Alright, so while the esteemed Mr Sherlock Holmes is generally (but not, it must be noted, exclusively) on the opposite side of the law from us here on this blog, he and his exploits do have a lot that we can talk about. It would be foolish to suggest that Conan Doyle's almost 60 stories that did so much to establish the Detective Procedural have had no influence on say, the genre of the Heist Flick, or fiction that focuses on the execution of crime rather than its detection.
And so we are going to take a brief break, and wander into the territory of the enemy, because I was given the new “official” Sherlock Holmes novel – The House of Silk, buy Anthony Horowitz – for Christmas, and I have just finished reading it, so feel compelled to furnish you with my review.
First, and most importantly when attempting to add a chapter on one of the most beloved and widely consumed finctional characters of all time (Sherlock still holds the all-character-title for having the largest number of actors portray him), the author must get the world right. Yes, I rank this as the first concern, for the worlds that we are shown by authors in their works grow directly out of the needs of their protagonists, and while every avid reader and potential critic will be scouring the “voice” that both Sherlock and Watson speak in, I would argue that it is the world itself that will ultimately make a story feel authentic or not.
You could pen a Sherlock Holmes story (as so many have) and get the banter between the two leads peerfectly correct, paint the streets of Victorian London with an authentic and richly evocative brush, and make sure that Holmes is dryly superior and Watson blusteringly incompetent and dense (which would be doing a disservice to both those characters, but one that most casual fans would not notice). However, if you have Sherlock investigate a case where a spiritualist turns out to be genuinely in touch with a client's deceased loved one, or an ancient family turned out to actually have 'fey' blood from the times of Arthur still running in their veins... you would not have written a Holmes story.
Importantly, both of those circumstances would have been considered well within the realms of possibility by Sir Arther Conan Doyle, and it is well known that he spent his latter years investigating and trying to prove such phenomenon. But he did not, and would never have, let any unproven or unscientific model of the world be presented within a story that he wrote for Holmes. As the arch rationalist, Holmes requires a world that is held to his own rigorous standards, and no faeries will be allowed in the bottom of his garden.
Does Horowitz get the world right? Well for the most part, very much so. The story is set in London, and the action and mysteries investigated wander between the very Holmmsian settings of the drawing rooms of cultivated manors in Wimbledon, to the fog-shrouded back alleys of Whitechapel. The police, or at least Lestrade, are irrationally obliging in allowing a pair of amatures to wander around and pocket evidence, and the Irregulars are suitaly grubby and endearing. But most importantly, the nature of the mystery is correct: a client's adventure in the colonies leads to some sinister events in his life, secret organisations have their claws in various institutions, dastardly crimes with seemingly simple explanations (and iron-clad evidence) turn out to be much more convoluted than they need to be, once Holmes applies his searing gaze to them. All of this has the definite ring of authenticity to anyone familiar with the Conan Doyle adventures of Holmes. Even the ultimate resolutions are fitting: a grubby, mundane, and entirely believeable set of explanations for some awful crimes.
So, having laid his foundations well, how does Horowitz proceed with filling in those details that I mentioned before? The more visible if shallower conncerns of voice, and character, and setting, that will jar the reader, if not done correctly, and be a continual reminder that you are not enjoying one of the offerings of the original author. How is his craft, in other words?
Well here I am not going to quibble or equivocate: it's Bloody Marvellous. Mr Horowitz does a wonderful job here. It is a testament to the sense of responsibility that he clearly felt when the estate granted him the opportunity to add another “canonical” chapter to the Holmes story. The care that he took over what must have been many many drafts is absolutely apparent as you read the text. I will not go into a complete analysis here, but you can sum up a lot of the techniques used and the successes he achieves by talking wbout one person: Watson.
While Holmes is the protagonist of all the stories and novels, Watson has always been the main character. I have always been a bit of a Watson fan, for once you get beyond being dazzled by the incredibly bright light that is the world's greatest (and only!) consulting detective, in all his wonderful and charismatic glory, you inevitably start to examine and enjoy the other leading man in the tales, and that person also happens to be the guy who is telling you the tales.
