A Holmesian Solstice

Mary Russell

"Untold Stories" is a pretty direct answer to armchair_elvis' request...but a distinctly non-standard entry for most of our known resident Russell fans, in its open portrayal of a prior Holmes/Watson relationship (although it's a very interesting take on that relationship). Nor does the prose, for me, quite match any of the usual suspects. I think this is probably written by mercuryandmoonlight.

As to "The Apprentice's Beekeeper":

With scfrankles having laid this one at my own doorstep, I'm going to get in trouble no matter what I say here...and yet I can't leave a Russell story on the table without any sort of comment. Very well, then: The Supreme Commander is actually not wrong about the prose style - and therefore, very possibly not wrong that someone deliberately sought to mimic it. But like scfrankles, I hesitate to tag sanguinity for the piece. I have two reasons for this: (1) I am almost always wrong when I tag her for a story, no matter who's actually written it, and more importantly (2), the excuse given in the editor's notes is simply not believable if applied to sanguinity. I don't think there's a blackmailer alive who could force her to yield if challenged, and if she were the author, she wouldn't have suggested that there was. The next most logical suspect would be [someone who didn't actually sign up this round - oops], and I've already tagged armchair_elvis for a different work.

On balance -- and in part because of the interesting exchange between the mods in the comment-stream for this story -- I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that no matter whose account was used to submit "The Apprentice's Beekeeper", its author is exactly who the manuscript says it is: Sherlock Holmes himself. (Which leaves us, of course, with the potential reserve problem of which one of us might in fact be Holmes in electronic disguise. But that's a whole different guessing round....)

Miss Sherlock

On one hand, as scfrankles points out, mercuryinmoonlight is our only other formal volunteer for Miss Sherlock aside from its recipient. But we do have two or three folks among us (myself included) who like to stretch their muscles and work in fandoms for which they haven't necessarily tagged themselves in signups. (Also, as with a previous instance, I've already put in a different guess for mercuryinmoonlight.)

I think both iwantthatcoat and sanguinity are skillful enough to be plausible candidates for this one...and both of them are likewise devious enough to have mimicked the AO3 user-lock practice. (Come to that, scfrankles is also both clever enough and versatile enough to be a candidate, but I think they're also smart enough to have seen how much trouble I get into when I try to tag other people for my own stories, so that attribution won't work here.) The argument against sanguinity is that she normally uses a different dodge when posting stories whose authorship she wants to fog; the one against iwantthatcoat is that versatility notwithstanding, this particular sort of intimate character study isn't typical of their work.

On balance, and after much dithering, my guess for "A Lesson in Love" is sanguinity, because this is the sort of character piece that she does very well.