Category Archives: Moriarty

November 17, 2012 · 4:20 am

Davies, David Stuart. The Veiled Detective. London: Titan, 2009*

Where’s Watson?

I was very fortunate, in my first few months of Sherlockian fascination, to light upon some excellent pastiches. I do not doubt that they served to plunge me deeper into obsession than I otherwise might have gone. Although Doyle’s original stories and novels bear up well under repeated readings, with nuances that–as with all the best literature–appear and change with the reader’s own experience, Holmesian fiction allows writers to explore aspects of 221B of which Doyle afforded us only the barest glimpse.  We get to ask, “What was it like?” “What if?” And, thanks to Watson’s notorious lack of attention to the proper details (ladies’ dresses lovingly described, dates mangled beyond recognition), we also can speculate as to what really happened.

The Veiled Detective tackles each of these questions–most particularly the last. It was perhaps the second or third pastiche I ever read, and while I’ve heard many people (rightly) list Mr. Davies’ The Tangled Skein and The Shadow of the Rat among their favorites, hardly anyone seems to recognize The Veiled Detective when I bring it up. This review will, I hope, remedy the situation.

The book starts off with a shock. To the reader. It’s Afghanistan, it’s Maiwand, and here’s British Army surgeon, John Walker, emerging from his tent, exhausted and traumatized by all of the…

Yes. I said “Walker.”

Even at that early stage of my acquaintance with Holmes’ Boswell, I read that–and no doubt re-read it–with a sense of indignation. “That’s not his name. Honestly, people, get it right, it’s….” You get the picture.

But I read on, and guess what? That is his name. Or was, and it’s the name his Captain calls him when he rouses him from the drunken stupor he’s lying in, under the dead tree which gives him refuge from the dying men he can no longer face. Brandy is the best medicine for guilt, he thinks, but it also turns out to be the liquid road to court martial, and—

That’s right.  Court martial. Drunk on duty. No jezail bullet, anywhere. Three months in a Kandahar gaol, no enteric fever. Drummed out. No army pension. Still no kith nor kin in England, though. Absolutely nothing at all.

Look at it this way: At least we now know why no one can find Watson or Murray in the lists of soldiers at Maiwand. Mystery solved!

No worries about Holmes, though. Holmes is the same. He’s younger,  living on Montague  Street, trying to make a go of the whole “consulting detective” thing. Here he is, foiling a safe-cracking team by tricking them into hiring him as a “lookout.” Alert them to the police, alert the police to them–just semantics, in the end. Scotland Yard doesn’t pay, unfortunately, nor is he getting the challenges his mind requires, but at least he’s got enough for the cocaine bottle. He suggests to Lestrade that the criminals he’s bringing in are just minor operatives in a larger enterprise, but Lestrade doesn’t believe him. He believes him even less when Holmes says  he suspects someone is toying with him, testing him, targeting him in particular. It makes the detective’s work more interesting, however, and he’s excited to (finally!) find the occasional case which stretches his skills. The letter-writer takes snuff and wears a large ring, he tells his client. He is a much better cracksman than one might think.

Moriarty appreciates that skill, and the note. In return, he gives Holmes a new flat, complete with landlady and flatmate.

Alone on the steamship Orontes,** John Walker finds his court-martial has made the papers and everyone seems to know who he is and what he has done. They treat him accordingly. He contemplates going overboard more than once, and is only saved by the appearance of the well-dressed, sympathetic Alexander Reed, who confides to Walker that he, too, was once in the exact same position, but now has a happy, prosperous life. This, and (again) brandy, is all it takes for Walker to unburden himself to the former Captain for hours in the ship’s bar, and by the time the Orontes  docks, the doctor hopes his confidante might help him secure employment. Reed does occasional “recruiting;”  there just might be a special position for Walker within his firm.

Reed’s boss agrees. He’s been looking for a man like Walker, so he offers him a simple proposition: take the job, stay alive.

So it is that Walker, cloaked in a new name and heroic backstory, finds himself at the Criterion Bar, meeting an old Bart’s colleague, Stamford, who will be able to pay off his most recent gambling debts after he introduces Walker/Watson to the odd duck who beats corpses and devises tests for haemoglobin in the lab. The man should be looking for lodgings instead, seeing as his Montague street landlord has unaccountably evicted him.*** Holmes’ situation is desperate enough that he’s happy to take the rooms Stamford suggested, with the wounded veteran the suddenly handy Stamford just happened to run into; after all, the man has normal bachelor vices and is all right with the violin, as long as it isn’t played badly. Now he has a nice set of rooms, a sounding-board, and Watson…well, Watson has someone fascinating to observe and follow around on cases and write about….

In detailed reports, which he posts regularly to Professor James Moriarty, in consideration of which he receives £100 per month, and his heartbeat.†

The lonely genius Moriarty, for his part, now has both a worthy opponent and someone in the enemy camp. With the right jerks on the strings, he can even make Watson perform acts of sabotage and (further) betrayal if necessary. It’s the perfect arrangement, really. What could possibly go wrong?

And so, Stamford has the wherewithal to gamble another day….

As you can see, David Stuart Davies has taken the stories we know so well and turned them, displaying them from another, slightly skewed, angle. Or is it?  Davies presents theses “true” versions of Watson’s stories†† so tightly that I really couldn’t find any holes. If anything, The Veiled Detective answers the question of how some of the most confusing problems with Watson’s writings came about. During SIGN, for instance, the doctor admits that 

..many of the details of this case escaped me, as most of my thoughts were full of Mary. The published version of this investigation…had perhaps more inaccurate passages and invented moments than nearly any other bearing my name.

Other stories, Watson says, were embellished to make them longer and more interesting. All that Alkali plains drama, for instance. Another, in particular, was changed to protect Holmes from prosecution for something rather more complex than breaking and entering. The detective’s willingness to overstep the law in search of justice, we find, was always a part of his makeup.

Davies does a wonderful job of reimagining Holmes’ and Watson’s adventures in this slightly bent world, but he does an even more masterful job with the people in it. Moriarty, Moran, Reed, and the redoubtable Scoular (with whom Holmes actually has the brilliant exchange Watson gives Moriarty in FINA) are fascinating, in the way of all poisonous snakes. You won’t be able to look away. Minor characters, such as Mrs. Hudson (who is not exactly as you remember her), Mary, Stamford, and Lestrade are handled with depth, sensitivity, and occasional humor, yet are not permitted to clutter the stage.

As for Holmes and Watson themselves…. Where Doyle only allows hints of their inner lives to show through, Davies pokes at these hidden fires, making them blaze brilliantly through the grate. The Veiled Detective is written as an omniscient third-person/Walker’s journal combination, which allows the author to compensate for the doctor’s narrative deficiencies, and the fact that he cannot be in two places at once. Watson is the loyal, responsible, emotional romantic we love from canon, albeit a little more perceptive and less admiring than he portrays himself in the stories. For example, while he is still quick to take offense at some of Holmes’ more condescending pronouncements, he is eventually able to see the intent behind them, and to take his share of the blame in their disagreements. Unfortunately, the same virtues which make him the most faithful friend in literature also lead him to a moment of moral failure which ultimately so compromises him that he cannot even live under his own name. Yet where a weaker man (say, Reed) might throw up his hands and exclaim, “All right, then I’ll go to Hell!”††† Walker never allows his circumstances to change his core decency. If, at the end of the book, he feels transformed, the reader knows that he’s really just been refined.

