Anthony Horowitz: The House of Silk (2011)

Edition: Orion Books, 2011
Review number: 1465

The character of Sherlock Holmes has been part of a huge literary industry, possibly the largest collection of what would now be known as fan-fiction ever produced. But The House of Silk remains an unprecedented event, being the first Sherlock Holmes novel actually authorised by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle. The writer chosen to produce this work is Anthony Horowitz. His prior literary output consists of thrillers for teens, the Diamond Brothers and the Alex Rider series. Rather more relevant, I suspect, is his role as the creator and writer of the acclaimed historical crime TV series Foyle's War.

As an authorised continuation of Conan Doyle's writing, it is to be expected that The House of Silk is more like the 'canon' than much of the Sherlock Holmes literature produced by other writers, and this is indeed the case. It does use some of the common devices of Holmes fan-fiction, in particular the idea that narrator Dr Watson had cases that he wished to write about but which were to sensitive to publish, and which were then stored after his death for a number of years. It does not play around with the canon as some Holmes novel do, including some of my favourites, Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series.

The many Conan Doyle-like touches include an American connection, with the story opening with Holmes employed to track down a man who has been terrorising his client, believed to be a gangster from Boston, Mass., where Holmes client had been instrumental in the capture of the gang he belonged to. This story bears a resemblance to the Scowrer plot in The Valley of Fear, also involving the early employees of the Pinkerton detective agency working against a violent gang.

Slightly oddly, given the potential of a series of authorised Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk seems to be designed as a one-off, judging by the preface and afterword (in which John Watson explains the reasons for not publishing this story at the time it happened). Maybe Horowitz didn't enjoy writing this, maybe the Conan Doyle estate only wanted a one off - there's plenty of time for more, though, before the final US copyright runs out on a Sherlock Holmes novel (assuming no changes in the relevant law before then).

The incidentals of the tale - the atmospheric depiction of Victorian London and its exotica, the energetic sleuthing of Holmes and Watson, and so on - are very much done in the Conan Doyle manner, but I found the puzzle very simple indeed. I found it a bit hard to work out whether this is authentic recreation of canon, or something which is Horowitz's own, because I know the Holmes stories fairly well so am not surprised by the twists in them, and I am a much more sophisticated and experienced reader of detective fiction than I was when I first encountered Sherlock Holmes in a comic strip version of The Sign of Four in the pages of Look and Learn in the mid-1970s. Thinking about it, I feel that the mysteries in Conan Doyle are mostly more difficult for the reader to solve. This is my only real caveat; in every other way, The House of Silk is a pretty good addition to the Sherlock Holmes industry, even if in 2012 it would be hard to write a novel with the impact of the original series that was true to the originals as this is. My rating: 7/10.

David Dickinson: Goodnight Sweet Prince (2002)

Published: Constable, 2002

When one things of the British royal family in the later nineteenth century, the immediate image that comes to mind is that of the perpetually mourning Queen Victoria; perhaps secondly there are the mistresses of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. Less well known is the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, because he never actually succeeded to the throne, dying of influenza in 1892. The career of Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (known informally as Prince Eddy) was much more scandalous than that of his father - he is a candidate for the most badly behaved royal in British history, a post for which there is a fair amount of competition. It has even been suggested that he might have been Jack the Ripper.

Goodnight Sweet Prince, the first in Dickinson's series of Lord Francis Powercourt detective novels, takes the death of Prince Eddy as its starting point, to weave a conspiracy theory to rival the wildest stories that concern the death of Princess Diana a decade ago (and one not mentioned in the Wikipedia article referenced above). In Dickinson's fictionalisation, the influenza was a story dreamt up as a cover for the murder of the prince, portrayed as a hedonistic bisexual syphilitic bent on debauching everybody with whom he came into contact; and the subject of blackmail paid by his father. Clearly, an excellent and popular choice of murder victim, and yet someone whose death requires careful and discreet investigation. Working out which of the various motives actually led to the killing is the main point of the story.

As a novel, Goodnight Sweet Prince is somewhat uneven. The title, for instance, takes a sarcastic tone alien to the rest of the narrative - and Prince Eddy is no Hamlet! The first few chapters are a little dull, enough to make me consider giving up reading the book; but in the end I felt that I enjoyed the novel. The mystery is interesting, the background well researched, and the scandal appeals in the way that conspiracy theories in general tend to - fun, no matter how far fetched.

Ann Granger: A Rare Interest in Corpses (2006)

Published: Headline, 2006

A Rare Interest in Corpses initially appears to be something of a departure for Granger. She is best known for her Mitchell and Markby series, and has also written several novels about amateur detective Fran Varady; both these series are contemporary crime fiction (in the sense that they are set in the modern world; the Mitchell and Markby novels are rather old fashioned in tone). Here we have her first historical crime novel, set in Victorian London - not as popular a time and place as might be expected, probably because it is so strongly associated with Sherlock Holmes. In fact, the writer I was reminded of by A Rare Interest in Corpses was not Arthur Conan Doyle, but Anne Perry.

