If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
See also
These lists capture other detective/crime stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (Natasha Pulley)
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Robert Downey Jr’s second outing as the detective)
- Moriarty (Anthony Horowitz)
- Series 4 and 5 of Ripper Street
Review
Like many detective fiction authors and readers, I find Sherlock Holmes endlessly fascinating and a bit troublesome. He is not, actually, all that interesting. I always think that Conan Doyle drew him a bold figure in a few lines through the original fiction. This leaves us lots to fill in and room to manoeuvre as neo-Victorian, Sherlockian authors, of course, but also can create a trap whereby the character does not seem to need much work once those strong lines are echoed. I’m afraid I found this book a little for flat for precisely this reason, although I admit that I’m also new to MacBird’s series of Holmes stories, and she’s no doubt earned the right to treat her characters to some extent as “to be taken as read”.
I similarly found the plot a little paint-by-numbers, illustrated perhaps by some of the precedents in the “see also” section. The historical anarchists attacks of the fin de siècle are fascinating, and one of the things that I love most about neo-Victorian tales is getting to see the history reworked in new ways. It can really add depth to the background of any story, and in my own writing I’ve found it often offers some interesting jumping-off points. But much of what happens here in MacBird’s novel is all surface, almost mechanically designed to get us from A to B. There are no particularly interesting detours. It feels cold. We get little insight into the villains of the piece, for example, the most interesting of which (a young female anarchist) gets almost zero air time except as a device to introduce Holmes to some other characters and make a play of creating multiple cases that in the end all weave into one, as is so typical for modern Holmes stories.
One might put this down to zealous editing, but I also found this element rather frustratingly slack! Occasionally one wonders what on earth the copy editor was thinking. Commas in particular seem designed to baffle, having no attachment to the usual principles of their usage, but closing speech marks also go astray (for which this is much less excuse). It is also regularly a little careless in its prose, which in turn made me feel like a pedant. For example, “enormity” is misused, verb tenses switch in error, and the titles “Lady Gainsborough” and “Lady Eleanor” are used interchangeably in a way that is generally puzzling if there had been even some cursory research. When I grumble about this sort of thing, as I do occasionally, I often feel bad because I know that everyone will have tried their best to get things right. I feel less charitable here, however, as this is bigger-budget publishing. If there writing were more slick and the plotting/characterisation less so, I think this would have been a much more satisfying read.
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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