Readers who love a glimpse of the younger Sherlock Holmes will appreciate Davies’ portrayal. In his late twenties, Holmes is on the threshold, just coming into his own. He’s not always aware of how he appears or sounds to others. He goes to extremes in his efforts to achieve total self-control. While he’s confident in his deductive powers, almost to the point of arrogance, he’s actually a man who makes snap character judgments and lets those judgments steer his actions–again, to extremes. In Davies’ retelling of STUD, for instance, Holmes doesn’t yet have the experience to see how Jefferson Hope’s bitterness has led him into madness. As a result, the young detective allows his sense of right and mission to weight the scales of justice in way which (although he swears to Watson he will eventually be easy with it) he will never do again. In fact, he’ll do the exact opposite, more than once. Another snap judgment, however, this one on the character of the apparently uninjured “invalided” Army doctor standing before him amidst the test tubes, leads him to a friend who, indeed, “sticks closer than a brother.” ‡

As I flip back through my notes and my now-completely inked-up copy of this book, checking to see if there’s something I’ve missed, I’m struck again by how layered this story is, and how much more I got out of a second reading than I did the first. It takes skill to take a conceit that changes a familiar, much-loved world–“what if John Watson were not who he claimed to be?”–and then to use that statement, with all that logically follows, to illuminate that world instead. You need to lift the veil and take a look.

So, have I convinced you? Or not? First commenter wins a copy! 

The Veiled Detective is available both online (print and e-book) and in traditional bricks-and-mortar bookshops. David Stuart Davies is a well-known and well-respected Holmesian who has written several well-received novels featuring the Great Detective, as well as a play (“Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act”), and two books on Jeremy Brett and the Granada Holmes series, Bending the Willow and Starring Sherlock Holmes. I could not find an author’s website for him, but he is on Twitter.

Star Rating: 5 out of 5  “This is a wonderful book that gets it right.”

Footnotes:

* This version of The Veiled Detective  is part of Titan Books’ growing collection, “The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” which is happily reprinting some of the better pastiche/Sherlockian fiction out there. Veiled was previously published in 2004.

**Of course, we all know that at this point in time, the Orontes was serving as a troopship, but Walker, being cashiered, would not be sailing on one of those, so the ship’s purpose is transformed. Others may question Holmes and Watson meeting in March in this book, when tradition (and a Plaque) have them meeting in January of 1881. STUD dates from March of that year, however, and since it was their first case together, the March date is not an unreasonable assumption. The only problem date I found was that the Battle of Maiwand is said to have occurred on June 27, 1880, when it actually took place on July 27th of that year. Because Davies’ other details are so scrupulously handled, I have to wonder if this is just a typographical error.

***Well, 12 sovereigns may have been involved. And if he hadn’t taken them, I’m sure he could have been otherwise persuaded.

†Sound familiar, BBC Sherlock fans?  I swear, when I saw Mycroft in the warehouse scene, offering John money to spy on Sherlock, I was as sure as anyone that he was Moriarty, and that Moffatt and Gattiss were referencing this book. I may have squealed some.

†† Primarily “A Study in Scarlet,” and “The Final Problem,” although others, such as “The Sign of the Four” and “The Greek Interpreter” are alluded to.

†††Free book if you can tell me where that quote comes from, and its context. (“Now we’ll see who reads the footnotes!” she cackles.)

‡Proverbs 18:24. It applies very well in this instance, actually.

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Filed under AU (Alternative Universe), David Stuart Davies, Five-star reviews, Moriarty, Titan reprints

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September 14, 2012 · 5:34 am

King, John R. The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls. NewYork: Forge, 2008

As promised, here is the second review of King’s book, brought to you by Jaime Mahoney. If you’ve never read her erudite and wide-ranging blog, Better Holmes & Gardens, you’ve been missing out! Find her at: http://betterholmesandgardens.blogspot.com/

It’s hard to see the powder burns on this chart. But they’re there. Oh, yes, they’re there.

I pulled my left hand away and began walking, a tingle of dread moving up my spine. “I know who I am.  Who are you, Silence?  Read your own palm.”

Silence matched me stride for stride. “I have been. Of course I have. There are many scars there for so thin a hand. The palm has tobacco burns, the sort that would come from embers falling from a pipe, and acid burns from mixing caustic chemicals. The back of the hand has black powder scars from firing a gun, and here—do you see these?” He rolled back his sleeve and showed me the purple depression of veins leading from his inner elbow.

“Opium.”

“More likely, cocaine. These are recent scars” (75-6).

I am originally from Southwestern Pennsylvania – you know, farm country. The kind of place where the first day of hunting season is a mandatory day off from school, where you yield to passing tractors, and where my mother was actually able to have milk delivered (complete with a delivery person in a white uniform) until I was in college. No one in my neighborhood locked their doors, I learned to ride a horse before I learned to drive a car, and you can feel free to fill in the rest of the stereotype however you see fit. You’d probably be right.

I am also the daughter of an immigrant. My father came to the United States when he was 25-years-old, complete with his own set of European values – and distinctly European tastes. I can guarantee that I was the only child in my fifth grade class that had ever eaten goose liver pâté (or had eaten goose at all, come to that – in fairness, I still have never eaten venison). My sister and I were the only children in our neighborhood that knew how to pronounce Camembert correctly (our father was into cheese before cheese was cool). And I know was I was the only 10-year-old who went to see a German opera for her birthday (and this was a few years before I learned how “introspective” German music can be).

So, I’m used to having strange tastes. I’m used to liking things that no one else likes.

And so, several years ago when I finished reading The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls, by John R. King (also known as J. Robert King) I fully expected to be one of a very exclusive minority that enjoyed this book. I anticipated it. I did not, however, expect to feel like the only person on the planet that enjoyed this book. And now, several years and one rather pleading (I see in hindsight) book review later, I find that this is still the case. If King’s book only has a fan club of one, then I’m the one attending the meetings, and I serve a superb Scotch.

Look, I get it. I can see and observe when the mood strikes me. There’s a lot about King’s novel that should surely leave a very sour taste in any Sherlockian’s mouth, especially a traditional one. Thomas Carnacki – who’s that and why is he narrating? A lengthy interruption from the main narrative in the form of a memoir? No, thanks. Perhaps the worst offense of all, Professor Moriarty as a sympathetic and – dare I even say it? – romantic hero (at least for a short while)? Check, please. And demons? Here, I poured you a scotch. Drink up.

Holmes will get it for you. It’s from Watson’s special stash.

But for those who read Sherlockian pastiche not just for a traditional mystery, but for a character study, for insight to the mind and manner of the Great Detective, then this novel has so much to recommend. For what is Sherlock Holmes without his great mind?  Is he even Sherlock Holmes at all? King’s amnesiac-Holmes is his interpretation of the man laid bare, with all his structure and building-blocks exposed. And there are very believable and realistic glimpses of why Holmes is as he is. A Detective without his memory is in many ways very much like himself, as the passage quoted above indicates.  But he is also in some ways very childlike, unable to ascertain how he accomplishes certain things.  At times he seems equally confused and terrified by his abilities, and at others, amused by them.  He seems disproportionately trusting, more dependent on others, and more aware of his physical needs than he would be with his memory intact (in fact, when Silence/Holmes expresses hunger and a desire for food, it is almost shocking, disorienting, and removed me from the story more than any demon ever could).