Conan Doyle himself often felt frustration with the character of Watson, and even tried to write Holmes without him, to a couple of peculiar and not terribly satisfying results. He felt hemmed in by his need to use Watson as a contunial foil, and the necessity to have him be a particularly blunt one at that, in order to show off Holmes to his greatest advantage. As a result, he never really fleshed out Watson terribly well, only adding notes here and there along the line. Of course, those notes add up to a significant amount of character, over the course of fifty six stories, but the lack of regard for deliberately develping Watson can famously be seen in his “wandering wound”. Conan Doyle first introduces us to Watson as an invalided Army Surgeon, returned from Afganistan, after a Jezail bullet has shattered his shoulder.
Over the next 40 odd years of writing the stories, however, Conan Doyle got a little absent minded, with the result that Watson occasionally complains about the old wound in his leg. And that's not to mention the poor man's wife – Mary Moreston from the second Holmes tale, The Sign of Four. I won't mention her too much, because it is my opinion that Doyle only ever intended Watson to have the one wife, and then decided that she had to die in order that Watson might move back in with Holmes which while heartless, was definitely the right decision for the characters and stories. Sufffice it to say that as the stories are recounte by Watson out of chronological order, but can be somewhat dated by references in them to other adventures, and events of the world periferal to them, some scholars count the number of times Watson relates being recently bereaved as indicating he had a total of six wives.
But back to Horowitz. As stated, I believe his main triumph is in dealing so fairly with the redoutable Watson. As I read page after page, I found mself hearing that incredibly familiar voice ringing in my ears once more. Not only Watson's turns of phrase, but his attitude. His beliefs and his emotions, his reactions and his desires – all rang effortlessly true to the man that I know so well. Even his manner of writing: his eye for detail, and the kind of details Horowitz has him note, and his emotive reaction to all that he is involved with seemed perfectly true to the Conan Doyle character.
There may have been one or two slips – moments when I found myself questioning whether he meant that he heard “growlers” or “handsoms” crawling up and down the street, for it could easily have been either, and the two offer distinctly different pictures of the setting – but after the first couple of chapters I realised I had stopped looking for such instances. He even plays a few delightful little games around the two previously mentioned foibles of the character, mentioning both the wife and the wound, but leaving enough play and vagueness in there to cause the reader to question the exact nature of them both. This of course leads you straight to the answer that Horowitz is not going to state an opinion, or try to sort out Watson's established lack of reliability on the topics, but rather that he is siply going to maintain it. And while cheeky, it is this approach which tells us that the author is going to be both careful and considerate – even loving – in bringing us this new chapter. For it must be remembered that Conan Doyle never took his Holmes work terribly seriously himself. He regarded it as light entertainment, and rued the fact that it detracted attention from his more serious work. So some amount of levity is entirely appropriate, even in a moder author, and to a modern audience, who are well aware together of the genius which that body of work represented.
So, through Watson's voice, and his narrative style, and his excellent historical accuracy, Horowitz manages to spike the landing. He even manages to give us a story that is firmly within Holme's world, with a mundane explanation. Also, he rightly structures the story to allow Holmes to be put in quite dire peril, and leave Watson bereft for a good portion fo the tale, while never forcing Watson to take over a role that he was not built for: that of the Leading Man. No – Horowitz gives him some entirely in character business to get on with, which is in its own way heroic, but nonetheless ends up simply serving to let Homles shine all the brighter himself. It really is a masterful piece of craft, taken as a whole, or in its parts.
Some readers might roll their eyes as every trope that can reasonably be expected to be remembered be casual readers of Holmes manages to turn up neatly in it is place, but knowing the novell to be what it is, I can't bring myself to resent it. Horowitz even manages to give us a portrait of an incredibly famous Holmes character, who nonetheless was actually direly under-represented in the canonical works. For myself, I was a little dissapointed at first by the author's need to include it, but I suppose I knew it was inevitable. And byy the end of the scene I felt that he had managed to pull off the characterisation perfectly – not a small feat considering that the character themselves has been represented on more stories cinematically than they were ever included in by Conan Doyle.
