A retired Miskatonic University professor ehgages the aged once-detective Sherlock Holmes to help find his missing cousin Carter Randolph who'd been researching cultists of the "Ancient Gods." The septuagenarian investigators pay a visit to a correspondent of Carter's, an H. P. Lovecraft. Yet, wherever they go, someone/thing sinister follows.

This is Vaughan's reported first published tale, reprinted with minor revision at request of Gryphon Books' editor as an illustrated chapbook. Per the author, it is the very FIRST published tale that entwines Doyle's Sherlock Holmes with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos before other authors were inspired similarly.

The plot is familiar and patterns itself but does not rise to equal either Lovecraft's investigative horror tales or Conan Doyle's mysteries although lightly touches on qualities of both, nor does the prose yet rise to that Vaughan achieves wondrously in his "Professor Challenger in Secret of the Dreamlands."

However, the story serves as a "sort-of" sequel to his subsequent "Sherlock Holmes in the Dreaming Detective" written a decade later which itself serves as a "sort-of" sequel tale to the Professor Challenger Dreamland story and the subsequent intended non-Mythos Holmes & Challenger tale "Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time" (that I have yet to read).

This chapbook is a worthy curio for the Holmes-Dreamlands completist -- and the only printing of the story, to my knowledge, that is illustrated. The tale may also be found, and again slightly revised, along with "Terror Out of Time" in Vaughan's 2015 collection "Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures" [Dog in the Night Press]. ( )