Most importantly, the entirety of King’s plot hinges on and revolves around—not just Holmes’s memory, but his mind. That is what is at stake. As Moriarty says:

“Yes.  That is the problem.  This brain of yours.  Empty.  It’s not what I paid for.  It’s the attic without the treasure… It’s as if the library of Alexandria had burned!  […]  It did burn, my friend.  That library, with all the wisdom of the ancient world—that goddamned library is gone.  Gone!  And your goddamned mind is gone, too.  All that you knew, all that you were—gone, except this pathetic, festering hunk of meat… (117).

A Sherlock Holmes who is not aware of himself is ultimately not Sherlock Holmes at all, but who he becomes during that time is not that far removed from the Great Detective that readers know. Holmes/Silence is constantly reaching out, consciously and unconsciously, and trying to reassemble himself. And the pieces that he reaches for first, and that fall into place earliest, provide the most startling insight into his personality.  As Holmes’s mind comes back to him in bits and pieces over the course of the story, it is as if the framework of his character is reasserting itself, snapping into place and fitting itself together. The characteristics that make him most uniquely Sherlock Holmes are what fall into place first—his deductive abilities, his imperious nature, and, of course, even his friendship with Dr. Watson:

“And there is a listener beside me.  He is a stocky man with an intelligent face and sensitive eyes…I look upon this slumping figure, who takes in my violin playing as a drunkard takes in gin, and I see greatness in him.  Greatness and friendship” (90).

This is all King’s interpretation, of course, but The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls is an excellent read for anyone who has ever chased the answer to the ever elusive question of Holmes’s essential nature.  Stripped of nearly everything that distinctly characterizes him, Harold Silence/Sherlock Holmes makes for an interesting personality study, but barring that and underneath it all, Sherlock Holmes is still, even when Thomas Carnacki has to remind him (and he does have to remind him), a great man.

Would you still like a Scotch?

The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls  is available from Amazon in hardback and Kindle editions, and from Barnes and Noble, for the Nook only. You can also find it at Powell’s and from ABE Books.

Star Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5: “(Less) Flawed, but worth a look.”

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Filed under Better Holmes and Gardens, Guest Reviewer, Holmes out of his Element, Jaime Mahoney, John R King, Moriarty, Reichenbach, Supernatural

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September 13, 2012 · 1:00 am

King, John R. The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls. New York: Forge, 2008.

Special Note: I initially planned to review this book in May, to coincide with the anniversary of Reichenbach, but Life intervened. This is all to your benefit, however, because in the interim, I had a lengthy conversation about it with Jamie Mahoney, better known as Better Holmes and Gardens’  “Goddess in Sepia.”  As it turns out, we have very different opinions of it. So today, you get mine, and tomorrow–a completely different perspective. After all, it’s always good to have more data!

Amazing how adding one little letter can make this sooooo much more interesting!

When someone sets out to write a book, he faces an instant set of choices, beyond the elementary* questions of character, setting, and plot. Should the book be told in past or present tense? Who should tell the story? How many points of view should it contain, and should they be limited or omniscient? First, third, or even second person? Some writers make these choices consciously, with a view towards achieving certain effects. Others let them occur organically which, when it’s right is a beautiful experience, and when it’s wrong, is a very complicated problem to fix. Either way, these initial choices determine the story’s structure, and if you’ve tried to write anything longer than…well, heck, even a grocery list has structure. It’s important.

Writing a Sherlock Holmes story? Even more structural decisions await.  Will you hand it over to Watson and let him produce a straight, Doylean pastiche, or choose another point of view, thereby allowing yourself a wider range of creative freedom, and avoiding the inevitable “Watson voice” criticism? Will you explain how the story came about–curiously, even authors who haven’t found another copy of “The Adventure of James Phillimore” feel the need to explain their book’s provenance.** Will the story unfold as it happens, or as a memoir? Will it hew strictly to canon, or will you give yourself room to play, say, with sex or vampires?***  Each choice is crucial, guiding  your readers’ expectations, and defining the latitude they will give you in terms of character details and canon fidelity. Just as well-designed foundation and framing will allow a building to stand for centuries, a judiciously chosen story structure will support nearly anything you want to do.

The question of structure ends up being paramount in today’s selection, one of the more unusual books I’ve read this year. It differs immediately from most Holmes books in that it’s not narrated by any canon character, but by Thomas Carnacki. Now I’m sure most of you know who Mr. Carnacki was, but on the off chance…

After an image search, let me just say that Holmes was able to attract much better illustrators.

Thomas Carnacki, whose adventures were chronicled by William Hope Hodgson, was a detective who specialized in scientific exploration of the supernatural. Long before Jay, Grant, everybody, and their grandmothers ventured into asylums and attics hunting ghosts with EMF detectors and digital voice recorders, Carnacki sought to help his clients determine whether or not their night-bumpings were caused by humans, or portals to Hell.† When King introduces us, however, his evening ghost story soirées are far in the future. He graduated from Cambridge in 1890 and has spent the ensuing year doing the 19th-century equivalent of backpacking around Europe, being, as he calls it, “a student of the world” (the world, at present, being Switzerland). Without a father’s bank account to draw from, however, he is now “living by my wits,” and while he probably would have approached that very pretty girl with the enticing bustle anyway, the fact that she’s carrying a basket full of food makes her even more interesting. Showing a remarkable lack of judgement, Anna Schmidt invites this strange, shabby young man with a scraggly VanDyke to accompany her for a picnic at a local attraction. You know, Reichenbach Falls. On May 4th. 1891.

To jog your memory.

So, is the coincidence-hater in you screaming right now? Well, just relax. It is, of course, a set-up. Even a bit of a double-cross, between a man who believes he’s going to kill his mortal enemy, and the daughter who believes she can save her father from his inner demons. Instead, Anna Schmidt (Moriarty, actually) and Thomas Carnacki end up rescuing someone else. They’re not really sure who he is. He can’t help them with that question, either, so they end up calling him by the name on the tailor’s label in his clothing. Harold Silence.†† It will do for now.

Obviously, when you’ve just been battling for your life, have fallen over a cliff into the water, hit your head (and everything else) and can’t remember who you are, you’d like a few days to regroup. Unfortunately, there isn’t time. There won’t be any time at all until Chapter 33, and then the three of them only get half an hour. If you like non-stop action, King has written your book. Within minutes of the get-out-of-wet-clothes and small deductions scene, our heroes are being pursued, a relentless ordeal that begins with a carriage chase and continues until they cram, in some impossible fashion, into a single sleeping berth on a train to Paris. The intervening chapters include, in no particular order:

  • Fights
  • Avalanches
  • Almost falling into a crevasse
  • Almost getting smashed by ice
  • Being tortured in an asylum
  • Hiding in a crematorium furnace
  • Poisonings
  • Near strangulation
  • More fights
  • Gunplay
  • Electrocutions

And that, dear readers, is just the first third of the book.  Once Silence and Co. get to Paris, for the final third, more chases, stabbings, punctured lungs, stabbings, exorcisms and dismemberment await.

Yes, I said “exorcisms.” Obviously, when Thomas Carnacki is involved, one must expect the supernatural–in this case, possession–so if this is not a trope you enjoy, it’s all right to move along.  I admit, when I did my initial “flip-through,” I was less than thrilled.†††† After I read the Carnacki stories and followed the entire plot through, however, I could play along to some degree. When I told my husband about this bit, he found it interesting, so I’m guessing it depends on the reader. In the end, the supernatural element meshes fairly well with the rest of the story, is appropriately chilling, and makes nicely subtle references to aspects of Carnacki’s future, his use of electricity and pentacles in particular.