The central character, Lizzie Martin, is a doctor's daughter from the Derbyshire coalfields, forced to take a position as a companion to an older rich widow in London when her father's death leaves her penniless. When she arrives, she discovers that the woman who previously acted as companion to Mrs Parry went missing, apparently eloping with a lover, but, it now turns out, murdered and her body left in the huge building site that would become St Pancras station. Lizzie feels an obligation to a woman who had been in the same situation as she now finds herself to try to find the murderer - a task in which she is much aided by the reluctance of key witnesses to speak to the police.

I have in the past discussed an issue I have with a lot of crime fiction. The genre is very much dependent on plot construction, and in particular on the construction of plots where particular points remain obscure to the reader (though fairly presented) until the very end: the reader has all the clues, but should still be surprised by the revelation of the murderer. Constructing such a plot is quite hard, and a shortcut which is often used is to use a coincidence - an unlikely happening which is not justified by the rest of the plot (it is one thing for an mysterious lost cousin to turn up just at the time of the murder, but much more acceptable if the murderer lures that person there so they arrive on the scene in time to be implicated in a murder they would benefit from). Even when unmotivated coincidences are left in a plot - and it is true that coincidences really happen - they usually have some meaning in the plot itself, whether actually helping to point the way to the solution of a crime, or making it harder for the reader to see the real solution. Sometimes coincidences are used to promote the continuation of a series, as where a character finds a body in novel after novel. At the beginning of A Rare Interest in Corpses, there are two coincidences which really serve no purpose whatsoever. The first of these is that Lizzie, taking a cab from King's Cross station to her new home, is delayed by police removing a body from the half-demolished slums which were Agar Town and would become St Pancras (which is, for readers not familiar with London, immediately next door to King's Cross): this is the body of Madeline Hexham, her predecessor. The second is that the police inspector assigned to the case turns out to be someone she already knows, despite her belief that she is a stranger to everyone in London: he met her when he was a small boy working in a coalmine, where her father was helping with the aftermath of an accident; her father paid for his education, which he put to use in joining the Metropolitan Police. The second establishes a certain bond between Lizzie and the policeman, but not one which could not have been developed in other ways, while there seems to have been no motivation at all for the first.

I found these coincidences, which come very close together near the beginning of the novel, a big hindrance to enjoyment of a book by an author that usually I like a lot. Although I got more into it by the end, I still feel that A Rare Interest in Corpses is Granger's least involving novel. This is partly because the character of Lizzie Martin is not very different from either Meredith Mitchell or Fran Varady, though the forthright attitude they share is interesting in a Victorian pre-feminist context (though it is hardly original in historical crime fiction set in the nineteenth century: as well as characters in Anne Perry's novels, it is also shared by Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody).

A competent historical crime novel, but by no means Ann Granger's best work.

William Rushton: W.G. Grace's Last Case (1984)

Edition: Methuen, 1984 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 742

William Rushton embroils probably the most famous cricketer of
all time in an outrageous and hilarious investigation into the
death of Castor Vilbastard (pronounced Vilibart, as he and his twin
brother Pollux insist), as he is about to bowl at Grace at Lord's.
This investigation, which has its roots in a disastrous MCC tour of
the US a few years earlier, leads Grace and co-investigators John
Watson and A.J. Raffles to Paris and then to the moon, encountering
such famous real and fictional Victorians as Mrs Beeton, Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde, Sarah Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde. Supremely silly, and
consistently funny, W.G. Grace's Last Case is extremely
enjoyable.

Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (1837)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 734

The story of Oliver Twist is extremely well known, mainly because of children's versions of the novel and the film and musical versions. It is a melodrama, about the orphan who grows up in the workhouse, is apprenticed and escapes to London. There, he falls in with a group of young thieves led by the Jew Fagin, but also meets kindly, well off people who help him to the point where his history is discovered and he is restored to his estates.

Oliver Twist was Dicken's first real novel (The Pickwick Papers being a series of episodes), and in fact shows more signs of careful planning and structural thought than some of his more mature works. Like them, Oliver Twist was published in serial form, but reading it in a single volume reveals few signs that this was the case. It is also one of Dickens' shorter novels, which may have also helped its structural unity.

It is of course inspired by the way in which the English Poor Law operated, where the poor were treated more like criminals than anything else, where the system allowed corrupt bullies like Mr Bumble the beadle a free hand, where children were effectively sold as apprentices to tradesmen looking for the cheapest of cheap labour. The social campaigning side of the novel is not handled as well in Oliver Twist as it is in many of Dickens' later books; it frequently threatens to overwhelm the story, which then descends into sentimentality. This is partly because Oliver, like a several other children in Dickens (Little Nell and Paul Dombey are other examples) is very colourless and bland. He is both too naive and powerless to provide much of a commentary on what happens to him.

