Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing collection
Review: Maybe my hopes were just too high for this one. It sounds like a great idea, but I have to agree with Cyberalchemist. Holmes in no instance ever confronts the weaknesses in his deductive system, which is where the real drama should lie. Instead, he displays a ridiculous erudition concerning all things Lovecraftian, which makes for a series of predictable, boring denouements. Some of the stories are decent reads, but reading them one after another gets tiresome. No points for guessing how many times Holmes' cocaine is mentioned either. I think every single author had to throw that one in there, whether it was pertinent to the story or not.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing collection
Review: Maybe my hopes were just too high for this one. It sounds like a great idea, but I have to agree with Cyberalchemist. Holmes in no instance ever confronts the weaknesses in his deductive system, which is where the real drama should lie. Instead, he displays a ridiculous erudition concerning all things Lovecraftian, which makes for a series of predictable, boring denouements. Some of the stories are decent reads, but reading them one after another gets tiresome. No points for guessing how many times Holmes' cocaine is mentioned either. I think every single author had to throw that one in there, whether it was pertinent to the story or not.
Rating: 
Summary: Extremely high coolness factor
Review: Not every story is a gem, but most of them are very, very good. The less successful ones cleave too much to Holmesian or Lovecraftian conventions too closely, so they feel too much like a geeky in-joke. (The tiger hunt one definitely fits into this category for me, as does the re-animator pastiche.) If I had been the editors, though, I would have put the Neil Gaiman story at the end. It's a jaw-dropping stunner...worth savoring at the very, very end. If you can resist, save it until you're done with the rest of the book, even though it's the first story in this anthology.The coolness factor of mixing Lovecraft and Doyle is off the meter. I'm surprised no one had done it before--and I've read a lot of Lovecraftian fiction, and to a smaller extent, the modern Holmes riffs like The Seven Percent Solution. I wouldn't be surprised if the editors produce another volume soon, with the number of writers who'd like to try their hand at this literary hybrid.
Rating:
Summary: Elementary, my dear Lovecraft
Review: Since I'm such a geek, most of my free time is caught up with various fandoms: Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings, and others. Now, most fandoms that are around today are based either on television shows or relatively recent novels. There are really only three that spring to mind that are much more than fifty years old. They are the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Cthulhu Mythos stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and the Conan the Barbarian stories of Robert E. Howard. Aside from their shared durability, these three fandoms have one other thing in common: the writing of pastiche stories by writers not the original creators.
Now, in many cases such pastiches are abject failures, for reasons best explained by turning to that oft-used Mark Twain quote about what it sounds like when a woman swears: "She knows the words, but not the music." However untrue that sentiment may be in the modern era, it rings true for, say, the monstrosities perpetrated on Conan by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp, or the Cthulhu-ish efforts of August Derleth, a figure to be welcomed with one hand and struck with the other by any fan of the Mythos, for reasons I haven't the space to go into here. (Find any Lovecraft FAQ only, and there'll be an explanation there, some more even-handed than others.)
With this dubious legacy in mind, I was cautious about approaching the recent anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan. The central premise of stories combining the worlds of Doyle and Lovecraft certainly left lots of room for failure: consider how few people are capable of producing a good story using either mythos, let alone both put together!
Fortunately, while the collection is not a complete success, my fears were largely unfounded. There are many good stories in Shadows Over Baker Street, and there's enough within to satisfy fans of either mythos. I'll offer some comments on each story.
"A Study in Emerald," by Neil Gaiman: easily my favorite of the collection. I don't want to say too much about it, for reasons that will be clear should you read the story, which I encourage everyone who enjoys Holmes of Cthulhu to do; it's available online from the author's website. What seems to be a simple retelling of "A Study in Scarlet" becomes much more. While the tale as a whole doesn't quite fit the tone of either mythos, there are sections of it that do, and it's still an excellent work.
