Read Online Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets by Guy Adams, Kasey Lansdale, Glen Mehn - Free Book Online

the bloody time!”
    Charlotte’s face clouded, and she turned away, back to the words on the computer screen. Even as she said it, Jane knew she was making a mistake. If there was one thing Charlotte hated it was a mystery: she never let go until she had all the answers.
    When Ms. McManus had given everyone detention because no-one would own up to the graffiti in the girls’ bathrooms, Charlotte had worked out the culprit. When a masked flasher had turned up at the school disco, Charlotte had worked out his identity. (Mr. Harrison had been working out some issues after his divorce. The school had a new maths teacher now.)
    If you had a problem to solve, a mystery to unravel, then Charlotte was your woman. She wouldn’t be nice about it, but she’d find the answers. Such brutal honesty did not win her many friends.
    Being seventeen years old and hanging out in the school computer labs writing fanfiction did not win you many friends either, which explained why Charlotte and Jane had remained so close.
    It wasn’t the only reason they were friends. In the years since they’d met, sitting next to each other in Harrison’s maths lessons,Jane had come to appreciate Charlotte’s intelligence, her energy, the way she always made life much more interesting.
    What she didn’t appreciate about Charlotte was how she sulked when her curiosity was denied.
    “Do you want my help or not?” Dark eyebrows knitted together, Charlotte studied the screen, still not meeting Jane’s eyes.
    Why had Eric taken the notebook? What was he going to do with it? Where was he keeping it, and how could they get it back? Jane needed to get it back. Charlotte would solve this.
    “Yes. I do want your help. But I still can’t tell you what’s in the notebook.”
    Charlotte sighed, and rolled her eyes. “Then either do something useful or let me study the problem in peace.”
    There was no talking to her when she was like this. Jane left Charlotte in the computer lab, reading around ‘plainjane’s’ own unique corner of Sherlock Holmes fandom.
    Holmes and Watson had always been beloved characters in pop culture, but recent reboots for TV and film had seen interest soar. The internet was full of fan forums, fanart, cosplay, fanfiction.
    Quite a lot of the fan-created works focused on the two characters as each other’s romantic interests—a dynamic some of the reboots did nothing to dispel. The reboots even played with the idea: emphasising Holmes’s jealousy of Watson’s wife, the awkwardness of their living arrangement, or the adulation of Sherlock shown in Watson’s written accounts of their adventures.
    Then again, as Jane was always quick to point out, quite a lot of fanfiction did not focus on this homoerotic dynamic. (Hers did.)
    Jane herself specialised in alternate universes, or ‘AUs’ for short. AUs took the characters and situations from the original work, and placed them in different worlds, different stories. The characters might be aliens, barbarian warriors or rock stars, but at the end of the day they were still themselves.
    Jane had written about Sherlock and Watson as vampires, serial killers, subversive radio hosts, WW2 super-soldiers; the list went on. Jane was, she had to admit, mildly internet-famous for her AUs.
    It was a pity that ‘mildly internet-famous’ wasn’t something that one could put on a university application, considering all the hours she’d spent writing fic when she could have been doing her homework, or even doing something her mother would call ‘healthy,’ like playing sports, spending time outdoors or kissing boys.
    The fans loved her though—‘plainjane’ had quite a following. It fascinated Jane that even AUs where the characters had completely normal, mundane lives could win a huge readership if enough love and attention were put into the details, the characterisation, the dialogue. Coffee-shop AUs, for some reason, were quite trendy. Perhaps because young fans of the shows with