Sherlock Holmes » How Mysterious!

Laurie R. King, The Moor

Jan 082013

Reading Laurie R. King’s Kate Martinelli mystery reminded me that I still have quite a few books to go in her Mary Russell series, so I took The Moor with me on a Christmas trip to New York City. I think I read about 30 pages of it there (The Nutcracker, the Rockettes, Mary Poppins, shopping, etc. impinged on my reading time), but I finished it quickly once I got home.

As with all of King’s Sherlockian stories, The Moor is cleverly written: rather than retelling the Hound of the Baskervilles story, it returns Sherlock and his still-newish wife to Dartmoor years later to figure out why people are seeing a large dog and Lady Howard’s ghostly carriage again. It may be related to Army artillery testing — Mycroft has an interest in that — or it may be something more sinister.

The story begins with Mary schlepping through the rain to meet Holmes at the home of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, whom he introduces (shockingly) as an old friend. In fact, in the course of this story Mary will learn a number of interesting things about Sherlock and his past, and about herself. Holmes actually admits he needs her to help with the case, so she’s almost a full investigative partner, and he’s completely understanding, kind even, when one turn in the case upsets Mary on an entirely human level.

It’s interesting that Mary continues to see a spiritual side to things despite Sherlock’s entirely scientific/rational approach. She feels the moor as an almost physical presence, for instance, and doesn’t want to be responsible for a villain’s death. This gives Sherlock, who does admire his wife’s mind, an opportunity to see the world differently — even if he doesn’t agree with her on such matters.

Another strong entry in the Mary Russell series, but do start from the beginning if you intend to read them all. If not, this one does quite well as a standalone.

One of the NYC distractions that kept me from reading

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (movie)

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Nov 232012

On paper “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” sounds like a great Sherlock Holmes movie. A cast that includes Alan Arkin, Vanessa Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, Robert Duval and Joel Gray; nominations for two Oscars, including best writing; and a plot that brings Sherlock Homes together to conduct an investigation with Dr. Sigmund Freud.

At the beginning of the movie, Sherlock (Nicol Williamson) is something of a paranoid, raving lunatic whose obsession with Prof. Moriarty and whose cocaine habit are both so out of control that Dr. Watson (Duval) is forced to take drastic action. Namely, he tricks Holmes into going to Vienna to meet with Freud (Arkin). The good doctor is able to help Holmes in part by hypnotizing him every time he starts to crave cocaine. In the course of his recovery, though, a fellow patient (Redgrave) is kidnapped and Holmes leaps into action.

Among other things, there’s the stereotypical train chase scene that I despise — yes, the kind where our hero runs along the top of a train and throws himself down just in time to avoid smashing on the top of a tunnel — and Freud’s psychoanalysis of Holmes, which explains not only his choice of profession and attitude toward women, but also his obsession with Moriarty and addiction to cocaine. Oh, and Freud plays tennis.

The film was well-received at the time (1976), but it didn’t do much for me. If you’re after an action-adventure Holmes, go with the Robert Downey, Jr. version.

Laurie R. King, The Art of Detection

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Nov 212012

How Mysterious! reader Peggy recommended Laurie R. King’s The Art of Detection after I raved about Folly and the Mary Russell series. I listened on audiobook and was pretty riveted by the story, and more particularly the story within the story, but was a bit annoyed by a heavy-handed social message — even though I agree with that message.

The Art of Detection is part of another series, set in San Francisco and starring police detective Kate Martinelli. (I haven’t read any of the others.) The book begins with an investigation of a home with a sitting room decorated with gas lights, a violin, and the letters V R shot through the old-fashioned wallpaper with bullets. Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, don’t realize it at first, but it’s definitely Sherlock Holmes’s sitting room. It turns out the victim, whose body was found in an artillery battery near the bay, was a Holmesian who dealt in Sherlockian artifacts for his living.

Kate quickly realizes that the man’s death had something to do with a manuscript Philip Gilbert had discovered and was trying to authenticate when he died. Was the story about Holmes, and was it written by Arthur Conan Doyle on his visit to San Francisco? Kate sits down to read the manuscript, and we get to read along. In the audiobook, the Holmes part of the story was read by a male narrator, setting off the story within a story to make it easier to follow along. I don’t usually like multiple voices in an audiobook but in this case it was very effective, as the Holmes story is told for long stretches without interruption by the Martinelli story. In fact, a couple of times when the story went back to Kate it almost seemd intrusive to the Holmes plot.

The possibly-Sherlock Holmes story tells of a detective’s investigation of the murder of a soldier, found in the same battery where Gilbert’s body was later found. I don’t want to give that story away, because it is so closely connected to what happened to Gilbert. But I will say that the solution has something to do with the soldier’s love affair with a transvestite performer.

