Concerning Mr. Sherlock Holmes

[truepenny]

Thoughts on Laurie R. King and The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Or On the Segregation of the Queen. Also pastiche and prose style. Spoilers for King, Conan Doyle (in general), Gaudy Night (Sayers), The Seven Per-Cent Solution (Nicholas Meyer), Stranger at the Wedding (Hambly--v.v. mild spoiler). Mention of Witch Week (Jones), the Windrose Chronicles (Hambly), Rex Stout.


I quite enjoyed The Beekeeper's Apprentice. Entertaining fluff, with plenty of esoterica to make me feel like I was learning things. I like that in my fluff. I quite like King's take on Watson and Mycroft, although frankly after an hour in her Watson's company I would have beaten him to death with a shovel as an act of mercy.

(And someone that stupid and guileless could not have written the canon stories. Watson makes himself look stupid in canon, and he's no genius, but there's a lot of self-deprecation and self-effacement involved. Bad actor, certainly. IQ on a par with a not-very-bright St. Bernard, no.)

My problems with TBA are two. The first, as I mentioned in a comment to marith last night, is Mary Russell herself. If I label her a Mary Sue, I think that gives the wrong impression, because I certainly am not about to argue that Laurie R. King is or believes herself to be anything like Mary Russell. But Russell is very definitely a wish-fulfillment, along the YA lines of Menolly in Anne McCaffrey and wossname in Lackey (Tanya? Toria? Whatever her name is.). You can tell Russell for what she is by several distinctive markers:

1. She's extremely tall. Height extremes are always a dead giveaway.

2. Tomboy. Girls who are tomboys in historical (or pseudo-historical) fiction are almost always wish-fulfillment characters.

3. Long blonde hair. Past her waist long. And for a gal who spends so much of her time cross-dressed, that's both stupid and implausible. Long hair braided up under a cap looks different than short hair. (Barbara Hambly knows this: cf. Stranger at the Wedding.)

4. Tragic, guilt-ridden past. With scars.

5. Unappreciated orphan child.

6. SPECIAL. Check out the beginning of her friendship with Holmes. Getting the best of him at their first encounter. (See #3.) Noticing things he doesn't. Cork-brained derring-do that succeeds.

7. Lodestone of Holmes's life. Miraculous effect on him, yada yada. Cherished of the World's Only Consulting Detective. Putting Russell on a pedestal much, King?

8. Everyone who meets her adores her. Patrick Mason, Jessica Simpson, Mycroft Holmes. (Come on, King. Mycroft, like Sherlock, is a rampant misogynist as well as misanthrope. That's quite different than childish and endearing awkwardness around pretty young ladies.)

9. Oh, yeah, and despite the height and the tomboyishness and the passing for a guy at a moment's notice, apparently a raving beauty when she bothers.

10. Plus the myopia that never actually gets in the way of anything. It's fun to write characters with handicaps (it's a ludicrously easy way to build sympathy), so long as it never gets in the way of the plot--I confess to having done it myself. Barbara Hambly is the only person I can think of who writes myopic/astigmatic characters like they really ARE blind without their glasses. This is one reason I will love Antryg Windrose forever. Ooh, also Diana Wynne Jones in Witch Week. Charles really does need his glasses, and they're part of his character, not just an accessory.

Mary Russell isn't real.

Neither, you point out, is Sherlock Holmes. Well, yes, but Conan Doyle balances him out with Watson, who is utterly, prosaically real. King's giving us Holmes and Holmes, only one of them is young, blonde, and beautiful. It throws the dynamic off--and I wouldn't mind if it weren't for the fact that Russell is so chimaerical.

My other problem is with the mystery half. I'm a pretty good mystery audience. I don't make much effort to figure out whodunit, and I will swallow brightly colored porcupines without noticing. But, come on! Russell's Maths Tutor? Who just happens to turn out to be Moriarty's daughter? We haven't even gotten as far as "implausible" with Patricia Donleavy. And leaving aside the weeds of Cloud-Cuckooland she doth wear, she's not properly set up for. There's an art to making a minor character the villain. Dorothy Sayers does it BRILLIANTLY in Gaudy Night, and with that before us, it's easy to see that King rather boots it. We don't even learn Patricia Donleavy's name (which is not itself any kind of a clue, since canonical Moriarty has no family and I don't think the name "Donleavy" is ever assigned to anyone) until Russell realizes she's the villain. That's bad structuring. Chekov's axiom about the gun on the wall isn't always true, but it's a useful tool to check if your plot is level. And King's plot is distinctly skewed.