Not only that, but it works as a crime novel. It has a good tale, is well executed, believeable, and clearly written by a professional who knows his business, and is going about it with a purpose. In fact, I must shamefully admit to being too caught up with scrutinising the story for authenticity to spot the trick. Yep, he got me. I fell for it hook line and sinker, and was kicking myself when it came to the end. (And it was a simple one, too – one of the oldest tricks in the playbook, and one that Conan Doyle used himself in Holmes stories, more than once. Well played, Mr Horowitz, well played.)
Both the mysteries feel in isolation exactly like a Holmes story of their own, and all the author has done is use a slightly more modern technique in conjoining the two, to make a more modern narrative structure for us to enjoy them through. You might not even notice it, if again Horowitz didn't deliberately draw attention to it in the preface by Watson. There again, he is playing thoroughly fair with us as readers, and admitting upp front what it is that he has done, and how he acknowledges it as a deliberate anachronism in this tale.
So, the final jugement. the novel feels like a Holmes story. It reads and sounds like a Holmes story. It is honest, and loving and handles the legacy it carries on its shoulders deftly and with grace. It is engaging, and challenging, and exciting, and manages to hold its own as a piece of story-telling, so that is all excellent in itself.
However. Yes, you knew this shoe was dropping. There is something that doesn't quite fit about this book. And it's not an ambiguous something either, but a rather glaring and even fore-grounded part of the narrative. It is no less than the entire premise of the mystery, and the author goes out of his way to establish that it is not the kind of thing we are used to seeing in a Conan Doyle style mystery, starring Sherlock Holmes. He has Watson call it out in the preface, as a reason that the story could not be published in his own lifetime. He describes the case as so shocking it could bring down the government, and he has every right to say so.
Now as a piece of continuity, and as a clever justification for the emergence of the story now, I have no problem with it. Nor do I have any issue with the plausibility of the crime, or its realisation. It is definitely shocking, and the magnitude of the conspiracy proves Watson's claim to be no exaggeration, while still remaining entirely believeable within the society of the time. We are looking back at that time with a modern understanding and are well capable of removing any rose-tinted glasses that we might have any tendency to wear when reading the original stories.
But therin lies the proverbial rub. The very nature of the crime revealed at the end of this book is of a nature that requires us to drop ay romanticism that we might hold for the era. It forces us into a thoroughly modern re-appraisal of what some aspects of Holmse's society were undoubtably hiding, and Horowitz is right in asserting that they are frankly not a subject that Doyle would ever have felt comfortable presenting, even had he dared to imagine them.
And that is quite clearly a problem. Conan Doyle's tales were at their heart crime and detection romances, written by the well to do, for the entertainment of the comfortably off. There is of course something of this in the nature of all crime fiction, even after the efforts of the American Realist writers to address the issue, as identified in Raymond Chandler's scathing piece of criticism The Simple Art of Murder. Granted, Chandler wasn't pointing the finger at past masters, but rather at practitioners from his own era, notably Agatha Christie.
Still, Horowitz hails from that more evolved tradition of realism, and it seems that he has found it impossible to craft a mystery whose resolution is recognisably Holmsian. No, more that that it is distinctly un-Holmsian in its nature. Now, he might well have a point. Modern audiences are not necessarily going to accept a murder mystery, no matter how well done, if it has such a polite and pedestrian resolution as the average Holmes tale. In fact, when reading the orignial tales of Conan Doyle, one inevitably feels a sort of warm, comforting sense of nostalgia – almost suffocating in its ability to put aside the troubles of our modern age, and smooth over the difficulties of the past one. That is part of their charm, and I think in no small measure why we read them still.