Mr. King does several things well in this book, in fact. Most of his characters are three-dimensional and interesting. The dialogue is realistic. With one exception, the plot moves quickly. Although I have a hard time visualizing action sequences, those of you who don’t will have plenty to work with. As the story  is for the most part extra-canonical, there weren’t a lot of references to check, and those few were accurate. He even gets in a nice little canonical joke, so if you think you see a major error, wait for it….‡ King has a nice prose style, and occasionally you even get real gems, such as this passage, which occurs as Harold Silence and his rescuers take refuge in a shepherd’s barrow and he tells them that in the morning, they will part company “‘as if none of this ever happened'” :

The irony of these words strikes me. My whole life never happened. I’ve lived only these last hours, all of it at the verge of death.‡‡

Here is another favorite, describing “Silence’s” thoughts as he begins to realize that he’s actually Sherlock Holmes, but with only a vague understanding of what that might mean:

How strange I am, to care about these things. Ashes and the composition of soil and the variations in bootblack… While other men filled their minds with planetary declinations and the properties of comets, I do idiot auguries in ash.‡‡‡

He’s just as insightful and poetic in the opening pages of the second third of the book, in which he describes Moriarty’s development, although certain events mean he eventually gets to avoid exploring its more complex aspects. King’s best moments come when he stops rushing his characters around and actually looks at them for a minute. When that happens, we realize, for instance, the significance of one of Silence’s seeming out-of-character moments, when he demands that Carnacki let go of him and self-sacrificingly fall into a crevasse. This is not Sherlock Holmes, who only days ago told his nemesis he was willing to give all to achieve the greater good. It is, however, Sherlock Holmes stripped down to only the most basic of human instincts. What’s even better is that King doesn’t  spell this out for us. He assumes we’re smart enough to grasp it on our own.

Mutually assured destruction? Not a problem.

In the best of all possible worlds, my review would end here. Remember all of the blathering at the beginning about structure, however? There was a point to that. The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls  suffers from structural problems.

First, King takes the well-worn path of establishing some sort of provenance for this story. Instead of coming from the ruins of Cox & Co., it’s a memoir, which Hodgson, Carnacki’s biographer, encouraged him to record and send to Dr. Watson in 1911. Why 1911? Carnacki’s stories first began appearing in 1910, so perhaps that played a part in setting the date. Holmes is retired, of course, but still has some very active times ahead of him. It seems odd that Carnacki, in his note to Watson, doesn’t allude to this in some fashion. It’s almost as if he thinks Holmes has died.

Oh well, that’s petty. The real problem lies in the fact that, while Carnacki starts telling the story in first person, as one would expect in a memoir, by Chapter 2 we’re  in Silence’s head. In Chapter 8, we venture into Anna’s point of view. This is fine. You know, in a novel that doesn’t purport to be a man’s memoirs. As gifted as Carnacki is, he’s not a mind-reader, and he simply cannot be in these people’s heads–one for a reason that will be clear by the end of the book, and the other because that person would never permit it. Notice that, in the canon, Watson is always Watson. If he goes to bed and misses things, he misses them. If he’s out in Dartmoor, he has no idea what’s going on in London. Never does he take on another’s voice or thoughts. When an author chooses a point of view, he is obligated to take on its restrictions. An editor would have done Shadow a world of good if she had taken out Carnacki’s prefatory note. Of course, then we would still have to contend with the odd fact that some sections of the story are told in present tense, and others in past, with no discernable (at least to me) narrative or artistic reason for the switches. These changes occur on a chapter-by-chapter basis, so they’re not so obvious as to be disconcerting, but they are curious.

If you’ve noticed, I’ve thus far avoided discussing the second third of the book. This is because it is Shadow’s  most problematic section. Somehow, some way, Thomas Carnacki got hold of Moriarty’s unpublished memoirs (which, like most fictional memoirs, read rather more like a novel). With no explanation as to how this occurred, he simply inserts them in the middle. Are they interesting? Yes. Do they contribute to the larger plot? Yes. But while King is at pains to provide a provenance for the book as a whole, he doesn’t think we need to know exactly where these pages came from. The result is a very clumsy, lengthy digression. One could argue that it’s actually intended as an homage to Doyle, who frequently allows Watson to interrupt his own narrative flow with long letters, reminiscences, and trips to Utah. I would counter that while this is probably the case, such editorial indulgences didn’t help Watson, and they’re less acceptable in the 21st century. To compound the crime, at the very end, we’re led to believe that these memoirs have somehow become a long origins story Anna’s been telling Carnacki and Silence as they take the overnight train to Paris. Father’s memoir or daughter’s memories? Can’t be both. Choose.

Whichever they are, they’re King’s attempt to explain why Moriarty ends up at the Falls. In the beginning, he’s no criminal genius, just a brilliant man trying to find a place in the world he experiences like no one else.§  He can, in fact, sense when a life has reached its turning point, and resolves to use this ability for good. In his first attempt at doing so, he rescues a beautiful prostitute, Susanna, who turns out to be a fellow mathematical genius and becomes his wife. Unfortunately, she is also a Mary Sue. Don’t get me wrong–I really loved her idea of applying mathematics to the sociology of crime (her university thesis). But I had a horrible time accepting that somehow she would be permitted to pursue studies at Cambridge’s Jesus College–which didn’t admit women, much less pregnant ones until the late 1970’s–no matter who her husband was. Nor did I think Cambridge would allow her to teach afterwards. Anna’s zippy riverbank birth, which occurs as the result of a deductive experiment, was also ludicrous. I know, I know, I’m quibbling over small things like historical fact when this is a book which contains an exorcism machine, but such casual, convenient manipulations can damage an otherwise interesting plot point.

This leads us back to the main narrative, and a larger, more damaging example of the very same flaw. I could spell it out for you, but I think it would be more interesting to let you find it instead, in this climactic moment of a scene between Silence and Carnacki. They’re looking at Silence’s track marks:

“Opium”

“More likely, cocaine. These are recent scars. If I were an opium addict, I would not be able to think clearly now that I have been without the stuff for two days. No, I must be addicted to a less-invasive poison.”

“But a poison, all the same.”

“True enough.”

“So, then, who is Harold Silence?” I pressed. “A cocaine addict–perhaps a drug dealer, whose hands are burned with whatever caustic chemicals he uses to prepare his wares, whose hands are burned from the guns he has shot to defend his criminal empire?”

“Perhaps,” Silence said quietly.

“Perhaps? What other explanation could there be for these scars?”

Silence took awhile to respond. “The evidence tells what I have done, but not why I have done it. I’ve shot cocaine in my veins–but why? An addict? A drug lord? I’ve shot guns–but why? To oppose the law, or to uphold it?”

I laughed grimly. “The cocaine-addicted crime fighter–yes. A very plausible explanation. And I suppose this madman trying to kill you is a criminal you have brought to justice rather than a rival drug lord–or even a police officer trying to bring you in.”§§

I’ll give you a minute.

