But a lot of it isn’t stories, but trivia related to Holmes, Conan-Doyle, actors who played Holmes, etc. There are many copies of the stories, from first editions to versions from many publishers in many languages – but those are really all the same (barring typo/misprints).
I don’t know if the collection contains these other stories by Conan Doyle (didn’t even know they existed before reading this), but the catalog to the collection is online.
P.S. The University is seeking to add to this collection. So those who have collections of material might consider that.
Despite the fact that some people call The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (the collection of Adrian Conan Doyle/John Dickson Carr Holmes stories) “Sherlock Holmes Exploited”, I have to say that I like them. I think this is entirely due to Carr, who wrote half the stories by himself, and was probably the major writer of the others. Of all the Sherlock Holmes pastiches, these come the closest to Arthur Conan Doyle’s style and feel.
I have to admit that I do like several of the others, especially when they give you an interesting mashup of literary or real characters with Holmes and Watson, but most of them aren’t anywhere near Doyle in style.
Holmes has met Dracula at least three times, The Phantom of the Opera at least twice, and Jack the Ripper more times than I can count. There’s no damned limit to the pastiches.
Any of you Holmes completists include Herlock Sholmès, the British rival/antagonist of Maurice Leblanc’s “gentleman cambrioleur” Arsène Lupin, in your pastiche collections?
THANK YOU for posting this! I read those original 2 volumes when i was a teen, many years ago, and I had stuck in my head the idea they were written by LESLIE Fish. I will have a better chance of finding them now (if I dare to see if they stand up to my memory of them).
Somewhere in my cluttered office I have a copy of The Enchanter Completed, a tribute to Sprague de Camp. I don’t think many of the stories feature Harold Shea, though.
Following publication of The Complete Compleat Enchanter, the Harold Shea series was continued by de Camp in partnership with Christopher Stasheff and other authors in the anthologies The Enchanter Reborn and The Exotic Enchanter.
I have a first edition of The Castle of Iron, the second Shea book, mostly because I collect books published by Gnome Press. It was not a success at the time, 1950, probably a reason why the next collection of Shea stories didn’t come out until 1960.
The collected works of Marx and Engels, published in English 1975-2004, runs to 50 volumes. A new German edition is planned to run to 114 volumes.
For all you aficionados out there, a new English translation of Capital is due out this September, from Princeton University Press. It will be interesting to see what it makes of the reference to oral sex.
Whether or not that’s true, it didn’t stop him from writing a lot of stuff that throws together many of the fictional characters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There was a real event near Wold Newton, Yorkshire on December 13, 1795 where a meteorite fell. In his stories, there were two coaches riding nearby. This meteorite caused genetic mutations in the occupants of those coaches. In his stories, the descendants of them are a large number of fictional characters.
Several other authors tried to connect various series they wrote earlier in their career into a single series later in their career, sometimes consistently, sometimes not very consistently. Isaac Asimov did this. Robert Heinlein did this. Madeleine L’Engle’s books can be looked at as individual novels, as series with several books in the series, or with all the books in a single series. She apparently did this while initially writing each book and keeping a single universe’s background in her mind. And then there’s the enormous amount of Sherlock Holmes pastiches written by many people. Trying to figure out which of them are connected with others of the pastiches is a real mess.
My apologies if I’m mis-remembering and making a hash out of this, but didn’t L. Sprague de Camp do the same with Robert E. Howard? Took some of Howard’s unpublished napkins, changed some character names and published them as Conan the Barbarian stories?
1.) took some Robert E. Howard stories that were about other characters and rewrote them as Conan stories, often tossing in some gratuitous fantasy. So the El Borak story “Hawks over Egypt” became the Conan story “Hawks over Shem”. de Camp claimed he could do this because “all f Howard’s heroes are ‘cut from the same cloth’”. Some Howard aficianados disagree strongly. But it did give them enoughmaterial to publish a whole series through Lancer paperbacks.
2.) took some incomplete Conan stories and fleshed them out. Lin Carter did some of this, too.