That does leave Horowitz with an almost impossible job however. We are willing to tolerate this clearly blinkered romantic view of Victorian London, precisely because of the circumstances and time in which it was published. The text itself is a window into the mores and attitudes of that time, as much as the descriptions held within. But would we find such a tale, penned in an entirely authentic way, by a modern author, anywhere near so engaging? I think not. In fact I think we would find the modern author's failure to deal with Holmes' world in a more circumspect manner a lapse, or a missed opportunity at least. That is, of course if anybody at all bothered to read it, because let's face it – an entirely authentic Holmes tale would present the modern reader, with all their inherited sensibilities of the murder mystery and the developents in that craft, with very little to challenge them.
So in order to challenge the reader, and in order to deal fairly with the realities of Victorian London as we all must understand them to have been, Horowitz gives us a story that has at its very core a concept that does violence to the world of Watson and Holmes. And it does violence to the characters as well. Horowitz has to give both of them little excursions to deal with some of the psychological trauma involved in the case. Even though he makes much in the preface of Watson's reason not to reveal this manuscript till a hundred years have passed (and a very nice touch that is, too) one can't help but be struck by the thoroughly modern nature of the crime, or at least the thoroughly modern act of relating it to the public.
I think therefore that Horowitz has onn the whole done the best job possible, given the brief. He has written a story that could well have been penned by Conan Doyle, if not conceived by him, and executed its telling to us with style and aplomb. In order to pass it off to the momdern reader, however, he has given us a story that is distinctly and jarringly not a Holmes story. He has acknowledged it as such, and even very nicely woven that fact into the meta-narrative within the story, which softens the blow a bit, but it still remains that he has given us a modern tale.
Did he have a choice? There, I think we have the real crux of the issue. and it is the one that will divide fans: is it justified to break the Holmes mold in that way, in order to give us a piece of fiction that works for the modern reader. Horowitz's manners in doing so, and his superb craft go a long way toward repairing any damage, and in the end, I think I must side with him. Yes, you can not simply tell a straightforward Holmes story in this day and age, more than one hundred years since the last story in which he appeared. To try to do so would be folly.
I think Horowitz has done a sterling job: presenting us with a true homage to the great work of Conan Doyle, and also with a gripping modern crime story. You cannot escape the fact that the one cannot on all levels be identical to the other, and where necessary Horowitz has made the difficult decisions, and made them well. I can thoroughly recommend this as a read for anyone who is even a casual fan of the great detective, and believe that most of you would enjoy it.
And so we are going to take a brief break, and wander into the territory of the enemy, because I was given the new “official” Sherlock Holmes novel – The House of Silk, buy Anthony Horowitz – for Christmas, and I have just finished reading it, so feel compelled to furnish you with my review.
First, and most importantly when attempting to add a chapter on one of the most beloved and widely consumed finctional characters of all time (Sherlock still holds the all-character-title for having the largest number of actors portray him), the author must get the world right. Yes, I rank this as the first concern, for the worlds that we are shown by authors in their works grow directly out of the needs of their protagonists, and while every avid reader and potential critic will be scouring the “voice” that both Sherlock and Watson speak in, I would argue that it is the world itself that will ultimately make a story feel authentic or not.
You could pen a Sherlock Holmes story (as so many have) and get the banter between the two leads peerfectly correct, paint the streets of Victorian London with an authentic and richly evocative brush, and make sure that Holmes is dryly superior and Watson blusteringly incompetent and dense (which would be doing a disservice to both those characters, but one that most casual fans would not notice). However, if you have Sherlock investigate a case where a spiritualist turns out to be genuinely in touch with a client's deceased loved one, or an ancient family turned out to actually have 'fey' blood from the times of Arthur still running in their veins... you would not have written a Holmes story.
Importantly, both of those circumstances would have been considered well within the realms of possibility by Sir Arther Conan Doyle, and it is well known that he spent his latter years investigating and trying to prove such phenomenon. But he did not, and would never have, let any unproven or unscientific model of the world be presented within a story that he wrote for Holmes. As the arch rationalist, Holmes requires a world that is held to his own rigorous standards, and no faeries will be allowed in the bottom of his garden.