When I was a student teacher, one of my classes was remedial government for seniors. I would wager that with one exception, none of these really enjoyable but slightly disengaged kids could find the Netherlands on a map. But every last single one of them knew that pot was legal there. If I could locate them all today, they would tell me instantly what is wrong with this passage. You could drink it from a bottle. You could put it in your hair. You could give it to your child. You could buy it over the pharmacy counter and shoot it up in private when the gears of your mind threatened to overwhelm you. All of this I verified online and in a book about London crime in about ten minutes, seven of which were redundant. Thus, what could have been a powerful scene  crumbles because author and editor chose the punchline over historical fact. The difference between this and demons? I don’t see King as creating an alternate universe (AU) here, in which cocaine is illegal; there’s been no set-up for this, or for AU at all. Instead, we have our real world, in which supernatural elements are exposed. Just inserting a ghost in a story, for example, doesn’t mean that cars can fly. If you want the latter, you have to introduce it in a rational way. Just as Susanna went to Jesus College because the author thought it would be cool, regardless of whether or not it was possible, cocaine is suddenly illegal in the 1890’s because the irony was irresistible.

The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls is a like a do-it-yourself bookshelf from a big box store displaying your collection of first editions. It looks nice on the box. That veneer could be oak if you squint. That screw went in, even if the holes didn’t match up. An edge is peeling, but if you turn it to the wall…. Yes, it leans a little, but just put the heavy books on the bottom. John R. King’s look at Holmes post-Fall has so many good points: action, characterization, dialogue, insight, originality, some beautiful writing and–if it’s your thing–spookiness. But he’s arranged these treasures on a structure that can’t hold them or display them properly. So go on and examine them, but it’s best not to look around too closely.

The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls  is available in hardcover and on the Kindle from Amazon, and on the Nook (only) from Barnes and Noble. You can also find it new or used from Powell’s, and used from ABE Books.

Star Rating: 3 out of 5  “Flawed but worth a look”

Footnotes:

*Haha, look it’s that word!

**Seriously, does any other group feel so compelled, or is it just us?

***Or sex with vampires? This has happened. And not just in fanfiction.

† In preparation for this review, I actually read his stories. They are really fairly decent, and divided equally between natural and supernatural explanations. In general, they are very atmospheric, and have a creepy-as-heck setup, while the impact of the denouement varies. You can find them all here: http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/carnacki.htm

††No, you silly people, it’s not “Calvin Klein.”  “Silence,” by the way, probably is a nod to John Silence, Algernon Blackwood’s 1908 detective.

††††Understatement of the Year

‡Yes, I felt stupid.

‡‡ King, p. 55

‡‡‡ King, p. 247

§I don’t want to give you more block quotes, but the passages in which King describes this are insightful and contain some evocative writing.

§§ King, p.76.

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Filed under Crossovers, Holmes out of his Element, John R King, Moriarty, Reichenbach, Supernatural, The Final Problem, Three-star reviews

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May 2, 2012 · 1:00 am

Bridges, Margaret Park. My Dear Watson. London: MX, 2011*

Find and circle all of the women in this picture.

My Dear Watson will go down in blog history as “the book that sparked a marital spat on the way to church.”**  And really, it’s no wonder, because the story itself is based on a controversial premise: What if Sherlock Holmes were really a woman?

That is, a woman masquerading as a man. As you no doubt know, there are plenty of historical precedents for this.*** These women decided to live as men for varied motives: to obtain an education, to find a military spouse, to work in traditionally male occupations (such as “pirate”), or because they were what we would refer to today as “transgender.” Lucy Holmes’ choice is made first out of necessity, and then out of a desire to fulfill what she sees as her life’s mission: to seek out and combat evil in all its forms.

This is not a choice she makes lightly. Until the age of fourteen, Lucy Holmes was just an awkward, bookish girl with an insatiable curiosity and an aptitude for everything that has nothing to do with practical homemaking.  Her much older brother Mycroft is away at school, and she’s left alone with her parents: a meek, religious mother and a father who loves horses almost as much as he loves other women. Young Lucy is unaware of this predilection, however, until the night her mother accidentally falls downstairs after catching her father with yet another mistress. Shocked and shattered, Lucy accuses her father of murder, and flees to Mycroft’s rooms in Oxford. In order to stay there undetected, she cuts her hair and dresses as a boy. She’s able to live secretly in Christ Church college for nearly a year before she’s discovered and evicted. By that time, however, she’s managed to garner  herself quite a scientific education, and the trauma of her experience has convinced her that, not only does she wish to avoid the subservient life of women like her mother, she also wants to root out wickedness. And the only way to engage that enemy on its own field, she firmly believes, is as a man.

And it works for her. Obviously it works quite well, because as the novel begins, it’s 1903, she’s on the cusp of her 50th birthday, and has an active, prosperous career behind her. She’s not immune, however, to the traditional midlife meditations, however, and these take on a special urgency when Constance Moriarty bursts into 221B.

Yes, Moriarty.  A name that’s never a coincidence in the Sherlockian world.✝  The Napoleon of Crime, it seems, did not leave this world without issue, and his red-headed actress daughter now believes he never left this world at all. She’s received a sort of ransom note claiming he’s alive, and she wants to hire Sherlock Holmes to find him. Of course, it doesn’t take long for Holmes to realize there’s much more to this shocker than is readily apparent, and the murder of a young Irregular confirms her suspicions. It’s not long before she’s fighting for life as she’s known it for thirty-five years, and Watson is in hot pursuit of (yet another) bride. Ms. Bridges sets the adventure against the backdrop of Shakespearean tragedy (Macbeth), and by the time the final scene is played, each of the main characters’ lives is shattered by their fatal flaws.

Watson: Scoping out Mrs. Watson #4
Holmes: Wants everyone to leave so she can “unbind”

Because we all have them, don’t we? Those crevasses in our characters which threaten at times to swallow us the way Constance Moriarty claims the Swiss Alps swallowed her father. These flaws, or quirks, or struggles generally lie dormant until we’re forced to confront them by some catalyst.  For fans of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, My Dear Watson is just such a catalyst. It’s a very well-written book which still challenges one to explore his or her own views of canonicity and world-building. These opinions (and they are only that, for all we may fervently espouse them as doctrine) will naturally vary reader by reader. Here, then, are mine.

First, of course, is the issue of Lucy Holmes. For some, this will be an instant deal-breaker, and that’s fine.✝✝ I will confess that “gender-bending” is not really my thing. I like Holmes and Watson as men. However, pastiche is a playground, and I decided up front that Lucy Holmes would not be an issue for me. What matters, in the end, is whether or not the story is a good one, and whether or not it’s well-told.

For me, the problems started at page one. There in the first paragraph, Ms. Holmes states that she has not been “an experienced writer of anything more substantial than mountains of hastily scribbled research notes.” Of course (and I’ll be honest–I had to check), she was still to write “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier”(assuming she wrote it long after it occurred in 1903) and “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” (1907) but this statement still leaves the monographs unaccounted for, as well as the magazine article Watson disparages in A Study in Scarlet, “The Book of Life.”  Other canonical problems follow, and unfortunately, they’re the kind that make Holmes’ ability to pass as a woman while living intimately with her physician friend seem implausible. Ms. Holmes claims, for example, that she cared for her own medical needs, and that she never went to the baths. “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” (Baring-Gould date, 1902) would indicate otherwise.