"Tiger! Tiger!", by Elizabeth Bear: the first of several non-standard stories in the collection. If you need to have Holmes in the story to enjoy it, don't bother with this one; it features a number (to avoid spoilers, I won't specify) of Holmes villains involved in a hunt for a man-eating tiger- or what seems to be a man-eating tiger- in India. Not traditional Holmes or Cthulhu, but not a bad horror story. Recommended.
"The Case of the Wavy Black Dagger," by Steve Perry: not recommended. Ridiculously brief, and a "Mary Sue" fan-fiction to boot. Not bad for Holmesian deduction, though. Set in New York for no reason I can see.
"A Case of Royal Blood," by Steven-Elliot Altman: Holmes and H.G. Wells in the Netherlands. Reasonably entertaining, with a few good Holmes moments and a nice Lovecraftian dream sequence. Recommended, but don't expect too much.
"The Weeping Masks," by James Lowder: recommended. No Holmes; deals with Watson's injury in Afghanistan and subsequent . . . events. Adequate story, with a strong conclusion.
"Art in the Blood," by Brian Stableford: one of the few good mixes of mythoses (mythi?) in the collection. Recommended.
"The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone," by Poppy Z. Brite and David Ferguson: starts well, but doesn't really get anywhere. Not recommended.
"The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece," by Barbara Hambly: second favorite. A strong mix, and well-written. A bit confusing, but still worthwhile.
"The Mystery of the Worm," by John Pelan: meh. Like "Violet Stone," reaches an interesting point and then just stops. Frustrating.
"The Mystery of the Hanged Man's Puzzle," by Paul Finch: solid, if unexceptional. Odd style.
"The Horror of the Many Faces," by Tim Lebbon: not involved enough, but good for what it is.
"The Adventure of the Arab's Manuscript," by Michael Reaves: fun, with a somewhat predictable ending. Also makes use of Watson's time in Afghanistan, but Holmes is in it as well.
"The Drowned Geologist," by Caitlin R. Kiernan: it seems like it'll be good, but then just stops. Very odd, and not recommended.
"A Case of Insomnia," by John P. Vourlis: entertaining, if not exceptionally Lovecraftian. A mild success, marred with a comment by Watson that is so untimely as to jar one right out of the story.
"The Adventure of the Voorish Sign," by Richard A. Lupoff: successful and enjoyable. Not much else to say.
"The Adventure of Exham Priory," by F. Gwynplaine MacIntye: Holmes and the residence from "The Rats in the Walls." Adequate but uninispriring.
"Death Did Not Become Him," by David Niall Wilson and Patricia Lee Macomber: meh. Doesn't get much done, and isn't really Lovecraftian so much as an ethnic horror story. Not recommended.
"Nightmare in Wax," by Simon Clark: has plusses and minuses; in the end, I feel neutral.
All in all, the number of neutral or better stories is enough for me to recommend the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts.
One final note, for Holmes timeliners only: each story is placed by year, but there are some odd choices and some outright errors. I leave them for you to discover, but I find it rather odd that the introduction emphasizes the inclusion of chronological context that isn't right on a basic level. A silly complaint, but given the focus of fandoms on minutiae, it's worth noting.
Rating: 
Summary: Sometimes you cannot eliminate the impossible
Review: What a great mixture--the world's greatest detective and the world's most terrifying mystos together! I have been a fan of both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft for years. The chilling Cthulhu Mystos has been the sorce of many a nightmare. And my logical mind has often asked, "What if it were all true. How would one go about combating things the mind cannot easily conceive?" Frankly, sometimes in the stories even Holmes is stumped for an answer. This only means that he is human faced with inhuman forces. And often as not, he wins. Five Sherlock stars! And note to whomever it may concern who puts these anthologies together: How about "The Many Ghosts of Sherlock Holmes" or "Investigations into Hauntings" or "Sherlock Holmes' Haunted London"? I know I'd buy them!!
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