3.) Wrote some original Conan fiction, often in collaboration with Carter. In fact, apparently some of the stories had previously been Lin Carter’s Thongor stories, rewritten with Conan as the hero.
De Camp did a lot of editing of the Conan stories. A lot of fans felt that the Howard stories didn’t need any editing, and that De Camp’s additions were both not necessary, and a way for De Camp to claim a share of the royalties. Since De Camp’s death, the Conan stories have been re-published in mass market editions without the De Camp additions. Also Howard’s other works, like King Kull and Bran Mac Morn.
The proper note from wiki is: The original tales and de Camp’s additions from the 1990s were issued together as The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (2007). Since no stories were written after 2005, there is a Completed Enchanter.
I think the only scholars who’ve edited any books with newly found materials by Tolkien are, after the death of his son Christopher in 2020, Brian Sibley, Verlyn Flieger, Carl Hostetter, and Peter Grybauskas. Brian Sibley edited a book called The Fall of Numenor in 2022, Verlyn Flieger edited a book called The Story of Kullervo in 2015, Carl Hostetter edited a book called The Nature of Middle-earth in 2021, and Peter Grybauskas edited a book called The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth in 2023. (There are, of course, other scholars writing analyses of Tolkien’s works.) Sibley is British. Flieger, Hostetter, and Grybauskas all live within a few miles of me. An announcement I found online says that this year there will be a book published called The Collected Poems of J R R Tolkien, which will be edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Those two (who are married) live in Massachusetts. They’ve previously edited some companions to Tolkien’s works and some collections of his art.
The first Conan story Howard ever published was a re-written Kull story, so I suspect Howard would be inclined to side with deCamp. Although I do like the stories with the original character names.
I’m not sure he’d like the idea of someone coasting on his efforts, though.
And a lot ogf De Camp’s changes were made to shoehorn the stories into a preconceived timeline. There are paragraphs devoted to that at the end of The Dark Stranger
By the way, the Conan story “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” was a re-written story originally starring a hero named “Amra”, who is apparently not Conan under his sea-faring name. The changes are pretty minimal.
Technically there should be no “Complete Works of Charles Dickens” because he died before he completed The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He left behind no clues as to how he intended to conclude the book because he’d only got to the halfway point when he passed away.
What he wrote did get published as his final novel but plenty of authors attempted to piece together how they interpreted Dickens plot to have been. It lay pretty dormant in obscurity until a broadway play in the 1980s gave it new life and a very unique way of reaching a conclusion. The cast of the play would act out the story as Dickens wrote it and then when it reached the point where his pen stopped once and for all, the production would come to a halt in order to allow the audience to vote on a set of different scenarios in order to choose how they wanted the story to pick up. This meant if they played for every night for a week you could potentially get a different ending for each night and in order to decide which ending was best you’d have to keep coming back.
It was pretty genius and was the brainchild of Rupert Holmes. Who you all probably know as for this
It was edited by the American mystery writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee under their joint pseudonym Ellery Queen.[4][5][6] The book angered the heirs of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes)[1][4] and it was pulled from publication after the original run.[7][8]
After years of searching, I was able to pick up a copy on eBay for a surprisingly low price. it even had the paper dustrjacket, although this was a bit torn.
Plenty of authors left unfinished works at their deaths, but we don’t generally say that “there is no complete works of…” because of it. Robert E, Howard left unifinished manuscripts and outlines, and never finished his novel Almuric (nobody’a sure who did finish it, but it was completed before publication). Heinlein left the outline for what became Variable Star. C.S. Forester never finished “Hornblower During the Crisis”. Tolkien left lots of notes and “Unfinished Tales”. I think they used the title of one or two books.
As for Drood, it wasn’t that obscure. I knew about it before the play came out, and lots of people took a hand at trying to complete it.
I’m not sure it’s Complete (although it says so on the cover) but I’m very fond of my copy of the 1927 The Works of Edgar Allan Poe in One Volume which I found at a small Berkeley flea market decades ago. Googling just now it appears to be not at all rare; the first hit is a “pre-owned”(!) copy for $17.99