Of course most pastiches contain some canonical error or other, and I’m certainly not well-versed enough to catch them all.✝✝✝   My Dear Watson  also posed some believability problems for me. It was hard to accept that Lucy could remain hidden in college rooms for any length of time at all, even if she were dressing as a boy. The chemistry equipment Mycroft provided her would alert others to her presence if nothing else. The fact that Dr. Watson and Holmes are such close friends raises more plausibility concerns. The man’s a physician. A physician who knows and likes women. And while he may not seem to enjoy doctoring all that much, he proudly claims, in The Sign of Four, “an experience of women over many nations and three continents.” He’s been married, for the purposes of this book, three times. Because this site should be suitable for all ages, let’s just say that there are aspects of female life it would be nearly impossible to hide from an experienced male roommate, much less a female housekeeper, for so many years. In the book, Watson notices that his friend has no need to shave after two days. Surely, after all of their trips together, he would have noticed this before. Likewise, Holmes’ drug use, which is alluded to in the book, would have, on occasion, put her in positions in which she would not have full control over herself, making discovery more likely. Couple this with a physician’s knowledge of female anatomy (not just the obvious parts), and it’s difficult to believe that Watson has never figured it out. The author tries to salvage this with what amounts to his ability to see and not observe, but physicians do observe others’ physical characteristics, and I can’t imagine why, once his curiosity was piqued, he would not investigate.

One could argue, however, that this Watson is a bit of a…well, isn’t the famous appellation “Boobus britannicus”? Basically, this is the Watson who likes jam.‡  Although he is very funny at times, he’s really out of character, and it’s hard to believe that even a man who needs romance is able to pursue another woman so ardently when his last wife (and their miscarried infant) is barely cold in the grave. Likewise, when cocaine poisoning forces Holmes to revisit her previous experience with withdrawal, Watson leaves her with a French couple who are basically strangers so he can pursue the mystery back in London. Holmes doesn’t send him; it’s his idea, and one which seems completely antithetical to his character. The French couple–a retired concert violinist and his wife, who have lost their only child–seem to have no real purpose in the story except to serve as Holmes’ caretakers in Watson’s stead, to make sure he doesn’t undress his raving friend. There’s an amusing bit with a motorcar, a sweet bit with a violin, and they take in one of the culprit’s victims in the end, but I kept waiting for them to prove untrustworthy, and found them superfluous when they did not. Other secondary characters, such as Constance Moriarty’s lover, Geoffrey Wickham, are well-drawn and interesting.

And Holmes? After a slightly rough start with the young Lucy, Ms. Bridge’s Sherlock Holmes is just what one might expect: she’s impatient, clever, forthright, and has a sharp tongue. There are the familiar canonical phrases, with just enough variation to make them original. However, Lucy Holmes has a depth and capacity for self-examination that I didn’t foresee. Although she’s read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she chose her path for more personal than political reasons, and her consequences have been personal as well.  Middle age has become, inevitably, a time of uncomfortable reflection, and all she knew in her thirties no longer seems as certain. She has that typically feminine moment of seeing her mother in the mirror, the bitterly common dilemma that the one she loves doesn’t know she’s alive, and the universally human realization that, in making her choices, she may well have rendered their alternatives impossible. For the best of all possible reasons, she’s built her life on a fundamental deception; her attempts to grapple with this decision and its fallout are truly poignant.

This brings us back to that argument in the car. My husband, who is not a Sherlockian, argued that, if the story is good, canon shouldn’t matter. I had more difficulty reconciling a very well-written story full of depth and insight with the plausibility problems, some of which contradict canon. As I told my spouse, when a group of people call the works of their favorite author “The Canon,” they’re sending a not-so-subtle message.

Where to put the emphasis? That was my problem. Conan Doyle had the answer. His “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” has to be one of the goofier Holmes stories. In it, an aging professor hoping to impress his young fiancée injects himself with ape serum and ends up becoming ape-like himself. No, really. But behind the implausible scenario is a touching glimpse of the unpleasant realities of aging. Making Sherlock Holmes a woman seems outlandish, but in playing “what if,” Ms. Bridges is able to make us think about issues ranging from “the thin line between good and evil,” to what it really meant for  the Great Detective to push aside “the softer emotions.” There is gain, and there is loss, and who’s to say which is greater in the end?

My Dear Watson  is available from your usual online suspects, as well as the MX Publishing site and the Baker Street Babes’ online bookstore. Ms. Bridges also writes popular children’s books. You can learn more about her, and her books, at http://www.margaretparkbridges.com/.  I’m curious about your views on this book,  canonicity, gender-bending, etc. Be the first commenter and win a copy of My Dear Watson, or the upcoming anthology currently being prepared in support of the Undershaw Preservation Trust.

Star Rating: For the first time ever, I’ve decided to give a book a “dual” star rating. If you highly value canonicity, My Dear Watson rates 3 1/2 stars out of 5, or “Flawed, but still worth your while.” If you give greater weight to story, My Dear Watson rates 4 out of 5, “Well worth your time and money.”

Footnotes:

*My Dear Watson has a very interesting history. It was, in fact, published in Japan in 1992, after it impressed judges in an international competition for unpublished mystery authors (an experience you can read about here: http://www.margaretparkbridges.com/writing-backwards/). New York publishers, however, are notoriously hard to please, so the book languished almost two decades before finding a new home at MX.

**It devolved into something like this. Brett: “You’re too sensitive.”  Leah: “You won’t ever let me score a point.” Ultimate outcome: stalemate, as usual.

***Examples include: Billy Tipton, James Barry, Albert Cashier, James Gray, and pirate Anne Bonny. If you do a web search for these (and others), you’ll find that most of them are fairly easy to “see through.” Several, however, are not.

✝Unless, say, it’s your last name. And if it is–how cool!

✝✝ Let’s say it together, shall we? “It’s all fine.”

✝✝✝ In fact, a couple of items I initially believed were errors proved, upon inspection, to be correct, or open to interpretation.

‡See http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=210 ; “Boobus britannicus”  was Edmund L. Pearson’s description of Watson in 1932.
 

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Filed under AU (Alternative Universe), Four-star reviews, Genderbend, Holmes and Love, Holmes and Watson Friendship, Margaret Park Bridges, Moriarty, MX Publishing, Real Historical Personages

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February 25, 2012 · 6:07 am

Cypser, Darlene. The Crack in the Lens. Morrison, CO: 2010.

Yes, Watson, We Were Shocked, Too

As one reads through the canon, it’s easy to believe, along with Watson, that Sherlock Holmes is “an isolated phenomenon,” that he simply sprang forth a wholly-formed adult from…well, somewhere. And even after we’ve gone to the Diogenes and met Mycroft in “The Greek Interpreter,”* and learned the few facts Holmes provides about his family and youth, we really don’t know that much more about them. “My ancestors were country squires,” he says, “who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class.” To spice things up a bit, he then tells Watson that his grandmother was a sister of the French artist, Vernet,** and that, “art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.” And that’s pretty much all Watson ever tells us, thereby whetting the imaginations of pastiche writers everywhere.

Because, of course, Sherlock Holmes didn’t just appear one day. He has a family, a childhood, an adolescence, all three of which have inspired plenty of creative speculations in both film and print. In today’s book, The Crack in the Lens, Darlene Cypser takes her turn, taking us back to the year 1871, when Sherlock, then 17, faces two critical events which force him to learn hard lessons about the darker side of human nature, loss, and resilience.

