A scandalous crime has been committed, sure enough – but it’s Holmes and Watson who have unintentionally been done over, guv.

A (slightly harsh) ** It didn’t actually make me angry, and I had a reason for persevering with it. But …

Before we get stuck into reviewing this novel, let me nail my colours to the mast.

I own three full sets of Conan Doyle’s fifty-six short stories and four Sherlock Holmes novels (including the glorious Folio Society one pictured) below; the entire seminal collection of BBC audio (starring Clive Merrison and Michael Williams); and two non-fiction ‘biographies’ of the great detective.

I’ve even dabbled in writing a tiny bit of fan-fiction. Getting the chance to write (and teach) a GCSE scheme of work for ‘The Sign of the Four’ some years ago was a highlight of my teaching career.

I’m not a Sherlock snob, honestly! I like a pastiche as much as anyone else. Take a look at Related Reads, below, if you don’t believe me.

However, as you can imagine, my expectations of new Holmes stories are, well, high … and this makes objectivity a little tricky.

Let’s acknowledge my bias and move on.

Rubin’s plot is satisfyingly opaque: an actor consults the great detective with a seemingly trivial but troubling issue relating to his engagement to play the title role in a short tour of Shakespeare’s Richard III. In no time, this leads to our heroes being dragged into an uneasy partnership with Professor Moriarty and his henchman, Colonel Sebastian Moran. The stakes couldn’t be higher as the quartet find themselves at a mysterious mountain-top resort in Europe.

So far so good. And there’s plenty of detail from the original stories to satisfy the casual reader as Watson and Moran narrate alternate chapters of the adventure.

But there’s the rub …

Again, maybe it’s one for the nerds – forgive me being hyper-fussy. We’ve got four familiar voices in this novel: our crimefighting duo and their foils.

One of those narrative voices is horribly ill-judged.

Colonel Sebastian Moran,

Moriarty’s right-hand man has an impressive CV. He’s the son of a cabinet minister, and Eton / Oxford-educated before a truncated (and chequered) career in the army, followed by a spell as a big game hunter. With a rifle in his hands, he’s the greatest shot in the empire.

Moran only speaks in one of the original stories, The Adventure of the Empty House (1903). Apart from denouncing Holmes as a ‘cunning fiend’ when he’s caught, this is what he has to say (to Lestrade):

“You may or may not have just cause for arresting me,” said he, “but at least there can be no reason why I should submit to the gibes of this person. [Holmes] If I am in the hands of the law let things be done in a legal way.” [a]¹

Why am I giving you all this background?

Because in Rubin’s hands this well-spoken scion of an establishment family is transformed into some kind of cheeky cockney sparrow-turned thug.

Suspension of disbelief is one thing – hearing this new Moran talk about ‘geezers’ and spraying lower class vernacular around like buckshot from a double-barrelled gun is just wrong. No, in Moran’s world, people don’t ‘shog off’, cigars are not ‘tent pegs’, and Holmes and Watson are not ‘nancies’.

And there is about as much likelihood of Conan Doyle’s Moran describing a fat man as a ‘buttery prick’ as there is of Lestrade solving a case without help.

I’ll go further: if you’re writing about such familiar and well-loved characters, you ought to expect a degree of nerdiness and scrutiny amongst your readers. If you don’t want people complaining that Moran’s tone is inauthentic, then write a similar story about brand new characters …

Look, if you’re a casual Sherlock fan, it’s worth 3*. But someone should have had a word in Gareth Rubin’s ear before this was published. Given the book was apparently endorsed by the Conan Doyle Estate, it’s them in the dock …

Over to you: let me know what you think.

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Related Reads

Stephen King, The Doctor’s Case, in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1987) – it’s a surprisingly satisfying pastiche in a superb collection of horror short stories.

Nick Rennison, Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorised Biography (2005) – required reading for those of us who like to play ‘The Game’ and pretend that Holmes and Watson are real.

Antony Horowitz, Moriarty (2014) – THIS (and its predecessor, The House of Silk (2011)) is what Holmes pastiche should look like. Muscular and twenty-first century bleak, but authentic.

James Lovegrove, Sherlock Holmes and Shadwell Shadows (2016) – this is the first of three which fuse the Holmes canon with HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Good fun.

Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water (2020) – a decently twisty mystery on board a ship, with a famous detective not a million nautical miles away from our boy.

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1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Empty House (in the 1903 collection, The Return of Sherlock Holmes) ↩︎