Moreover we're only told about Russell's intense and somewhat crush-esque relationship with Donleavy in that final climactic scene. Up until that point, Donleavy has only been the eccentric, cranky Maths Tutor whom Russell doesn't much like. So Donleavy bursts onto the stage in the last act and we are instructed to believe that she has been important and visible all along. Which, no. She hasn't. You can't retcon inside a novel; that's what second drafts are for.

And there's a big double-barrelled cop out on the motive front. First she goes for the Batman/Montoya gambit: "You killed my father!" and then she whips out the gibbering lunatic ploy, which Dorothy Sayers has some scathing things to say about somewhere. (Is that in Busman's Honeymoon? My mind's gone blank.) Sayers villains may be and often are unbalanced, but they don't commit murders merely because they're nuts. They have motives, and their motives are real and immediate. Not like Donleavy's VENGEANCE VENGEANCE VENGEANCE. She's a villain, but she has no character. (The one aspect of her that I did like, and thought was brilliant and subtle and should have been played up more, was her insistence on first names. Calling Holmes "Sherlock"--it's always so wrong and unnatural, even when Mycroft does it, and it's the only way she ever really gets under his skin in the climax. That little tiny thing was ... I don't know. But it felt true, in a way that most of the rest of the book doesn't.)

It's easy to build a mystery: enigmatic clues, inexplicable events. That's fun, and you can go on doing it indefinitely. The tricky bit (and the reason I doubt I'll ever be a mystery writer) is when you have to whisk aside the drape and show the mechanism. That's where many otherwise perfectly good mysteries fall on their faces, as this one does.

Now that I've torn the book to pieces, I should reiterate that there are things I liked about it. The dialogue, for one (although she cheated shamefully by indirect discoursing her way past Holmes and Russell's staged arguments). The crimes themselves were ingenious (I particularly liked the Simpson sequence), and she did a good job with the deducing from details shtick that is the hallmark of Holmesian sleuths. Really, the problem is simply that she built the thing up too big. We didn't need to escalate from the Simpson case; we didn't need the personal element (itself a sign of inferior mystery writing; Rex Stout went down that path a time or two, and it was ALWAYS a mistake--except for the one where Archie got himself arrested to make Wolfe take the case. That was neat. That same mistake was also the mainspring of one of Robert Parker's more dreadful outings). She made the stakes too high for her denouement.

And I think it was a mistake to buy into the myth of Moriarty quite so whole-heartedly. My favorite take on Moriarty is Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution, where Moriarty is merely Holmes's childhood math tutor, and his diabolical evil is the product of Holmes's cocaine-twisted brain. I have big problems with Meyer's version of Freud (short version: he's too nice), but I think his Moriarty is brilliant.

But King replicating Moriarty in his daughter--an Oxbridge don who controls an immense international web of crime and plots personal vendettas on the side--pitilessly highlights all the ways in which ACD's original conception is simply ludicrous. The more you think about Moriarty, the more he looks like a bad mytharc episode of The X-Files.

King doesn't have ACD's gift for turning a phrase, either, although her dialogue is funnier. (Esp. Sherlock and Mycroft:

     "But was that deliberate or an oversight?"
     "I suppose a group of criminals can overlook essential organisational--"
     "For pity's sake, Mycroft, it's not the government."
     "True, a certain degree of competence is required for survival as a criminal."
(King 217)

And:

     "I dislike the idea of a murderer employing children," said Holmes darkly.
     "It is, I agree, bad for their morals, and interferes with their sleep."
     "And their schooling," added Holmes sententiously.
(King 223)

Okay, I'm done now.)
This is the great pitfall of Holmes pastiche; whatever his egregious flaws as a plotter, ACD had a prose style, which has gone on to affect writers from Sayers to Wodehouse, and on and on like ever-widening ripples. And if you can't write Doyle's prose, you need to think long and hard and carefully about writing Holmes pastiche.