The most interesting characters in the novel, in fact, turn out to be Fagin and his gang of thieves. He is a bit of a stock character, and has led to accusations of anti-Semitism against the novel. (The character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend is to some extent intended as an apology for Fagin.) These are to a certain extent justifiable (he is consistently described in such terms as "villainous Jew", for example), but Dickens is quite mild by comparison with some of his contemporaries, and he is, of course, a man of his period. There is no particular reason why Fagin should be Jewish, except that Jews have always been accused by their enemies of making up a kind of underground community, closer to their co-religionists than to Gentile neighbours. This is used to give him links to accomplices in other parts of the country.

Nancy is the most three dimensional of all the characters, torn between her pity for Oliver and her desire to do something right on the one side and her love for the unpleasant Bill Sikes and her fear of Fagin on the other. She refuses an offer to help her escape her life, but is then killed because of Fagin's suspicions that she might betray him. Her tragic situation raised Dickens to write better once it had been established, and makes the last hundred or so pages of Oliver Twist come alive much more than the duller earlier sections.

George MacDonald Fraser: Flashman at the Charge (1973)

Edition: Granada, 1989
Review number: 412

The fourth Flashman novel tells of his involvement in the Crimean War, with the Charge of the Light Brigade as its centrepiece. Great play is made on the contrast between Tennyson's heroic poem and Flashman on the back cover ("Was there a man dismay'd? Yes, one - Flashman"). It is one of the most fun of the series, though it does have a darker side in the stupidity of the commanders at Balaclava and the Russian brutality towards their serfs.

Anne Perry: A Sudden Fearful Death (1993)

Edition: Headline, 1994
Review number: 406

The first of Perry's William Monk detective stories to be published in the U.K., A Sudden Fearful Death does not read like the first of a series. The reader is given the impression that they should already know some of the characters, and be familiar with other events and cases. I do not know if there is a precursor to the novel, but if there is not, it is an interesting way to make the reader feel part of something ongoing.

Unfortunately, A Sudden Fearful Death is rather a weak novel, as Perry gets carried away by her mission to expose the unpleasantness of Victorian England. There is no denying that for many people, particularly women, it was a place with much suffering. But the hypocrisy of the period is what marks it out, and it is what obsesses Perry in her other series, featuring Inspector Pitt. Here, it is exposed more publicly, in a trial scene which would surely have become one of the most celebrated cases in the nineteenth century, with at least one extremely unlikely aspect to it dictated by a desire to provide a dramatic ending. (There were surely mechanisms, even then, to present new evidence which comes to light after the conclusion of the prosecution case.)

The other weakness of the novel is that several characters behave inconsistently, particularly the man accused of the murder and his family. Things become known which a much greater effort would have been made to hush up, where Pitt should have a much harder time breaking through the veils of secrecy to find the clues he needs to work out the solution. Most disappointing.

Anne Perry: Callander Square (1980)

Edition: Fawcett, 1986
Review number: 186

Like The Hangman of Cater Street, the first of Anne Perry's Inspector Pitt novels, Callander Square is a tale of the worst of Victorian society's vice and hypocrisy. Other than Charlotte, Pitt's wife, there is scarcely a member of the upper classes without a disreputable secret; Perry's is surely an exaggerated version of Victorian London. (By their very nature, it is impossible to accurately know how many people have disreputable secrets.) Some fairly typical Victorian vices, such as child prostitution, are either still considered too unpleasant to talk about by Perry, or they just haven't yet proved relevant to one of her plots.

The plot concerns the police investigation into the bodies of two babies, discovered in the wealthy neighbourhood of Callander Square when some work is being done in the gardens. They are thought to be the results of a servant girl's indiscretions, so everyone in the square expects the investigation purely to be a formality. Inspector Pitt is in charge of the case, and when Charlotte discovers what he is investigating, her sympathy both for the babies and their mother leads her to take a hand. She encourages her fashionable sister Emily to start visiting in the Square to find out from gossip what's going on, and even manages to get herself a job as secretary to General Ballantyne, who lives in the Square and is writing a history of his family's involvement in the army since the days of Marlborough. Before long, the disreputable secrets of those who dwell in the Square begin to come out, and it becomes clear that there's more to the mystery than first appeared.

It's clear that Anne Perry has found a successful formula in The Cater Street Hangman, and that she has stuck to it in Callander Square. The portrayal of upper-class Victorian society as totally hypocritical may be exaggerated, but it provides many opportunities for a detective writer, through the existence of lots of disreputable secrets which the reader has to work out whether they are connected to the matter under investigation or not.