Of course he has no idea what’s coming. He’s just returned to his native Yorkshire with his parents, Squire Siger*** and his wife, from a two-year sojourn among his maternal relatives in the south of France, where they travelled in hopes of improving Sherlock’s delicate health. He has a tendency towards serious lung problems and, to his ex-cavalry officer father’s consternation, has been labelled “delicate” by the family physician. Despite this, he’s an active, intelligent young man, who can’t wait to take his horse and dog out for a ride on the moors around the manor house to explore his old childhood haunts, like an old stone hut. But the Holmes family is in transition, now. Sherlock’s oldest brother, Sherrinford✝ is about to be married and is taking on many of the duties that will one day be his as squire, while Mycroft is living and working in London as a government accountant. The squire is in the process of hiring a tutor in hopes of preparing Sherlock to gain admittance to university, where, he hopes, his youngest son will study engineering and find gainful employment in the rapidly expanding British Empire. This won’t be the only change in Sherlock’s life this year; on this, his first ride out onto the springtime moors, he encounters Violet Rushdale, the daughter of one of the Holmes’ tenant farmers.

The North Yorkshire Moors. Much More Interesting Than Mathematics.

She’s shot a hare, and her hands bear evidence of hard work, which makes no sense to him, as his father’s tenant farmers tend to be fairly prosperous. She claims that poor harvests have caused everyone hardship, but he doesn’t quite believe her. From Sherrinford, who took care of manor business while the squire was away, he learns that Violet’s mother died of cholera a couple of years before, and her father took to drink in response. Godfrey Rushdale is now barely functional, and it’s fallen to Violet to try to keep their lives together. When Sherlock visits the now-ruined farm himself, he learns that she’s done so by gathering herbs for some village women, and selling off livestock and family belongings–now in short supply. He helps her take some furniture to town, and to get a good price for the Rushdale wagon, thus beginning a friendship which deepens as weeks pass.

He is, in fact, much more interested in Violet than he is in the Greek, Latin, mathematics and astronomy lessons presented by his new tutor, James Moriarty (who has this strange, oscillating tic). Still in his twenties, Moriarty has already gained academic acclaim for his papers on the binomial theorem and asteroidal dynamics. Sherlock wonders why the professor resigned his chair at Westgate University, apparently giving up on a promising career to become a tutor.  He has an almost instant, intuitive distrust of the man, which he can’t explain; Moriarty seems nice enough, and works hard to curry favor with the family. When Sherlock begins to suspect Moriarty of subtly cruel manipulations, such as making it impossible for him to finish his work, then complaining to the Squire that he is lazy–or worse, altering the work itself– no one believes him. For his part, Moriarty  wonders why, exactly, Sherlock is so eager to have his afternoons free, why he wants to go out riding on the moors so often.

The answer, of course, is Violet. Sherlock finds her fascinating enough all by herself, but he also relishes the freedom and time away from his cold, demanding father, mentally absent mother and the reptilian Moriarty. One thing leads to another, with the predictable result and its predictable consequences. What could have just been a small family scandal, however, with Moriarty’s cruelty added to the mix, becomes a tragedy that threatens four lives and forces Sherlock out of childhood towards the man he will become.

In The Crack in the Lens, Ms. Cypser, long-time Sherlockian and current president of the Denver scion society, “Dr. Watson’s Neglected Patients,” has written a book which should appeal to both newbies and seasoned fans. There are plenty of nods to both canon and William S. Baring-Gould’s biography of Holmes (although she does not follow the latter slavishly), but one does not need to have either memorized to follow the plot. As a young man, Sherlock has many characteristics of the Great Detective already in place: he’s observant, for instance, and he and Mycroft play a little game of deduction which Sherrinford is not very good at. Cypser works glimpses of these traits into “slice of life” episodes, such as a visit to the Lammas Day Fair in Yorkshire, where Sherlock, serving as his sister-in-law’s escort, makes a fool of a thimblerig con and, through his kindness in discouraging some young purse-snatchers, ends up inspiring their loyalty later in the day. It’s during this trip that Sherrinford points out that his younger brother has a morbid streak–a fascination with the Newgate Calendar.✝✝ Some readers may find that these sections move a little slowly, but it’s interesting to imagine the Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street ribbing his brother about his wedding jitters, complaining about his annoying little cousin, George Challenger;  shooting grouse, teaching a dale boy to fence, looking for fossils, or working in area fields during the harvest.

This last, of course, isn’t what a country squire’s son would normally be doing. In fact, he’s sent there as a punishment for what Moriarty leads Siger Holmes to believe is laziness. One gets a sense of why Holmes doesn’t speak fondly of his parents in later life; with both father and mother too caught up in their own interests and  duties, the young Sherlock gets his only real familial affection from his brothers, and it shows in their interactions. While the scenes between Sherlock and Violet are sweet and natural, those involving either the Squire or the Professor are  unpleasantly electric, particularly as the conflict escalates. Sherlock is keenly aware that he will never be able to please his father; it doesn’t help that Moriarty is not a villain with comprehensible motives, but a different creature entirely. Each time Sherlock brings an accusation against his tutor, the reader is bound to ask, along with Mycroft, Sherrinford, and their father, “Why? Why in the world would anyone do that?” The answer, of course, is one that gradually becomes clear to Sherlock and, unfortunately, to many of us in our own lives: he does it because he can. Because some people are simply evil.

Some readers may be surprised to find that, in the final chapters, Sherlock Holmes is not the calmly cerebral person they envision from Watson’s stories. I thought that myself, the first time I read it–at least, I thought he was a little over-dramatic. Then, however, I thought back a few decades to my own adolescence. To my own very emotional reactions to events both small and traumatic, and to those of friends and classmates. It’s easy, as an adult, to forget how it felt to be dependent on parental actions and support, to not have the confidence earned through experience, or the sad yet resilient assurance that the sun will shine tomorrow, and we’d best get on with it. No one is born with this knowledge; it’s gained through living, and living much longer than 17 years. And at any rate, as his friend continually points out, Watson sees, but does not observe, and those “hidden fires” are never so secret as he imagines they are.

The Crack in the Lens is exciting and enjoyable, highly recommended for anyone who doesn’t mind extra-canonical speculation in their pastiches. And if that’s what you particularly enjoy, you’ll be pleased to know that a sequel, which follows Holmes to university, is due to be released this spring. I, for one, am looking forward to it. And I would love to know what happened to Professor Hastings.

Well, this ends our February exploration of  Sherlockian romance. There will be more later, never fear! But for now, the first to comment on this post wins a copy of The Crack in the Lens, or if you already own it, its sequel when available (most likely in March). So don’t be shy–let me know what you think!

The Crack in the Lens is available from Amazon and other major online booksellers, as either a print or e-book. For more information, including a list of sources, see www.thecrackinthelens.com

Star Rating: 4 out of 5: “Highly enjoyable; worth your time and money.”

Footnotes:

*Sherlockian convention dictates that, for brevity’s sake, each story be generally referred to by an abbreviation of its first four letters. “The Greek Interpreter,” for example, is therefore written as GREE.

**Typically, he does not tell us which Vernet. Baring-Gould picks Antoine C.H., aka Carle, 1758-1835.

***Baring-Gould got the name “Siger” from the alias Holmes uses during the Great Hiatus, “Sigerson,” which, in the Norwegian it was purported to be, means “Siger’s Son.”

✝ Baring-Gould invented Sherrinford to explain why Mycroft and Sherlock, sons of a country squire, were not actually living in the country. As the eldest, Sherrinford would inherit, and his brothers would need to find other occupations.

✝✝ This used to be a monthly record of executions in Newgate Prison. By Sherlock’s time, it was a collection of moral stories, rather dramatic, based on the misdeeds and sorry deaths of famous historical criminals, and apparently a common book in English homes.



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February 1, 2012 · 8:56 pm

Walters, Charlotte Anne. Barefoot on Baker Street. London: MX Publishing, 2011

Happy Valentine’s Day, Sherlockians!

