<p><em>The Uncollected Cases of Sherlock Holmes</em> presents eight new stories about Holmes which set the great detective against the background of Victorian England, an era of enormous progress, in science, transport, and medicine but which also witnessed a surge in urban poverty, prostitution and imperial adventurism. Each of the stories in this collection engages with an aspect of this background. In ''The Sicilian Defence'', Holmes comes to the aid of a disgraced army veteran who has fallen in love with a Sudanese woman and incurred the wrath of her father, whilst in ''The Archaeopterx'' Holmes has to recover an important fossil which has been stolen from the Natural History Museum. In ''The Missing Heir'' Holmes is asked to find the heir to a great fortune, considered by his family to be mentally unstable, and in ''The Dunwich Ghost'' he investigates the plight of an old army colleague of Watson''s who is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife.</p><p class