That, I think, is actually NOT a place where King falls down. She sets it up very carefully so that she doesn't have to try to match ACD's prose, although I think Holmes qua Holmes loses a lot of his character when he's not framed in ACD's intricate and stately prose. I quite like King's Holmes, but he never really matches up for me with ACD's Holmes (King has Russell SAY that Holmes is "a Victorian gentleman down to his boots" (King 299), but he isn't, you know). But, then again, ACD's Holmes would never be guilty of the atrocious displays of sentiment in which King's Holmes wallows, so it's probably just as well.

Final verdict: fun but flawed. I even hold fluff to exacting standards. It's my besetting sin.


---
WORKS CITED
King, Laurie R. The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Or On the Segregation of the Queen. 1994. New York: Bantam Books, 1996.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Fascinating.

Holmes pastiche is something I have an occasional sweet tooth for, and I'm very picky about people getting Conan Doyle's prose style right; to my mind Nicholas Meyer and Loren Estleman are the only people I've seen really succeed - Meyer not so much in The Seven Per Cent Solution as the other two, but Estleman's Holmes-Dracula book is a thing of beauty, particularly Holmes and Van Helsing bristling around each other like fighting cats.

On the other hand, I make a special exception for Sam Siciliano's Angel of the Opera, which does a Holmes-Phantom of the Opera story in a prose style befitting the latter, to go beside The Canary Trainer which fits the former. I really must find a copy of that for myself, it would be very interesting to read both those books together.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I should read The West-End Horror again; I didn't like it the first time I read it, but that was when I was about twelve.

I hadn't heard of the others--now THEY go on my list (esp. the Holmes-Dracula one). Prose style is key, it's true. One of the many things that doesn't work about Stephen King's attempt, "The Doctor's Case," is that he has only one way of writing "Victorian" prose, and that's the way he uses for the bodice-ripper in Misery. Anything less appropriate to Sherlock Holmes is hard to imagine. And of course once I realized that was what was happening, I became completely incapable of ever reading the story again, because now it just reads to me like a parody, which was not the intent. And Holmes, like Lord Peter, is a character I love too much to want to see him satirized. It's like watching somebody make fun of a dear friend.

Thanks for the pointers!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

To my mind West-End Horror is more about Meyer having fun with Shaw and Oscar and Gilbert and Sullivan than about being a Holmes pastiche, but The Canary Trainer was good. I've never seen a copy of Angel of the Opera other than the one I read, which was borrowed from my Evil Siamese Twin, so should you encounter more than one copy of it, let me know ?

Estleman's Holmes-Dracula book has had a recent iBooks reprint, I got it in Seattle in January, which unfortunately says Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula in large red letters while removing The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count from the cover altogether. He has also written Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes, but I've not read that yet.

One further honourable mention, if you happen to like the style of the originals, is Cay Van Ash's Ten Years After Baker Street, which is a quite good AFAICR pastiche of a Fu Manchu novel that draws in Holmes and Watson in due course.

Sayers being scathing

[(Anonymous)]

the gibbering lunatic ploy, which Dorothy Sayers has some scathing things to say about somewhere. (Is that in Busman's Honeymoon?

This bit? Chapter 12, BH, Harriet to Peter:

"So they will. Frightful. All the same, I do think it looks neater to have a comprehensible motive. Murder for the fun of it breaks all the rules of detective fiction."

Cheers,
Sean

Re: Sayers being scathing

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's the bit I was remembering being in Busman's Honeymoon, but it's not the bit I was thinking of. She has a remark somewhere about madmen being disappointing villains ... Gaudy Night? Have His Carcase? Damn it all, usually I can place Sayers quotes to within a chapter or two, but this one is eluding me.

It'll come to me. Later. Probably at some inopportune moment. Or I'll just reread all of DLS again and find it.

Or (she says hopefully) you or someone else will come up with it.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

It is in Strong Poison when Peter is subtly interrogating Harriet about her motives for doing in Philip, under the guise of plotting an imaginary novel, and Harriet says "Let her be someone with a monomania - not a homicidal one, that's dull and not really fair to the reader".

And I have lots to say about Mary Russell - mainly that entertaining as they are, when you read Folly or Birth of a New Moon you realise that they represent a considerable waste of King's talents, unless (as is possible) she writes them as light relief, to come down after the big ones, like Greene wrote stuff like Monsignor Quixote.