Does Horowitz get the world right? Well for the most part, very much so. The story is set in London, and the action and mysteries investigated wander between the very Holmmsian settings of the drawing rooms of cultivated manors in Wimbledon, to the fog-shrouded back alleys of Whitechapel. The police, or at least Lestrade, are irrationally obliging in allowing a pair of amatures to wander around and pocket evidence, and the Irregulars are suitaly grubby and endearing. But most importantly, the nature of the mystery is correct: a client's adventure in the colonies leads to some sinister events in his life, secret organisations have their claws in various institutions, dastardly crimes with seemingly simple explanations (and iron-clad evidence) turn out to be much more convoluted than they need to be, once Holmes applies his searing gaze to them. All of this has the definite ring of authenticity to anyone familiar with the Conan Doyle adventures of Holmes. Even the ultimate resolutions are fitting: a grubby, mundane, and entirely believeable set of explanations for some awful crimes.
So, having laid his foundations well, how does Horowitz proceed with filling in those details that I mentioned before? The more visible if shallower conncerns of voice, and character, and setting, that will jar the reader, if not done correctly, and be a continual reminder that you are not enjoying one of the offerings of the original author. How is his craft, in other words?
Well here I am not going to quibble or equivocate: it's Bloody Marvellous. Mr Horowitz does a wonderful job here. It is a testament to the sense of responsibility that he clearly felt when the estate granted him the opportunity to add another “canonical” chapter to the Holmes story. The care that he took over what must have been many many drafts is absolutely apparent as you read the text. I will not go into a complete analysis here, but you can sum up a lot of the techniques used and the successes he achieves by talking wbout one person: Watson.
While Holmes is the protagonist of all the stories and novels, Watson has always been the main character. I have always been a bit of a Watson fan, for once you get beyond being dazzled by the incredibly bright light that is the world's greatest (and only!) consulting detective, in all his wonderful and charismatic glory, you inevitably start to examine and enjoy the other leading man in the tales, and that person also happens to be the guy who is telling you the tales.
Conan Doyle himself often felt frustration with the character of Watson, and even tried to write Holmes without him, to a couple of peculiar and not terribly satisfying results. He felt hemmed in by his need to use Watson as a contunial foil, and the necessity to have him be a particularly blunt one at that, in order to show off Holmes to his greatest advantage. As a result, he never really fleshed out Watson terribly well, only adding notes here and there along the line. Of course, those notes add up to a significant amount of character, over the course of fifty six stories, but the lack of regard for deliberately develping Watson can famously be seen in his “wandering wound”. Conan Doyle first introduces us to Watson as an invalided Army Surgeon, returned from Afganistan, after a Jezail bullet has shattered his shoulder.
Over the next 40 odd years of writing the stories, however, Conan Doyle got a little absent minded, with the result that Watson occasionally complains about the old wound in his leg. And that's not to mention the poor man's wife – Mary Moreston from the second Holmes tale, The Sign of Four. I won't mention her too much, because it is my opinion that Doyle only ever intended Watson to have the one wife, and then decided that she had to die in order that Watson might move back in with Holmes which while heartless, was definitely the right decision for the characters and stories. Sufffice it to say that as the stories are recounte by Watson out of chronological order, but can be somewhat dated by references in them to other adventures, and events of the world periferal to them, some scholars count the number of times Watson relates being recently bereaved as indicating he had a total of six wives.
But back to Horowitz. As stated, I believe his main triumph is in dealing so fairly with the redoutable Watson. As I read page after page, I found mself hearing that incredibly familiar voice ringing in my ears once more. Not only Watson's turns of phrase, but his attitude. His beliefs and his emotions, his reactions and his desires – all rang effortlessly true to the man that I know so well. Even his manner of writing: his eye for detail, and the kind of details Horowitz has him note, and his emotive reaction to all that he is involved with seemed perfectly true to the Conan Doyle character.
