Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds

Manly W. Wellman & Wade Wellman
Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds (1975)
I suppose someone had to do it, and given the corpulent central cell of this particular Venn diagram, I'm surprised there haven't been more - although Andrew Hickey's The Book of the Enemy is substantially different, should anyone be about to mention it. Ordinarily I might shy away from such crowd pleasing schlock, particularly given that recent developments among certain self-identified fan groups suggest that we can no longer tell the difference between inspiration and quotation; and, of course, I've already found some Goodreads pillock describing this book as steampunk.

The premise is what Conan Doyle's characters were doing during Wells' War of the Worlds - characters in the plural because the authors team Holmes up with Professor Challenger from The Lost World and somehow it actually sort of works. The authors additionally draw on Wells' The Crystal Egg, establishing an association that even Herbert himself left somewhat unresolved; so it embellishes and underscores War of the Worlds, fleshing out certain details even when attempting to contradict them, and as such makes for a surprisingly satisfying read, possibly because it's a Challenger novel more than anything. I hated the character in The Lost World, suspecting Challenger to be a genuine and unrestrained expression of Conan Doyle's misanthropic regard of his contemporaries as intellectual pygmies. The Wellmans, however, allow the character his alleged scientific genius while clearly having fun with his endless declarations of the same; and so we essentially get a version of the Wells novel told from the perspective of those living off the side of the page, and told very well too. I'm sure Holmes obsessives might have something to say about this, not least the detail of Sherlock getting busy with Mrs. Hudson - whom I still picture as played by the significantly older Mary Gordon in the Basil Rathbone movies, so that was odd - but who gives a shit, really? Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds is nothing life changing but it's a lot of fun and at least held my attention for a couple of hundred pages.