But I've had a shit week and am off to the pub, so I shall opine about King later when lubricated.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you, yes! That was the bit that was nagging at me. I knew it was Harriet and Peter, but I'd somehow got it in my head they were talking about the Wilvercombe case.

Shall eagerly await your comments on King. If she's written better stuff than this, I do indeed want to know about it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

... they represent a considerable waste of King's talents, unless (as is possible) she writes them as light relief, to come down after the big ones, like Greene wrote stuff like Monsignor Quixote.

I've been thinking about this.

I find that I don't really buy the stress-relief defense for writing bad books. Light-weight books, yes, but not bad ones. Although now I'm trying to think of someone who writes both "serious" and "light-weight" books with equal ease and not getting any search results. Well, except Shakespeare.

I had no objection to Connie Willis writing To Say Nothing Of The Dog for light-weight comedic relief from oh, say, Doomsday Book. But I object strenuously to the fact that TSNOTD is a DREADFUL book, clumsy, ham-handed ... I won't go on. I guess what I mean is that comedy takes as much or more work than tragedy, so while the psychological relief may be there, I don't think it's an excuse to let up on the craftsmanship. P. G. Wodehouse is a counter example; nothing serious ever happens in a Wodehouse book, but they're as tightly and flawlessly crafted as a Swiss watch. They have to be; farce depends on timing.

Not, of course, that King is writing farce (although that would have been preferable, frankly, to the overwrought and implausible melodrama she DID produce), but my point is still that, if that is an excuse, I don't think it's a valid one. (And, I hasten to add, I'm not saying you do, either. This isn't an attack or a rebuttal, just that that comment started me thinking, and this is the result.)

But I'm a perfectionist and can't do things by halves.

The rest of the Mary Russell series

[riani1.livejournal.com]

There are several sequels to Beekeeper's Apprentice that really make the Mary Sue-esque qualities a bit harder to ignore. King seems torn between writing a Holmes novel and a commentary on early 20th Century politics adn sociology. I own TBA, but I don't own the others. I'd go into the reasons I twinge at them, but others may want to read them unspoiled.

I personally don't care too much about whether the prose is Doyle-esque or not, if the story is good. I can never remember authors, but there's a lovely story called, I believe, Sherlock Holmes and the Sacred Sword that is just a tremendously fun adventure yarn in the old pulp serial vein. It is fairly Doyle-esque, I suppose, and Watson manages some real derring-do, as much by happenstance as by intention.

The Estleman stories are good, though more Doyle-esque and homages to their literary precedents than straight adventures. They're good, but I more often re-read the adventurous stories.

One thing that annoys me is authors' prologues, where they try to explain where they came by the manuscripts. Or when they insert footnotes trying to explain how they dealt with some problem in the purported handwriting. I get very tired of authors showing off their Holmes research. I have a smidgen more respect for authors who just dive into the story.

Re: The rest of the Mary Russell series

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The prologues and the like can be fun; it's one of the many things I adore about George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series. But, then, he's not swanking about his command of Sherlockiana; he's talking about real history.

I suspect the provenances and footnotes also largely come from the tradition exemplified by W. S. Baring-Gould's Annotated Sherlock Holmes (which, she says a trifle smugly, I own, in a single volume edition suitable for bludgeoning back attacking Visigoths). I find the insistence on pretending the stories are nonfiction to be oppressively twee, but it is a dominant characteristic of the breed.

And thanks for the warning re: Russell. I may seek them out anyway, but if she's starting down Anne Perry's appalling path (I really quite liked The Cater Street Hangman, but then the blasted woman got a social conscience, and it was All Over), I shall know not to expect too much.

Re: The rest of the Mary Russell series

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I nmust admit, I rather liked Baring-Gould's Holmes biography, and I do appreciate it when writers of Holmes pastiche endeavour to remain consistent with the existing corpus and what is deducible therefrom, much of which is better summarised in said biography than anywhere else.

Re: The rest of the Mary Russell series

[riani1.livejournal.com]

>(which, she says a trifle smugly, I own, in a single volume edition suitable for bludgeoning back attacking Visigoths)

mine's in two volumes, so I could get a two-fisted defense going against the Visigoths.

Re: The rest of the Mary Russell series

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dude, I've seen the 2 vol. set. You must have wrists like iron bars if you can wield those puppies one-handed. Sensible Visigoths (if there is such a thing) will steer clear. *g*

Re: The rest of the Mary Russell series

[riani1.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't say it would be a good defense, but at least it would scare them off.