There may have been one or two slips – moments when I found myself questioning whether he meant that he heard “growlers” or “handsoms” crawling up and down the street, for it could easily have been either, and the two offer distinctly different pictures of the setting – but after the first couple of chapters I realised I had stopped looking for such instances. He even plays a few delightful little games around the two previously mentioned foibles of the character, mentioning both the wife and the wound, but leaving enough play and vagueness in there to cause the reader to question the exact nature of them both. This of course leads you straight to the answer that Horowitz is not going to state an opinion, or try to sort out Watson's established lack of reliability on the topics, but rather that he is siply going to maintain it. And while cheeky, it is this approach which tells us that the author is going to be both careful and considerate – even loving – in bringing us this new chapter. For it must be remembered that Conan Doyle never took his Holmes work terribly seriously himself. He regarded it as light entertainment, and rued the fact that it detracted attention from his more serious work. So some amount of levity is entirely appropriate, even in a moder author, and to a modern audience, who are well aware together of the genius which that body of work represented.
So, through Watson's voice, and his narrative style, and his excellent historical accuracy, Horowitz manages to spike the landing. He even manages to give us a story that is firmly within Holme's world, with a mundane explanation. Also, he rightly structures the story to allow Holmes to be put in quite dire peril, and leave Watson bereft for a good portion fo the tale, while never forcing Watson to take over a role that he was not built for: that of the Leading Man. No – Horowitz gives him some entirely in character business to get on with, which is in its own way heroic, but nonetheless ends up simply serving to let Homles shine all the brighter himself. It really is a masterful piece of craft, taken as a whole, or in its parts.
Some readers might roll their eyes as every trope that can reasonably be expected to be remembered be casual readers of Holmes manages to turn up neatly in it is place, but knowing the novell to be what it is, I can't bring myself to resent it. Horowitz even manages to give us a portrait of an incredibly famous Holmes character, who nonetheless was actually direly under-represented in the canonical works. For myself, I was a little dissapointed at first by the author's need to include it, but I suppose I knew it was inevitable. And byy the end of the scene I felt that he had managed to pull off the characterisation perfectly – not a small feat considering that the character themselves has been represented on more stories cinematically than they were ever included in by Conan Doyle.
Not only that, but it works as a crime novel. It has a good tale, is well executed, believeable, and clearly written by a professional who knows his business, and is going about it with a purpose. In fact, I must shamefully admit to being too caught up with scrutinising the story for authenticity to spot the trick. Yep, he got me. I fell for it hook line and sinker, and was kicking myself when it came to the end. (And it was a simple one, too – one of the oldest tricks in the playbook, and one that Conan Doyle used himself in Holmes stories, more than once. Well played, Mr Horowitz, well played.)
Both the mysteries feel in isolation exactly like a Holmes story of their own, and all the author has done is use a slightly more modern technique in conjoining the two, to make a more modern narrative structure for us to enjoy them through. You might not even notice it, if again Horowitz didn't deliberately draw attention to it in the preface by Watson. There again, he is playing thoroughly fair with us as readers, and admitting upp front what it is that he has done, and how he acknowledges it as a deliberate anachronism in this tale.
So, the final jugement. the novel feels like a Holmes story. It reads and sounds like a Holmes story. It is honest, and loving and handles the legacy it carries on its shoulders deftly and with grace. It is engaging, and challenging, and exciting, and manages to hold its own as a piece of story-telling, so that is all excellent in itself.
However. Yes, you knew this shoe was dropping. There is something that doesn't quite fit about this book. And it's not an ambiguous something either, but a rather glaring and even fore-grounded part of the narrative. It is no less than the entire premise of the mystery, and the author goes out of his way to establish that it is not the kind of thing we are used to seeing in a Conan Doyle style mystery, starring Sherlock Holmes. He has Watson call it out in the preface, as a reason that the story could not be published in his own lifetime. He describes the case as so shocking it could bring down the government, and he has every right to say so.
Now as a piece of continuity, and as a clever justification for the emergence of the story now, I have no problem with it. Nor do I have any issue with the plausibility of the crime, or its realisation. It is definitely shocking, and the magnitude of the conspiracy proves Watson's claim to be no exaggeration, while still remaining entirely believeable within the society of the time. We are looking back at that time with a modern understanding and are well capable of removing any rose-tinted glasses that we might have any tendency to wear when reading the original stories.