That’s relevant because Kate Martinelli, like the soldier in the story, is homosexual. Her partner, Lee, and their daughter feature prominently in the story, as Kate frequently organizes her schedule around her child’s bed time, for instance, or helps her work through her first episode of homophobia at school. So having the Holmes story end in a way that is perfectly rectified by the final scene of the book, relating to gay rights, is just a little too obvious. In fact, I’m having a hard time explaining anything about Martinelli’s story, the Holmes story, or the Gilbert murder investigation that doesn’t just give the whole thing away because they’re all basically the same narrative working out in different ways meant to suggest progress. Because of these close connections, it’s too easy to figure out what happened to Gilbert, and how the book will end. I support gay rights, but making them such a cornerstone of the book took away, for me at least, from the mystery.

I did like both narrators, Alyssa Bresnahan and Robert Ian MacKenzie, and would definitely consider reading another Kate Martinelli mystery.

Laurie R. King, A Letter of Mary

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Aug 072012

Somehow I got sidetracked from Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell series, even though I really enjoyed The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and A Monstrous Regiment of Women. Once I even checked out the third book, A Letter of Mary, from the library but never got around to reading it. And then I missed all three episodes of series two of the BBC Sherlock series, and it occurred to me that I ought to read A Letter of Mary instead. Oh my gosh, how much I enjoyed reading this book!

If you haven’t read any of this series, you should know that Mary Russell is the wife of Sherlock Holmes. She’s a scholar and a detective in her own right, with the wits and training (by Sherlock) to match the great man on every front. The letter of Mary mentioned in the title, though, is not a letter to Mary. Instead, it’s a letter from Mary… Magdelene. As the book begins, Mary Russell has been deeply involved in a scholarly project, when an acquaintance, an unconventional female archeologist, pays a visit. When that woman turns up dead after leaving behind the manuscript, Russell and Holmes launch into action.

The interaction between Holmes and Russell, the mystery of the archeologist’s death, and the possibilities raised by Mary Magdelene’s letter, and a number of possible motives — from Zionism to misogyny to the challenges the letter may pose to Christianity — provide lots of possibilities for the mystery, not to mention fodder for conversation between Sherlock and Mary.

In many ways this book couldn’t be more different from the book I read just before it, Red Cell, yet they both feature strong, capable, smart women protagonists, and that is something to be celebrated.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (Movie Monday)

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Jun 272011

I never reviewed it, but I really enjoyed the BBC’s new Sherlock Holmes series, a fast-paced, modern take on the classic. For some reason, this led me to watch “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking” (2006).

Rupert Everett stars as Sherlock, and this is a depressing, drug-addicted Sherlock whose Dr. Watson involves him in a case just to get him out of his opium-addled stupor. The plot is not based on one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, and I’m afraid it shows. Although it’s only 1903, and therefore years before Freud’s Introductory Lectures, Watson’s fiancee persuades Sherlock to study the psychology of sexual deviance in order to figure out who’s murdering young women in London. Note to the producers: Sherlock is known for deductive reasoning, disguises and the occasional martial arts move — not profiling.

Everett played his part well, but this Sherlock’s not a particularly sympathetic character. Both the wisecracking Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC’s current series and the action-hero Robert Downey Jr. Hollywood version of Sherlock are more appealing, at least to me. This isn’t a terrible movie, but I suggest you hold out for BBC’s series 2 or the Robert Downey sequel.

The Sherlockian

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Apr 152011

After I shook myself out of Blurred Book Disorder, I flew right through Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian (2010), and although I enjoyed it while I read it, I found the resolution to be a bit deflating.

I didn’t realize until I got to the Author’s Note at the end that much of the tale is based on reality. The Baker Street Irregulars, for instance, an elite group of Holmes scholars who meet to discuss and debate the ins and outs of Sherlock lore, really do exist. Harold White, the newest Irregular and the unlikely hero of the book, does not — but he could. Yet the mystery Harold sets out to solve — the murder of another Irregular who claimed to have found Holmes’ missing journal — is based on a real story.

The book is told in chapters that alternate between Harold’s quest to find the killer (and maybe the notebook), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, Moore’s fictional guess at what could’ve happened during the months covered by the missing journal. Both stories were well told and engaging, but both were resolved in ways that I found unsatisfactory.

Ironically, Moore defends (actually, foreshadows, now that I think about it) his book’s resolution through a number of Harold’s conversations and internal monologues. At one point, for example, he’s asked why he loves the stories so much, and he says:

“I think I love the idea that problems have solutions. I think that’s the appeal of mystery stories, whether their Holmes or someone else. In those stories we live in an understandable world. We live in a place where every problem has a solution, and if we were only smart enough, we could figure them out.”

And later:

He’d read thousands of happy endings and thousands of sad ones, and he had found himself satisfied with both.

Harold decides that finding a solution and having to go on living with it is worse than not finding one. I’m not so sure I agree: this book’s resolutions– both what Conan Doyle supposedly did and what Harold finds out about it — both let me down.

How odd for a book I so enjoyed reading!

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

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Mar 292011

I’m pretty picky about which books I’ll actually buy (as opposed to borrow from friends or the library), so it’s revealing that I put Laurie R. King‘s A Monstrous Regiment of Women (1995) on my Christmas list. It means I expect it to be a book that I’ll want to keep.

Put it on your wish list, too.

It’s the second book in King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, and it offers a compelling mystery, involving a mystic, Margery Childe, and the strange goings-on at the New Temple in God, where Childe ministers to poor women and children as well as preaches several nights a week. As a theologian and a detective, Mary Russell can’t help but be interested. When she finally turns 21 and gains control of her family money, Russell throws herself into life at the Temple in hopes of figuring out why several wealthy young women associated with Childe have died, as well as trying to understand Childe’s interpretation of the Bible and the role of women in church and society.

Russell must contend with her own problems as well — her troubling relationship with Sherlock, her academic career, her new fortune, her own beliefs about God — and each of these is just as interesting as the mystery. It is fair to say that these adventures mark the end of Mary’s childhood, which bodes well for the next books in the series.

Book #2 in the Strong Heroine Reading Challenge

Blurry Book Disorder

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Feb 052011

This week’s Weekly Geeks post — “Blurry Book Disorder” — was made for me.

I didn’t realize there was a name for this disorder when I had it last week. At home, I was reading Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian, which takes place in Arthur Conan Doyle’s era at the time he was writing Sherlock stories, as well as the present, focusing on a club of Sherlock fans. And then the book I keep in my bag, for reading while I’m out, was one of Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell mysteries, which also feature Sherlock. I kept forgetting which one I was reading, and expecting Mary to show up among the Sherlockians or Arthur Conan Doyle to appear in Mary’s story. So confusing.

My solution was to put The Sherlockian down, even though it’s past due at the library, because I was farther along in the other book. When I finished that, I started a Michael Palmer, which really couldn’t be more different, and then I’ll go back to Sherlock. From now on I’m going to be sure I don’t have similar characters appearing in my book choices. Even if it means I have to pay a fine at the library.

Fortunately, I’ve enjoyed all three books so far, so BBD didn’t ruin my experience. But I have to say I laughed out loud when Arthur Conan Doyle really did turn up in Mary Russell’s world!

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

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Nov 052010

What is it about Sherlock Holmes and me? I keep saying I don’t like him, and then keep reading/watching Sherlock stories. I’m pleased to report that I really liked this version.

In Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1996), set during and after World War I, we see an older Sherlock through the eyes of young Mary Russell, no relation of mine but a neighbor at Holmes’ countryside retirement home. This Sherlock is still smarter than all the rest of us (combined), but young Mary catches on fast, and Sherlock proves to be fallible, too. This book, the first in a series, takes us through Russell’s apprenticeship and through her first two major cases with Holmes.

The audiobook narrator, Jenny Sterlin, sounded too old to me at first, seeing as Mary is only 15 when the book begins, but her voice grew on me; not only does Russell age during the book, but it’s all supposed to have happened a long time ago, so it makes sense to hear an older voice.

I gave the print version of this book to my mom read and she was indifferent toward it, but then my dad read it and, like me, he thought it was really good. So it’s obviously not for everyone, but give it a look. If you’re like me, you might decide Sherlock’s not so annoying after all. (On the other hand, if you’re a Sherlock fan, you might not like what King’s done with Watson. He’s pretty much a buffoon.)

Buy the book:

Book #8 of 12 in the Audio Book Challenge.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

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Sep 272010

I’ve admitted this before, but it bears repeating: I just don’t think Sherlock Holmes is that great. The mysteries always strike me as too esoteric to be solved by ordinary humans, and Sherlock is annoyingly, downright inhumanly, right all the time. However, almost every other mystery lover loves Sherlock, so I decided to watch “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1939) on the off chance that everyone else might be right. Heh.

The “Hound” in question is apparently haunting the Baskerville family; when one Sir Baskerville is killed by the Hound, the next in line is Henry, who arrives from Canada to claim his estate. Waiting to greet him are friendly neighbors, suspicious servants, a curmudgeon, and Shelock Holmes and Mr. Watson. For some reason it is always foggy at the Baskerville estate, and despite the fog and the Hound, people insist upon walking on the moors, frequently alone and usually at night. Will the Hound get young Henry as well?

Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock is kind of silly, which I didn’t expect, but that did help make the character’s smug omnipotence a bit tongue-in-cheek and therefore less annoying than some of the other Sherlock iterations I’ve come across.

Although the whole thing was a bit unbelievable, I liked the movie more than I thought I would. But I still like Robert Downey Jr.’s “Sherlock” better.

Buy the movie:

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