There’s a terrible vice I need to confess. It’s not quite
as bad as judging a book by its cover, but in many ways, for me, at least, it’s
worse. I’m a sucker for a pretty book and have the collecting bug. In addition, I’m
a slow reader. Combined, these facts mean I tend to amass sometimes complete
series of books before I get around to reading them. In short, if there is a set
of books with covers that catch my eye, I’ll collect them incrementally from
charity shops and, in the case of Alison and Busby books,
The Works.
That’s how I amassed six or seven of Laurie R. King’s
Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell books. To be honest, I avoided reading them
for years because, while the books themselves are indisputably gorgeous, the idea
of Holmes in retirement meeting, then marrying, a fifteen year-old American didn’t
really appeal. That was virtually all I knew about this series, beyond the fact
that it has a good following. I also knew, of course, that
King is a well-regarded American novelist and the creator of Kate Martinelli.
Then two things happened at once. One: I had a huge
clear-out, getting rid of nearly 900 books that I won’t need again (this is hard, and
being an academic I can always tell
myself that I might want to write about Insubstantial
Thriller XYZ or might need to teach Dull
Classic ABC). Still, several beautiful sets of books got the boot: the
highest profile casualty was Ellis Peters. I finally got around to reading from
my near-complete set of attractively presented Cadfaels. If I need to make a
snap judgement, I turn to page 85 and if I don’t end up on page 86 it hasn’t
worked for me. I tried three Cadfaels and didn’t get on with them, so out went most
of those. Laurie R. King survived this cull automatically, though. Anything
Sherlock Holmes related stays, however bad – because I probably will write about it one day. But the
series was on my radar again.
The second thing that happened was this: I read an essay on
King’s novels in
Crime Fiction as World Literature, a great new Bloomsbury book. The essay, by Theo D’haen, described
the first novel,
The Beekeeper's Apprentice (1994)
and its interesting set up. King introduces the novel as herself, saying – in the
traditional way – that she received a box full of (conveniently uncounted, as
there was no telling how long the series would run) manuscripts from a woman
who claimed to know Sherlock Holmes.
Then there is a ‘prelude’ from this Mary
Russell in which she states:
I do not remember when I first realised that the
flesh-and-blood Sherlock Holmes I knew so well was to the rest of the world
merely a figment of an out-of-work medical doctor’s powerful imagination. What
I do remember is how the realisation took my breath away […]
Watson’s stories, those feeble evocations of the compelling
personality we both knew, have taken on a life of their own, and the living
creature of Sherlock Holmes has become ethereal, dreamy. Fictional. […] And
now, men and women are writing actual novels about Holmes, plucking him up and
setting him down in bizarre situations, putting impossible words into his
mouth, and obscuring the legend still further.
The very act of irreverence to Drs Doyle and Watson
ironically reveals attention to the canon, its devices, and its characters, but
also enough competence to avoid trying to emulate them. All of this piqued my interest because it was
very clear that King had done her research, and I thought I might as well give
the first book a chance. So I did, and, while it hasn’t made a die-hard fan of
me, I’m looking forward to reading more, and collecting the full set.
The story is this: in 1915, a young American woman, Mary
Russell, is reading on the Sussex downs when she runs into an elderly – well,
middle-aged – Sherlock Holmes. They immediately start banting like Benedick and
Beatrice with very good A-levels and become friends.
It’s clear from the very beginning that Russell and Holmes
are equals and I particularly like the way King doesn’t overstate Russell’s
cleverness; she doesn’t chuck in obscure Latin references (well, hardly ever)
or little demonstrations of superiority in the way that so many crime writers
do when their hero is cleverer than they are. The characterisation is, like the
character, assured and effortless, and we can’t help admiring and respecting Mary
Russell. When she comes, three-quarters of the way through, to confess her dark
and sordid secret, we are totally on her side.
I was also impressed with the
handling of Holmes’s famous misogyny: King doesn’t milk it or paste over it as
so many do. Instead, she shows him as a brilliant but flawed man who is
mellowing with age.
Russell writes:
Looking back, I think that the largest barrier to our
association was Holmes himself, that inborn part of him that spoke the language
of social customs, and particularly that portion of his make-up that saw women
as some tribe of foreign and not-entirely-trustworthy exotics.
He works with her, she decides, because he sees her as ‘a
lad’ (note: not ‘a boy’); that is, as an apprentice rather than as a woman. The
fear of women that he has expressed has been a product of his social upbringing
– unlike Doyle’s Holmes, King’s is a gentleman amateur – and part of his
absolute focus on his work. It hasn’t been, as it is in Sherlock, a disengagement with sexuality, but rather a total
ignorance of half the human race.
Russell goes off to university, but comes back to visit
Holmes, and they end up getting involved in a transatlantic criminal case in…
Wales. Naturally. From this, they end up in London, donning disguises and
nearly getting blown up. Then they travel to Jerusalem – I’m not entirely sure
why – and back to London, and Sussex (to actually get blown up) and Oxford, and a random ladies’ toilet
where Holmes makes a personal discovery. Mycroft is involved, Watson is
involved, Mrs Hudson is involved, even the long-dead Moriarty is involved. There’s
a war on but we don’t hear much about it.
As a plot summary, this sounds ridiculous and nonsensical,
but King’s eminently readable style just about makes it work. At any rate, I
found myself turning the pages at a steady rate and not really questioning
anything, except the sojourn in Jerusalem. Most of it makes sense at the time.
I did spot the villain, purely because there aren’t many characters, but that
really isn’t the point.
This is one of those novels where plot and social commentary
are hard to separate. The solution is just part of the great narrative message
which is about the pursuit of gender equity. It has a 1990s Spice Girls-level
feminism vibe about it, which is obviously philosophically limited but great
fun to read. By the end, I was relieved that Holmes and Russell hadn’t
yet tied the knot. I am at least now convinced that when they do marry (in Book
2, I think), it won’t be for conventional reasons, and while my Holmes would
never behave in this manner, I don’t deny King hers.
All in all, I enjoyed The
Beekeeper’s Apprentice. I think it could have been a bit shorter and a bit
more streamlined, but in this book King achieves something rare. She does
something original with an overused canon.
