The last time international treasure Neil Gaiman tangled with the classic canon coined by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he came away with a Hugo Award in 2004 for writing the year’s Best Short Story, and something of cherry on top, too: namely the 2005 Locus Award for Best Novelette.

If he hadn’t had it already, he could have had my heart as well.

Indubitably, the widespread recognition given “A Study In Emerald” was both hard-earned and well-deserved. It was a slow burn of a story, certainly, but when it caught its light was surely bright; brilliant, I’d go so far as to say. “A Study In Emerald” was a thing of poise and power — harmonious in one moment with the Sherlock Holmes and the Dr Watson we knew from the tales of discovery and derring-do and delightful, decisive deduction we loved, and in the next... not.

Of course “A Study In Emerald” was no mere Sherlock Holmes story. Unexpectedly, it set the great detective and his beloved biographer against the oeuvre of another turn-of-the-century novelist: one of Conan Doyle’s most celebrated contemporaries, namely the dark fantasist H. P. Lovecraft.

Image via Neil Gaiman’s online journal.

To read the full article on Neil Gaiman’s Sherlock pastiche “The Case of Death and Honey” with a link to download the broadsheet version of “A Study in Emerald”, visit our sister science fiction and fantasy blog, Tor.com.