When I first thought of doing this blog, I planned on reviewing books based on a monthly theme–reviewing only Watson books in July, for example. With the rapid influx of new pastiche, I’ve had to scrap this plan just to keep up, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have the occasional theme month. And since it’s February, what better theme to use than…romance?

I know, I know, a few of you are about to navigate away. Not everyone likes the idea of giving Sherlock Holmes a love life.  But ever since Doyle told William Gillette that he could “marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him,” writers have been taking him at his word and producing quite a lot of Holmesian hook-ups. So many, in fact, that it was hard to choose among them, and I’ve had to leave three of my favorites for another day.  This February, we’ll look at a relatively new work, an older one by an established writer and, finally, a book with a March sequel.

Workhouse Scene; No Wonder Red Wanted Out

Barefoot in Baker Street, Walters wants the reader to know, is not a Sherlock Holmes novel. Rather, it is a novel in which Sherlock Holmes appears. The story actually belongs to Red, a young woman fighting to rise above her workhouse origins. Red is not another Watson, recounting a Holmes adventure through her own eyes; she’s got a lot more to say in this first-person memoir than that.

We never know what Red’s mother named her. She doesn’t know, herself. Like many young couples, her parents come to London seeking opportunities denied them in their rural county and, like many, fail to find them. Red’s father dies in a railway accident, leaving her mother  to take refuge in the massive, infamous Whitechapel-Spitalfields Union Workhouse. There, she dies giving birth, leaving her daughter to a hardscrabble childhood in which she’s named for her hair.

Walters doesn’t shrink from painting the realities of workhouse existence. Because the novel is written as an older woman’s memoir, some details are less graphic than they might have been, but they’re no less horrific. A highly intelligent but strong-willed, emotional child, Red is too volatile to stay in an orphanage; thrown out into the East End streets, she returns to the workhouse.  There she endures rudimentary education, religious and domestic training, and works at pulling apart tar rope until bits of oakum are permanently embedded in her skin. Life at the Union Workhouse is physically brutal, disease-laden and humiliating but, as Red points out, the fact that she has never known any other world  makes it easier for her to survive the harsh conditions which defeat many workhouse denizens. She is strong and able to fend for herself, which she does ruthlessly one night after Union’s schoolmaster rapes her. After killing the manager who tries to block her escape, she grabs the master’s money and flees, taking with her Jude, a young boy she once saved from a beating, who is her only friend in the world.

Unable to return to the workhouse and running out of stolen money, Red and Jude do what many street children did out of necessity and affiliate themselves with a gang–in this case, the Dean Street Gang, led by one Wiggins.  Yes, that Wiggins, and it’s through his “moonlighting” as a Baker Street Irregular that teen-aged Red first comes into contact with Sherlock Holmes. He makes a definite impression, one she doesn’t forget as she’s pulled even further into the London underworld of prostitution, thieving, gambling and alcoholism. Her intelligence and physical strength serve her well, and she carves out a successful, if legally precarious, life for herself and Jude. It’s only a matter of time before she falls into the crosshairs of the Napoleon of Crime, a pivotal moment which changes her life forever.

For the past two weeks, I’ve debated what to do at this point of the review. A summary should, well, be a summary and give you, the prospective reader, an idea of the book’s major plot points.  It should not, however, contain spoilers, and if I go very much further, spoilers will appear one after another, like dominos in reverse. So let me just echo Walters’ description: Barefoot on Baker Street is the story of a woman’s life, and on her journey, Red reaches some very familiar female landmarks. While our lives may not be quite as adventurous or involve plots to, well, rule the world, most of us have encountered the horrible boyfriend, the passionate fling and, hopefully, the stable, mature relationship. Never content with life as it is, and despite tremendous loss, Red continues to grow throughout the novel until one day the savage little girl from the workhouse is only a memory.

Barefoot on Baker Street is Charlotte Anne Walters’ first novel, and the seven years’ of work she devoted to it have had impressive results.* The first half of the book shifts seamlessly back and forth between Red’s early days and her life in Moriarty’s household.** The memoir format makes for quite of bit of  “telling” in place of “showing,”  at least in the first few chapters, but the dramatic flow of events minimize the impact and keep the reader’s attention. Many of the confrontational scenes–and the romantic ones–are electric, although I did find a couple to be slightly overwrought. As everyone seems to collectively lose their minds directly after Moran is arrested in a retelling of “The Empty House,” for example, I found myself wanting to  reach through the pages, shake a few people (Watson, I’m looking at you), and tell them all to calm down.

It’s common for main characters in first novels to be “Mary Sues,” perfect in every way, even their (minimal) flaws somehow adorable. Fiction, romantic fiction in particular, also suffers from a preponderance of feisty heroines, to the point that they’ve become a stereotype. Walters avoids both of these pitfalls. Red is a fully realized woman, more flawed than not, who must do some difficult emotional work to mature. Because she’s so vividly alive, she avoids one of the fates that commonly befall new pastiche characters; the reader cares about her, and doesn’t skip through her story just to get to more Holmes and Watson. The other major characters are similarly well-drawn, Moriarty and Holmes in particular. Walters has an interesting and, I think, believable take on how both men think, and the mental and emotional challenges they face. Watson is less clearly envisioned and sometimes seems out of character, but not fatally so, while Mycroft is treated with care and complexity. As supporting characters, Sebastian Moran, Jude, and Ronald (a new brother for Watson) fill their roles adequately.

Canon devotees need not worry. While Walters does introduce romance and her own characters into Sherlock Holmes’ world, she’s done her research and takes great care with the Doylean universe. Some scenes, such as Holmes’ return from the Great Hiatus, are rendered practically word-for-word, with endnotes. Other stories, such as “The Sign of the Four,” are deftly woven in. “The Blue Carbuncle” gets a bit of a retelling but,  frankly, I like Red’s version a little better (James Ryder, such a sniveller….). Walters also does a decent job with historical detail. One error did recur; although brassiere-like undergarments did exist in the late 19th century, they were very uncommon and the corset was the rule; Red would never refer to a “bra.”

Again, I realize that some of you like your pastiche canon-straight. But if you’re adventurous, and open to allowing the Great Detective a little love, you’ll find Barefoot on Baker Street an exciting, engrossing adventure.  Want to leave your own opinion? First comment wins a copy of this week’s book, or your choice of David Ruffle’s Sherlock Holmes and the Lyme Regis Horror, or a BSB coffee mug–any one of them a perfect Valentine’s Day gift!

*Walters says she is currently working on a screenplay for Barefoot (which is quite visual and would lend itself well to the screen), and has several other books in the mental percolation stage.

** When I first bought Barefoot, I was so eager to read it, I did so on my phone. This was a mistake. While the shift in time periods during the first part of the book are very obvious in the printed copy, they’re not as distinct on a phone.  I was very confused. In a new edition, separation marks might be useful.

For more information about workhouses and the role they played in Victorian society, see: http://www.workhouses.org.uk/

Barefoot on Baker Street is available from MX publishing, major online booksellers (for US readers) and in Waterstone’s and other brick-and-mortar stores in the UK. You can also purchase it from the Baker Street Babes’ Bookshop, here: http://www.bakerstreetbabesbookshop.com/category/Sherlock+Holmes+-+Female+Writers; profits go to support the BSB podcast (which, incidentally, interviewed Charlotte Walters for Episode 10).

Star Rating: 4 out 5  (“Highly enjoyable. Worth your time and money.”)

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