So, yes, Horowitz kits out Holmes as Holmes. He plays his tricks of deduction, surprises Watson with (somewhat) astonishing revelations, magicians his way out of a scrape or two. You may have noticed we haven't really talked about Sherlock Holmes. But if you're not quite satisfied and the pastiche sends you back, maybe for the first time, to the original stories, to A Study in Scarlet or The Red-Headed League, you'll enjoy what extra hours you have with Conan Doyle's Sherlock. You'll probably enjoy it, and probably leave it _ not quite satisfied _ on the hotel lobby bookshelf alongside abandoned copies of Die Bourne Identitat and Harry Potter och Fangen Fran Azkaban. Read it for yourself on a long flight or during a few hungover days at the beach. It's a detective story after all, and it's a perfectly good one. Or how Holmes solves the yoked adventures of the man in the flat cap and the House of Silk. Maybe that's what we want from a detective story. Maybe it's just easier to go for the facile CSI: Crime Scene Investigation kill, without dwelling too long on the consequences. Maybe, as David Foster Wallace once suggested, there are limits to what an interested critic can ask of an interested author, an interested reader. Maybe it's not Horowitz's moral cowardice, but Watson's Victorian decorum that won't let reality get drawn too real. Maybe Horowitz _ writing after the fashion of Conan Doyle pretending, in turn, to be Watson _ knows this particular ventriloquism too well. Maybe it's mean spirited to raise cavils against a literary pastiche of this kind, against The House of Silk's species of page turner, such a cracking good yarn. The novel's failure to look its victims in the eye makes our complicity as readers equally easy, unsettling. The wrong itself remains unpainted, unexamined. It's an easy vileness, and Horowitz doesn't really own it (even when he has his Sherlock return to exact a bit of against-type, cathartic requital at the scene of the crime).
But the particular nastiness Horowitz chooses as his denouement _however stock it may be in fiction and film _ is played cheaply. And the original Conan Doyle stories had their fair portion of murder, grotesquerie.
Of course pulp fiction thrillers trade on sex and violence, the allure of vice. But, when Horowitz finally outs the House of Silk's gilded depravity, the stylised nightmare of our passage through London's netherworlds takes on a different character. To dwell too heavily on what's standard fare for such aestheticised period pieces might seem a bit killjoy. The novel is an Instagram portrait of London given a certain Conan Doyle filter: the city fetor prettied by gaslight, the Street Arabs' poverty eroticised. A not dissimilar nostalgic lust hangs about Horowitz's storytelling.
YA NOVEL SHERLOCK HOLMES TV
Historian Simon Schama lambasted Downton Abbey, the hit TV programme, for engaging in "cultural necrophilia", fulfilling audiences' unhealthy desire for an unreal past. From 221B Baker Street to a grange for homeless boys, an opium den to stately manors, a prison to a perilous wunderkabinet, Holmes and Watson's pursuit of the first mystery entangles them in the final unsettling problem of the House of Silk. A rather benign tale of a flat-capped man loitering (yes, mysteriously) at the gate of an art dealer's Wimbledon villa soon descends into a succession of increasingly brutal murders across Victorian London. Horowitz has crafted a consummately entertaining and functional Holmes tale, but the novel is still strangely unsatisfying, and stranger, disquieting.Īn elderly Dr John Watson, alone with memories of his years as friend and chronicler of the great detective, decides that he must set down a last untold Holmes story _ one "too monstrous, too shocking" to have been published before. The House of Silk isn't terribly obsequious, nor does it play too fast and loose with Conan Doyle's canon and spirit, unlike certain recent bombastic, steampunk silliness at the multiplex.
He's a dexterous prose stylist, Mr Horowitz. Available at Kinokuniya.Ĭommissioned by the Conan Doyle Estate, Horowitz's contribution to the Holmes apocrypha benefits from what Alex Rider, his best-selling YA teen spy novels, and his fine Foyle's War taught him about crafting artful and clever genre dramas. THE HOUSE OF SILK: The New Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz 320 pp, 2011 Orion, 953 baht.