anonymous creator sufficiently for having devoted that much work to my words. Here is your link; don't hesitate to go forth and listen!

The Women in the Case - Podfic
(Enola Holmes Series - Nancy Springer, Mary Russell - Laurie R. King, The Adventure of the Peerless Peer - Philip Jose Farmer)
Author (text): graycardinal
Producer/Narrator (Podfic): oldshrewsburyian
Rating: General Audiences
Length: ~43 minutes
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Enola Holmes & Mary Russell
Characters: Enola Holmes, Mary Russell, Original Moriarty Character(s), Sherlock Holmes, Nylepthah Watson, Von Bork
Additional Tags: Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 30-45 Minutes, Bechdel Test Pass, Community: holmestice

Reveals are complete and all is calm after the summer edition of Holmestice, which counts as highly entertaining all round (as per usual).

I was assigned to sanguinity (who is a co-moderator, and so immune to being totally surprised), and thought briefly about writing a Dinosaur!Holmes story (the source is a very strange 2010 movie from The Asylum, specialist in offbeat adaptations of minor classics). But then I noticed a reference to a certain Philip José Farmer work in their request list, and instead did this:

The Women in the Case
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Enola Holmes Series - Nancy Springer, Mary Russell - Laurie R. King, The Adventure of the Peerless Peer - Philip Jose Farmer
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~6700
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Enola Holmes & Mary Russell
Characters: Enola Holmes, Mary Russell, Nell Watson | Nylephtha Good Curtis, Sherlock Holmes, Von Bork, Original Moriarty Character(s)
Additional Tags: Women Being Awesome, Bechdel Test Pass, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Meta, Footnotes

An account from a cache of manuscripts attributed to Enola Holmes - which both answers a great many questions about significant women in the Holmesian canon, and raises a great many others.

Only a little bit later than promised, here's what I've been doing for the last several months' worth of exchanges:

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Mrs. Pollifax and the Irish Expatriate
for genarti 
Fandom: Mrs. Pollifax - Dorothy Gilman
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~3400
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Emily Pollifax, Carstairs (Mrs. Pollifax), Bishop (Mrs. Pollifax), Grace Hartshorne


This was almost a crossover (and indeed, one commenter very perceptively noted the potential for just such a connection), but the logistics involved in actually staging the necessary scenes proved more complicated than I'd initially thought, and time constraints forced me to scale back.  In hindsight, it may have been just as well; as much fun as it would have been to connect the Pollifax canon to that of Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" universe, it occurs to me that fully integrating the two would almost certainly have ripple effects much more complicated than I'd have been able to deal with in that one story.

But even without the crossover element, I am reasonably satisfied with this one.  I had initially been contemplating a number of other explanations for Grace's background (including the idea that she might have been Emily's guardian angel), but this strikes me as more satisfying than anything else. 

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The Kincardine File: Notes from an Untold Case
for scfrankles 
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~1300
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Mary Morstan, Mycroft Holmes
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Untold Cases of Sherlock Holmes

What it says on the tin – a collection of notes and correspondence from a case for which no full manuscript has been found (almost certainly because Watson thought better of writing this one up for posterity).

This was a pure delight to write, not least because scfrankles has been one of the most dangerously accurate players in the guessing-game stage of Holmestice, and I wanted very much to supply a story that would slip beneath their guessing radar.  I succeeded in that endeavor, and also came up with what I like to think is a reasonably plausible canonical tale (although I slipped in a subtle nod to one of my favorite series of pastiches along the way). 

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X-Ceptional
for lirin 
Fandom: Perry Mason (TV), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~4000
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Della Street, Moira MacTaggert, Paul Drake, Perry Mason, Sebastian Shaw, Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Secrets

Don’t get me wrong," said Moira MacTaggert, " but if your boss really wanted to make a deal with Shaw, he’d have brought a whole other sort of professional girl with him. "

"Yes, well," said Della Street, "we shared our report with the local Treasury authorities. And if Paul Drake had run into you anytime during that investigation, Mr. Mason and I would have heard about it in Technicolor detail.”

This took the longest to come together of any of this year's exchange stories; I was contemplating various other prospective crossover plots involving different sets of fandoms until very late in the game.  But once I'd rewatched X-Men: First Class, I concluded fairly quickly that I wanted to do something with Moira and Della -- at which point it took a good bit of further brainstorming to work out just what Della's mutant ability might be.

As with the Holmestice story, I also threw in a really subtle Easter egg, this one so small and tangential that it pretty much matters only to me.  (If you're curious, here are your clues: consider the relevance a carbon-refraction process might eventually have to paleontologic research, and then look for a subsequent generation or two of Mercers in a totally different fandom featuring dinosaurs....)

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A Little Self-Knowledge
for desertvixen 
Fandom: Nancy Drew - Carolyn Keene
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~1600
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Nancy Drew & Eloise Drew
Characters: Nancy Drew, Eloise Drew
Additional Tags: College, Family
So, my match on Fic Corner this year happened to be to the same recipient I drew for Crossovering last year...and in both cases, the primary matching fandom was Nancy Drew.  In some respects, this story resembles a five-things story I did for Alexis Castle in the Castle fandom a number of years back, but the context is significantly different (although the Drews and the Castles have suspiciously similar taste in restaurants).  Obviously, being an exchange story, I couldn't establish any overt connection between the two stories on the initial posting, but as I noted later in comments, there's nothing specifically inconsistent between them -- and so now I've formally made a series to include the two works.  [One notable feature of this one involves some back story on Nancy's mother, further amplified in a subsequent comment.]

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Astute readers will notice that there are four stories called out in this post, whereas there are six in the prior listing of gifts.  This is because, despite the best intentions, I ended up defaulting late in the game for Remix Revival -- a combination of unusually busy Life circumstances and a complete failure of muse on my part.  The latter rather surprised me; despite a great range of worthwhile choices, nothing whacked me over the head and said "remix me!"  So I bowed out of that one.  (I also did not finish an Into A Bar story within that challenge's designated window, though I do have a Plan for that one and hope to complete it eventually.)

 ...but wow, is there a wealth of wonder in the current round of holmestice !  Mind, I can't be too specific in my praise just yet (so that when it comes time to guess who wrote what, people will credit me with various things I dearly wish I actually did write). But if Sherlockian pastiche is your jam, I highly recommend checking out the current run of stories.

Also, I have *two* stories waiting for me--so someone has written me a treat this round!  

From the recently completed round of Holmestice:

First, an absolutely fascinating open-ended fusion. Just as I went forward in the previous round and merged the "Charlotte Holmes" novels with Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, my donor this round skipped back in time and ingeniously spliced Mary Russell into Charlotte's world.

Insoluble Puzzles by amindamazed
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Charlotte Holmes Series - Brittany Cavallaro, Mary Russell - Laurie R. King, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~4900
Characters: Charlotte Holmes, Araminta Holmes, Mary Russell, Leander Holmes, Jamie Holmes
Additional Tags: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Mention of Past Traumatic Events, incuding harm to animals, all from canon, no graphic descriptions of it in this fic

As for me, I wrote a light, quick crossover in which almost no one is who they seem to be (and, for a wonder, absolutely nobody fingered me as the author!

A Case of Identities
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Doctor Who
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~2800
Characters: John Watson, Sherlock Holmes, James Moriarty, The Master (Delgado), The Doctor (Doctor Who)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Clever John Watson, Footnotes

Mycroft Holmes once said “I hear of Sherlock everywhere these days.” This story may (or may not) explain the true origins of that remark.