But therin lies the proverbial rub. The very nature of the crime revealed at the end of this book is of a nature that requires us to drop ay romanticism that we might hold for the era. It forces us into a thoroughly modern re-appraisal of what some aspects of Holmse's society were undoubtably hiding, and Horowitz is right in asserting that they are frankly not a subject that Doyle would ever have felt comfortable presenting, even had he dared to imagine them.
And that is quite clearly a problem. Conan Doyle's tales were at their heart crime and detection romances, written by the well to do, for the entertainment of the comfortably off. There is of course something of this in the nature of all crime fiction, even after the efforts of the American Realist writers to address the issue, as identified in Raymond Chandler's scathing piece of criticism The Simple Art of Murder. Granted, Chandler wasn't pointing the finger at past masters, but rather at practitioners from his own era, notably Agatha Christie.
Still, Horowitz hails from that more evolved tradition of realism, and it seems that he has found it impossible to craft a mystery whose resolution is recognisably Holmsian. No, more that that it is distinctly un-Holmsian in its nature. Now, he might well have a point. Modern audiences are not necessarily going to accept a murder mystery, no matter how well done, if it has such a polite and pedestrian resolution as the average Holmes tale. In fact, when reading the orignial tales of Conan Doyle, one inevitably feels a sort of warm, comforting sense of nostalgia – almost suffocating in its ability to put aside the troubles of our modern age, and smooth over the difficulties of the past one. That is part of their charm, and I think in no small measure why we read them still.
That does leave Horowitz with an almost impossible job however. We are willing to tolerate this clearly blinkered romantic view of Victorian London, precisely because of the circumstances and time in which it was published. The text itself is a window into the mores and attitudes of that time, as much as the descriptions held within. But would we find such a tale, penned in an entirely authentic way, by a modern author, anywhere near so engaging? I think not. In fact I think we would find the modern author's failure to deal with Holmes' world in a more circumspect manner a lapse, or a missed opportunity at least. That is, of course if anybody at all bothered to read it, because let's face it – an entirely authentic Holmes tale would present the modern reader, with all their inherited sensibilities of the murder mystery and the developents in that craft, with very little to challenge them.
So in order to challenge the reader, and in order to deal fairly with the realities of Victorian London as we all must understand them to have been, Horowitz gives us a story that has at its very core a concept that does violence to the world of Watson and Holmes. And it does violence to the characters as well. Horowitz has to give both of them little excursions to deal with some of the psychological trauma involved in the case. Even though he makes much in the preface of Watson's reason not to reveal this manuscript till a hundred years have passed (and a very nice touch that is, too) one can't help but be struck by the thoroughly modern nature of the crime, or at least the thoroughly modern act of relating it to the public.
I think therefore that Horowitz has onn the whole done the best job possible, given the brief. He has written a story that could well have been penned by Conan Doyle, if not conceived by him, and executed its telling to us with style and aplomb. In order to pass it off to the momdern reader, however, he has given us a story that is distinctly and jarringly not a Holmes story. He has acknowledged it as such, and even very nicely woven that fact into the meta-narrative within the story, which softens the blow a bit, but it still remains that he has given us a modern tale.
Did he have a choice? There, I think we have the real crux of the issue. and it is the one that will divide fans: is it justified to break the Holmes mold in that way, in order to give us a piece of fiction that works for the modern reader. Horowitz's manners in doing so, and his superb craft go a long way toward repairing any damage, and in the end, I think I must side with him. Yes, you can not simply tell a straightforward Holmes story in this day and age, more than one hundred years since the last story in which he appeared. To try to do so would be folly.
I think Horowitz has done a sterling job: presenting us with a true homage to the great work of Conan Doyle, and also with a gripping modern crime story. You cannot escape the fact that the one cannot on all levels be identical to the other, and where necessary Horowitz has made the difficult decisions, and made them well. I can thoroughly recommend this as a read for anyone who is even a casual fan of the great detective, and believe that most of you would enjoy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment