Tag: mystery

The Pirate King

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

Investigating possible evildoers while filming a silent movie about a movie about a comic opera. It should have been a farce. But in Laurie R. King’s The Pirate King, it’s Holmes and Russell, so it’s an absolutely marvelous froth instead.

Mary Russell does not particularly want to spend a fortnight (that’s two weeks to us Americans) cooped up in Sussex with her brother-in-law Mycroft. In their last meeting (The God of the Hive) Russell discovered that some of Mycroft’s actions on the part of the government were even shadier than she had thought. And Russell, being Russell, didn’t cavil at letting Mycroft know exactly what she thought. This does not contribute to family harmony, even in the Holmes family.

Inspector Lestrade needs someone to infiltrate a film company that seems to have a run of bad luck. Fflytte Films makes a film about gunrunning, and suddenly there’s a rash of illegal firearms everywhere. Fflytte makes a movie about rum-running, and there’s bathtub gin all over the place (1924–Prohibition, remember?) When the producer’s assistant goes missing, Lestrade wants someone who can type to substitute, so he can get a man on the inside. Russell “volunteers” to get away from the Holmes brothers’ family reunion.

Fflytte Films leaves London for Morocco by way of Lisbon to film a movie about a film company making a movie about the making of a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Which is in Wales. But Fflytte Films would never do anything so boring as to film in Wales. Or so boring as to use anything like the real story of the opera. Instead of 4 daughters, the Major General of famous song has 13 daughters. And then, there are the pirates. Since there are 13 daughters, there need to be 13 pirates. And because Fflytte Films is famous for its realism, Randolph Fflytte recruits real pirates, along with a real, honest-to-goodness (or badness) Pirate King.

Escape Rating A+: I stayed up until 1 am to finish this book. This was the lighter side of Holmes and Russell, and was a welcome antidote to the darker doings of The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive. The Pirate King is a lark. Some serious events happen, but there is a happily ever after in this one. Even though it turns out that all of the events were manipulated by Mycroft from the beginning, it is worth it just for the image of Holmes playing an actor playing the Major General courting Russell under the eyes of the entire film cast and crew. Priceless!

Reality 36

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews

Reality 36 by Guy Haley is a really cool mash-up of a sort that doesn’t happen often enough. It’s a science fiction mystery. And not just any kind of mystery, but an old school detective kind of mystery, except that neither of the detectives are from any type of school that Sam Spade would have recognized.

The detective firm in Reality 36 has the name “Richards & Klein” on its doors, which exist in both real and virtual space. The year is 2129, and the world has definitely moved on from 2011. That’s both good and bad.  Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a story.

The Mr. Klein, of Richards & Klein, is Otto Klein. He’s ex-military. It’s not even uncommon today for ex-military personnel to go into security work in some way, or at least not uncommon according to TV and the movies. But Otto Klein is an ex-military cyborg. That’s definitely more 2129 than 2011.

And Richards, well, Richards is an AI. Yes, that’s Artificial Intelligence. But in 2129, AIs beyond a certain level are citizens, as are other creatures that don’t currently exist. Richards is a Class 5 AI, one of the most powerfully intelligent AIs remaining that didn’t go insane. There are AIs running lots of things in 2129. There are 3 AI Uncle Sams running the fractured government of North America. They substitute bureaucracy for power. I’m still snickering over that one.

What is Reality 36 itself? Reality 36 is one of the game worlds that has been closed since the AIs that populate the game worlds were determined to be, you guessed it, self-aware and sentient.

How do Richards & Klein get involved? A simple murder that turns out to be not so simple. A man is killed. A human, not an AI. But a very important man to the AIs. The man who argued, lobbied and fought for AIs to be granted citizenship. Professor Zhang Qifang is found dead on a yacht. And in a London alleyway. And in his apartment in Los Angeles. And captured alive but with a faulty memory. When all the living and dead clones turn up (plus the one dead “real” Professor), it turns out that the situation is even messier than they thought.

And that whoever the villain is, he, she or it is targeting Richards & Klein specifically. And anyone who can help, will help them, or might be reasonably predicted to help them is in danger. And only an AI could make those kind of predictions. But which one has gone rogue? Who watches the watchers?

Verdict: Reality 36 is a kind of cybergeek technothriller with its roots back in noir fiction. If any of those types of stories appeal to you (they do to me) you will enjoy this book. Richards loves to adopt the personas of Sam Spade/Raymond Chandler-era detectives whenever possible (I’m certain he would have empathized with Captain Picard’s holodramas of Dixon Hill). Klein is the world-weary side of the equation, older, wanting to retire, but not ready to hang up his guns just yet, still making up for the bad things he witnessed.

Richards is also an anti-hero. He seems to be the only Level 5 who still has a sense of “play” for want of a better world. He definitely does do work, but only on his own terms, which makes him the only one with the power and the ability to stop the rogue. So he and his partner are the targets from the beginning. Watching them run through the “maze” is a fantastic introduction to the new universe that Haley has created.

But for a very new-fangled story (the AIs are even called neukind), this book has an extremely old-fashioned ending. It’s a total cliffhanger! Richards leaps into the virtual eye of the storm and the story continues in the next book, Omega Point. Dammit. I want to know what happens next.

Escape Rating B+: I couldn’t quite manage to stay up to finish it–but I finished over breakfast the next morning!

Spoiled but not rotten

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | reading

When I think of “spoilers” I hear the word spoken in River Song’s particular sing-song, usually accompanied by the endearment, “Sweetie”, and inevitably followed by the opening of her Tardis-blue diary.

The Doctor and River Song are living their relationship out of sync with time relative to each other. The first time the Doctor meets River, she has known him all of her life but he’s never met her before. Every time they meet after that, each of them remembers different pieces of their relationship, but on the whole, at least so far, what she remember is his future, and what he remembers is her future — and he knows that her future is going to end badly. His is going to contain an unbearable amount of pain. But then, so does his past. However, there’s the inevitable time paradox involved. His future is her past, so what has happened must happen. Even though River knows it will bring him agony, she must let it happen–she can’t spoil it. The actual fate of the universe is at stake. “No spoilers,” are allowed.

But we regular humans seem to like spoilers. Or we do according to an article that appeared earlier this month in Wired that immediately went viral. The research indicates that spoiling the ending of the book or the big surprise finale of a TV show helps most people enjoy the story.

This makes sense, doesn’t it? How many readers thumb to the end to find out what happens? Honestly? I know I do. Not at first, because the ending wouldn’t make sense. But after a third or maybe halfway, then I’m interested in seeing if I’ve figured things out. I’m curious if I’ve guessed “whodunnit”. Or if the evil villain I thought it was really is the actual “big bad”, because sometimes the “man behind the curtain” conceals yet another “man behind another curtain”. Of course, sometimes that “man” is a “woman” or a vampire, or a dragon. To each genre their own.

Even when I find out the ending, I still don’t know how the author gets there. The journey is always entertaining, even when I am certain of the destination. And when I have guessed wrong, then I really, really want to know how the author fooled me.

If we humans didn’t enjoy predictability in our fiction, we wouldn’t re-read the same books over and over, which we do. We also wouldn’t re-make the same story in different settings. West Side Story is still Romeo and Juliet. It was a good story both times, but it was the same story, dressed up in different clothes. Everyone knew how it ended.

The thing about thumbing to the end is something that is different with ebooks and digital media. I wonder what effect it will have?

Listening to an audiobook, it’s just difficult to zip to the end and then zip back to where you were. This is particularly true since people often listen to audio because their hands are otherwise occupied with something important, like driving. The medium just doesn’t lend itself to the idea of the casual flip to the back of the book and then flop back to where you were before.  Mysteries are particularly popular in audiobooks, and this maybe the reason. It’s just plain hard to find out if “the butler did it” until the end, even if you really, really want to.

With ebooks its a lot easier. I can bookmark the page I’m on, go to the end, and then go back to my bookmark. It’s possible. It’s even easy. I’m realizing that I just don’t do it, and I don’t know why. New medium, new method.

The Dark Enquiry

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

The Dark Enquiry is the latest entry in Deanna Raybourn‘s Lady Julia Grey series. In this installment, Lady Julia and her husband, Nicholas Brisbane, have recently returned to London from both their honeymoon in the Mediterranean and an extended trip to India to solve a murder.

Solving murders together is nothing new for Brisbane and Lady Julia;they met when she hired him to solve the murder of her first husband. In fact, their entire courtship was conducted over a series of the recently and feloniously deceased.

But marriage, for better or for worse, is different than courtship. Upon returning to London, Brisbane returns to his business as a private enquiry agent. Lady Julia intends to be a full partner in his business. Brisbane, despite all previous evidence to the contrary, considering that Lady Julia has participated fully in every case he has been involved in since they met, keeps trying to find ways to “protect” her. His methods of protection unfortunately include lying to her for her purported own good. Lady Julia, who resents being coddled, starts leaving important details out of her accounts to her husband, in order to follow him around and determine what is being kept from her, especially as the case that Brisbane has taken on concerns her oldest brother.

Once the tale got past the marital discord, the real story finally got moving. And move it did. Initially, Brisbane seems to be investigating a fake spiritualist who was blackmailing Lady Julia’s oldest brother with some indiscreet letters he once wrote her. Unfortunately, the spiritualist turned out to be much more than a blackmailer.  She was also a spy, and a spy in the service of more than one paymaster, at that. The only problem was that she was a dead spy. And between her blackmailing activities and her spying, the number of possible murderers seemed to be multiplying.

The second half of this book kept me riveted. The story flowed, the pace was fast, the plot kept twisting and turning. The setting in the early 1900s is also part of the appeal. Technology was just being adopted, so the telephone and the motorcar were new. Some people were willing to use the new tools, while others thought they were demonic. Being on the telephone, or not on it, made a big difference. Photography was new and exciting; the discoveries and art that could be made with it are fascinating. The spying is an important part of the story. The “Great Game” of European politics was going strong, leading up to World War I–this was a game that was about to be played for the biggest stakes of all.

The first half of the book really dragged for me. There was a need to show the marital adjustment, but it took much too long and was repetitive. Lady Julia and Brisbane didn’t just meet over a corpse, they kept meeting over dead bodies. Also, her family were known eccentrics. For him to expect her to be anything remotely like a conventional wife, or vice-versa, would have been out of character. I just wish it hadn’t taken half the book for them to give in to that fact.

The Beekeeper and his Apprentice

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

In 1914, Sherlock Holmes participated in his last official case as published by Dr. John Watson. The case, His Last Bow, took place at the eve of the First World War, and detailed the wrapping up of two years of Holmes’ infiltration into German espionage on British soil just before the Great War. At the end of the story, Holmes and Watson say goodbye, and Holmes returns to Sussex to keep bees. Mrs. Hudson even takes part in the case, going undercover as the German official’s housekeeper in order to assist Holmes.

But after the case is over, Holmes is left with nothing to do. And His Majesty’s government comes to the realization that Holmes might have been killed, or even worse, kidnapped, during the course of his work. Ransoming a national treasure like Sherlock Holmes would have been even more embarrassing than a state funeral!

So Holmes is forced into a retirement with no hope of any cases to enliven his days. In the official Canon, this was never good. He descended into black moods, played the violin at all hours of the day and night, and resorted to cocaine. Mental inactivity was always a worse enemy than any criminal mastermind.

In 1994, mystery writer Laurie R. King published the first of the memoirs that she received from Miss Mary Russell. The memoirs were delivered by UPS in an old fashioned steamer trunk wrapped in cardboard. The stories they told were incredible.

According to Miss Russell’s memoirs, in 1915, when she was 15, she quite literally tripped over Sherlock Holmes as she was walking over the Sussex Downs with her nose buried in a copy of Virgil. She was uncertain at first whether he was a tramp or just an Eccentric. During their subsequent conversation, his upper-class accent firmly placed him in the Eccentric category. But it wasn’t until she correctly deduced that he was attempting to find a group of feral bees to re-stock his hive that he realized that she might possibly have a brain. The story of their continued association, and Mary Russell’s training as Sherlock Holmes’ apprentice is told in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.

Until now, the entire Mary Russell “Kanon” has been told from Russell’s perspective, and an absorbing one it has been. But in preparation for this fall’s release of the next book in the saga, titled The Pirate King, the story of Holmes’ and Russell’s initial meeting is finally being told from Holmes’ point of view.

Beekeeping for Beginners is Holmes’ story of that fateful meeting. It has always been clear that Holmes rescued Russell, but until now, he has never been willing to admit that she saved him. Her training gave him purpose. Her sharpness of mind sharpened his own back to its laser-like brilliance. We all need to be needed. Even the Great Detective.

I discovered The Beekeeper’s Apprentice on audio when it first came out. The premise intrigued me. I had read a chunk of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but the idea of Holmes taking on an apprentice was, well, implausible, to say the least. But Mary Russell is more than a match for Holmes, and the period is perfect. She arrives in his life after the Conan Doyle Canon is over. I was captivated and enthralled, and each new book is a delight. But with Beekeeping for Beginners, I went back and reread not just the first part of Beekeeper’s Apprentice, but also His Last Bow. to see the whole story fabric knit together. It works. From the high of his last case, to the slough of despond of total ennui that Holmes so often experienced, to the bright, sharp girl who needs training, and becomes…if you haven’t read them yet, I envy your upcoming discovery.

Good cops, strange beats

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

In an urban fantasy, when the detective needs to round up the “usual suspects”, those suspects can be pretty unusual. That’s actually part of the fun, seeing how close the author can hew to the traditional line of the mystery or police procedural formula and still bite the reader with that touch of the weird.

In any urban fantasy, there is a touch of alternate reality going on. History as we know it has gone down a different leg of the trousers of time (to borrow a phrase from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld) and magic works in the here and now. In urban fantasy, it’s our world, our history, our pretty much everything, except there’s this one big change–magic and magical creatures co-habit with science.  How that happened changes from one author to the next.

A lot of authors work from the theory that magic has always existed but that magic practitioners have tried to hide themselves. Remember the Salem Witch Trials? If magic does exist, that era of real history would be enough to keep any real witch (or any other unusual being, for that matter) from revealing themselves for several generations.

In Laura Anne Gilman‘s alternate New York, her world has always contained magic. Magic is current, that is, electricity. Ben Franklin wasn’t out there with that kite because he was conducting a science experiment, oh no. He was trying to control the lightning because in Gilman’s version of history, Franklin was a mage! But Gilman’s modern-day protagonist, Wren Valere, has a slightly more profitable use for her magic–she is a retrieval agent. She finds things that are lost, or missing, or stolen–and retrieves them–even if they are protected by magic. But Wren’s life is complicated by too many things: her changing relationship with her business partner, her friendship with the demon P.B., and that fact that Wren is a Lonejack, a Talent who works alone, and now the organization that keeps tabs on Talents, the Cosa, short for Cosa Nostradamus, suddenly wants to control her. The first book in Gilman’s Retrievers series is Staying Dead. Wren’s journey is worth following.

In P.N. Elrod‘s Vampire Files series, the detective is a vampire, although he keeps it a secret from everyone except his partner. Jack Fleming’s first case is to find out who turned him. Bloodlist has all the elements of a 1930’s noir detective novel except that the detective is a vampire. The moral dilemma of a vampire dealing with, and later in the series, becoming, a Chicago mobster in the 1930’s is absolutely priceless.

But my current favorite for mind-bending urban fantasy is DD Barant‘s Bloodhound Files series. So far, it’s Dying Bites, Death Blows, and Killing Rocks. The title puns are pretty typical of the gallows humor. Jace Valchek is a FBI profiler who specializes in serial killers, the really whacked-out kind. Her job is exciting enough in the first place. Then she gets whisked away to an parallel universe by the their national security administration because in their version of reality, only humans commit serial crimes, and, humans are less than 1% of the population. So what are the rest? Vampires, werewolves, golems, and pretty much every other supernatural creature that Jace only knows of in legends. But someone is murdering them, and Jace is the one expert they located who could possibly figure this out.

So Jace is stuck. Unless she finds their serial killer, she can’t go home. She might find another magic practitioner to send her to her world, but only they know exactly when they took her from. Her best chance of going back to find her old life reasonably intact is to help. And profiling serial killers is what she does.

What I enjoy about Jace’s story is her point of view. The mystery she solves in each book is fun, but I like being in her head. Her story is a “fish out of water” tale. The world she has been taken too is “almost” like hers, like ours, but not quite. She starts to adapt, and then something brings her up short. Her partner is a golem, named Charlie of all things. Charlie is a snappy dresser, and he likes to dance! But he’s made of rock. When he gets wounded, he needs a patch kit, not a medic. Her new boss is a vampire who may look like an 18-year-old surfer dude, but is actually hundreds of years old. In every encounter with the bad guys, she is reminded that she is part of an endangered species. Humans are called O.R.–that’s short for “Original Recipe”, and the name is derived from KFC. Like Jace, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at that revelation. See what you think.

If you just want a sample of some weird detecting? There is an urban fantasy anthology titled, you guessed it, Unusual Suspects.

 

June is Audiobook Month

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audiobooks

The Audio Publishers Association promotes June as Audiobook Month. Last week, when we had to drive up in separate cars, I couldn’t even think about the drive without planning for an audiobook. I never drive long distance without one. The question was, which one?

I was in the middle of a mystery, A Test of Wills by Charles Todd. It’s the first book in his/her/their Inspector Ian Rutledge series. (Charles Todd is a pseudonym for a mother-and-son writing team) There was no question that I was going to either finish the CDs before I left Florida, or I was going to copy the thing to my iPod and finish on the road. I finished on the road.

By the time I decided to return everything to the library, I only had 2 discs left, so I needed a second book for the 6-hour trip. I chose An Impartial Witness, the second book in Todd’s Bess Rutledge series as my next selection, and purchased it from Audible.com. I had already read A Duty to the Dead, the first book in the series, and found it excellent, so I was looking forward to continuing Bess’ story.

Both books were appropriate choices for the Memorial Day weekend, as well as just plain good books. The Todds series are historical mysteries, focusing on the World War I era in England. Bess Rutledge serves as a nurse or, as they were called in England during that period, a nursing sister, with the British Army. Her father is a retired Colonel still doing classified work for the military, and Bess and her mother have “followed the drum”, going with her father to his various postings around the British Raj. From her travels and her own profession, she has acquired a much broader and less prejudiced viewpoint than would be typical of her race and class at that time. Her nursing experience, and the disruption brought about by the Great War, cause her to get involved with people and circumstances she might not otherwise, and bring her into contact with potential crimes, as well as potential spying and put her life in danger at home as well as from bombing near the front.

Inspector Ian Rutledge survived his war, just barely. Rutledge is the victim of shell-shock, what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He was an officer during World War I, but before the war, he was a police inspector, solving homicides. He has returned to Scotland Yard in the hope that returning to his old job will help keep the quite literal voices in his head from hounding him into bedlam. He is uncertain if he retains enough of his old skills to perform his old job, and he is handed a case deliberately designed to trip him up. But coming face to face with his own demons turns out to be just the boost he needs.

So, on Memorial Day I listened to mysteries during wartime. I admit, I didn’t see the symmetry until afterwards. I was looking for compelling stories, and I found them.

Detecting with cats

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | cats

Mystery author Lilian Jackson Braun died Saturday, June 4 at the age of 97. Braun was the author, or perhaps the perpetrator would be the better description, of The Cat Who series of mysteries. She was probably the single author responsible for the entire genre of cozy mysteries with cats as, not merely lap adornments, but actual detectives.

The concept began innocently enough. Her human protagonist was a newspaper reporter named Jim Qwilleran. Like so many detectives, both amateur and professional, Qwill has gone through some rough patches in his life, and is now trying to get his life back on track. A former crime reporter, he is now “demeaning” himself by covering the art beat–a last chance given by an old friend. But crime comes to him, a gallery owner is murdered, and Qwill decides to investigate the homicide. As part of his investigation, he “temporarily” adopts the gallery owner’s Siamese cat Koko, convinced that the cat must have seen, heard, or perhaps sniffed something related to the murder. Qwill’s investigation, his redemption, and his growing “partnership” with the cat Koko complete the story of The Cat who could Read Backwards, the first in the 29-book series that ended with Braun’s death this weekend.

Braun started a trend. Throughout the series, Qwill believes that Koko is providing him with hints and clues, but Koko still acts like a cat, and only like a cat. The “clues” that Qwill gets from the big Siamese are all a matter of the human’s interpretation.

But it’s pretty easy to trace the line of descent from Koko to two feline detectives who really ARE the detectives, Midnight Louie and Joe Grey. Midnight Louie is the co-narrator of a series of mysteries, starting with Catnap by Carole Nelson Douglas. His human is a public relations freelancer named Temple Barr, and the city they investigate is the Sin capital of the U.S., Las Vegas. Midnight Louie is an overweight, all black tomcat who sounds like he just stepped off the stage of the latest “Guys and Dolls” revival. Louie has clawed his way through 21 books so far, and is still going strong.

Joe Grey is my personal favorite, partly because Joe knows what happened to him is wrong for a cat, and he thinks about it sometimes, then washes himself and goes back to solving crimes, usually after he’s ordered delivery from the local deli over the phone. In Cat on the Edge by Shirley Rousseau Murphy, we discover Joe Grey, a smoke grey tomcat with white socks a docked tail. Joe suddenly discovers he can talk, and understand, human. He just doesn’t know why, or how. Then he witnesses a murder behind his favorite deli. Now he has the power to do something about it. But with the ability to talk like a human, comes the ability to think like one, too. Cats don’t face moral dilemmas–but Joe Grey does.

Lilian Jackson Braun created a cat who had his human convinced that he was helping him solve crimes. After three books, she stopped her successful series for 18 years, then picked it back up by moving her human and his feline assistant from the big city to a place she created, Pickax City in Moose County, a place “400 miles north of everywhere”.  Moose County was so far north, it even had a town named Brrr. Read the books. Especially some night when you need to cool off.

 

Real person fiction

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

Real person fiction, otherwise known as RPF, is a term used in fanfiction to describe a story that uses the actors playing the characters in a TV show or movie rather than the characters themselves. And what is fanfiction, you ask? Fanfiction is when someone writes an alternative version of something they watch, read, or play and posts it somewhere that is fanfiction friendly like fanfiction.net or livejournal.com. There are also sites dedicated to specific interests. The number of sites devoted to Harry Potter is positively legion. Fanfiction is very definitely a violation of copyright, but, since no one makes any money off of it, most writers allow it.

But RPF is a breed all its own, and a lot of sites won’t touch it. There is a very big difference between imagining any kind of behavior one cares to between fictional characters, and applying that same imagination to real people–the tabloid papers at the grocery counter notwithstanding.

However, there is a growing trend in mystery writing of using real people as amateur sleuths. An amazing number of historic figures have been pressed into service in recent years, solving a surprising variety of dastardly deeds that history did not record.

One of my favorite books is The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey. It is a police procedural and a historic mystery, wrapped in a single package. In the police procedural framing story, Tey has her police detective laid up in hospital with a compound fracture. While he is unable to investigate real murders, and is bored out of his mind, he is forced by inactivity to find another occupation. Because the story was written in the 1930’s, her detective does not have the option of surfing the net, or even TV as mind candy, even if he were inclined to mind candy. A book someone brings him causes him to latch onto the idea of investigating the historic mystery of the Princes in the Tower–Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, who disappeared sometime after 1483.  Shakespeare’s play, Richard III, has pinned the crime of the Princes’ murder on their uncle and successor, Richard. Tey’s detective makes a different case.

Reading The Daughter of Time in my early teens gave me a lifelong interest in British history. The title is based on an old adage, “Truth is the daughter of time”. Whether Tey’s conclusion is the truth, no one knows. The topic is one that has been debated for over five centuries now, and Richard as the murderer has been fixed in the popular imagination. Although bodies purported to be the Princes were found in 1674 and possibly 1789, forensic testing has not been performed to date.

Imagine my surprise to discover that Tey herself had been “borrowed” as a fictional detective! Nicola Upson has begun a series of mystery novels using Josephine Tey as the center of a series of murders based in Tey’s real life as playwright Gordon Daviot. Ironically, both Tey and Daviot were pseudonyms, her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh.

The first novel in the series, An Expert in Murder, revolves around the end of production of the play Richard of Bordeux in 1934. The play was Tey/Daviot’s most popular work, and was the theatrical event of its time. Many of the real participants left detailed memoirs of the period and their friendship with Tey (Sir John Gielgud, for example) and Upson’s portrait of the theatrical world in the 1930’s is fascinating. One does hope that not quite so many dead bodies turned up as in this mystery.

There are two more books in this series so far, Angel with Two Faces and Two for Sorrow. I plan to read both ASAP. But as much as I’m enjoying this series, there is something very ironic in this. Tey was, by all accounts, including Upson’s own, an extremely private individual. Making Tey the leading character in a mystery series is probably something she would have shied away from or made one of the suitably biting comments for which she was apparently famous. Too bad she can’t write this play, or novel, herself.

 

Holmes is everywhere

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

Every generation reinvents Sherlock Holmes to suit itself.  The current revision, Sherlock, was created by the same team that is also at the helm of Doctor Who. This is totally appropriate, as Sherlock beat Doctor Who for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best Drama Series. The announcement was made yesterday, on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. Watson would have been pleased, especially since the actor who plays Watson also won for Best Supporting Actor.

Sherlock is either a reboot or an update of the Holmes canon. The premise updates Holmes into the 21st century, complete with cellphones, GPS, non-smoking restaurants, competition from modern forensics, and modern psychiatric diagnosis of Holmes’ quirks. Sherlock knows he is a high-functioning sociopath. This doesn’t stop him from solving crimes that the police can’t. Watson is still a police surgeon invalided out from the Afghan war.  It’s the same unwinnable war. Some things do not change.

I was astonished at how well this premise worked. It’s not the canonical Holmes, and yet it is. We forget that when Conan Doyle wrote Holmes originally, they were contemporaneous. Holmes was a creature of his times. It’s only to us that they are historical because the Victorian period is one that turned out to be a memorable epoch. And, ironically, part of the reason that the Victorian period is memorable is probably due to Holmes.

I also watched the Robert Downey Jr. /Guy Ritchie version of Sherlock Holmes not too long ago.  Once the main plot finally got going, I enjoyed the movie, and it was great steampunk, but…Downey just isn’t my Sherlock Holmes. The late Jeremy Brett still matches the portrait I see in my head when I think of Holmes, more or less.  But the “great detective” has lent himself to a multitude of portrayals over the years since Conan Doyle first published Watson’s stories, and every character in the canon has been given his, or her, due.

The original versions of the Sherlock Holmes canon remain cracking good stories, which is one reason why they have continued to be read and re-interpreted to this day.  But the fun is in the re-imaginings.  TV’s updated Sherlock is just the latest in a very distinguished line.

The resemblances between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Gregory House on House M.D. have been commented on too many times to be repeated. The creator of House has admitted that the show is an homage to Holmes in a number of ways.  Holmes=Homes=House just for starters.  There were even two episodes of Star Trek, the Next Generation where Data portrayed Sherlock Holmes on the holodeck.

Authors have continued to push the “world’s first consulting detective” into cases that his original biographer did not pursue.  One case in point, Holmes and Jack the Ripper, were, or would have been, contemporaries.  Had Holmes existed, Scotland Yard would surely have called him in to investigate such a notorious and inflammatory series of murders.  In Dust and Shadow, by Lyndsay Faye, Holmes is both a suspect and an investigator into the Ripper killings, as Watson follows his friend into horror.

On the other hand, if you prefer villains as heroes, Michael Kurland has written a series where Holmes is a bumbling, drug-addled idiot, and Professor Moriarty is the actual hero of the piece.  The Great Game concerns the “Great Game” of European politics in end of the century—the 19th century, that is—Europe, as the great powers tried to stave off, or speed up, the advent of the “Great War” that we know as World War I.

Holmes has featured in other worlds, particularly in the recent collection The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which includes the award winning story by Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”, where Holmes and Moriarty join forces in a parallel universe in which the Cthulhu Mythos of Lovecraftian invention has taken over Victorian England.  Very improbable indeed!

Last, but absolutely not least, the series which contains the answer to the question, “What did Holmes do after he retired to keep bees in Sussex?”  His last recorded case (His Last Bow) takes place in August, 1914.  And then?  According to Laurie R. King, in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, he kept bees, took way too much of his 7% solution of cocaine, and was slowly killing himself in boredom.  One afternoon in 1915 a fifteen-year-old girl tripped over him on the Sussex Downs with her nose buried in a copy of Virgil.  And the second act of his life began.