I also have the Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana, which has lovely tidbits and pictures about the Victorian world. I need a bigger library, so I can have all these things on one shelf.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Gaudy Night on TV wasn't me. I know the BBC has done more than one series of Sayers, but I've never seen any of them. I mean, I'd love to take the credit for single-handedly denouncing purveyors of bad taste, worse pastiches, unforgivable sequels, and unfaithful adaptations, but I must have a co-champion out there somewhere.

GAUDY NIGHT on tv

[oracne.livejournal.com]

It was me. I don't usually rant in my journal, but I was overcome.

[lcohen]

There's an art to making a minor character the villain.

this complaint is ringing a bell for me. i think the book where this really hit home was one of the nero wolfe books written by robert goldsborough--probably the second one since i think i made it through the first one being merely dissatisfied. but in the second one that i read, the villain was someone who had been barely referred to up until then or some such thing and i gave the whole project of reading non-rex stout nero wolfe books up as a Bad Idea.

we didn't need the personal element (itself a sign of inferior mystery writing; Rex Stout went down that path a time or two, and it was ALWAYS a mistake--except for the one where Archie got himself arrested to make Wolfe take the case. That was neat.

now see, i don't have a problem with any of the ones that i can think of except the one involving nero wolfe's daughter. the orrie cather ones, for example, were okay with me.

(as you may have gathered, i've not read enough holmes books to comment on them, but i have read rex stout's books over and over, through the years.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I suppose I like my detection cerebral rather than emotional. This would explain why I like Conan Doyle, Sayers, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Emma Lathen ... So it always seems to me like a cheap way out when the author resorts to having an established character be either murderer or victim. But that is, I grant you, a personal quirk.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

OK: here goes

King's Mary Russell books are fairly entertaining, and I own three of them in hardback, but I can't see myself buying another one, at least, not unless second hand. The final one (Justice Hall) got badly on my nerves, partly I think because I really couldn't buy the central premise. Basically she was dabbling effectively with a Buchan pastiche as well as a Holmes pastiche, with the main character a Sandy Arbuthnot or Lamancha type, but it really didn't work for me. I also really disliked the second one - Monstrous Regiment - though this may not be wholly fair - I mean, it may have hit me badly for personal reasons (the handling of the drugs theme I found squicky in the extreme). However, I do find otherwise unexplained supernatural occurences in a novel which is otherwise intended to be "realistic" plays havoc with the general suspension of disbelief.

I agree with the reservations about Russell as a character, especially re hair and myopia. I wouldn't mind being reminded why she has a maths tutor at all, given she's reading theology, and I will also say that most (though not all) of the actual mysteries have similar flaws to that highlighted - great exposition, often, but a disapppointing denouement. A Letter of Mary for example, suffers this way, with an awful lot of the plot skewed towards a red herring, and limited development of the actual suspect as a character. I also think the love interest business simply doesn't work, personally, given the time at which the novels are set. The age gap is just too great for me to see it as reasonably credible.

Having said all that, I do find them engaging and entertaining. But read Folly - it is streets away as a better novel. In fact, you actually wonder how far King is artificially fettering herself by the pastiche world. And I like the Martinelli books as well, but it's when she can create one-offs, outside a series, that I think she's done her best stuff.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Argh! I thought I'd replied to this DAYS ago, to say thanks for the recommendations/warnings, but evidence is indicating overwhelmingly that I did not.

So, yeah, um, thanks. And I agree with you about the love-interest thing. Part of my brain was sitting there relentlessly doing sums the whole time. The older man/younger woman thing doesn't always bother me (Barbara Hambly, for instance, is quite consistent about it, and I tend to adore her romantic couples), but this one ... I kept trying to accept it and let the current of the book carry me along, and I just kept boggling. I think partly because, in The Beekeeper's Apprentice at least (since I haven't read the others), despite having specifically told us Holmes is rising sixty, she keeps treating him, as a character, as if he were ACD's Holmes, who is most likely in his thirties and forties. It's like Russell's myopia.

[ibmiller.livejournal.com]

Brilliant post. I find myself rather late to the party (seven plus years, goodness), but have a couple of comments.

1) I find it interesting that commenters consistently claim that King's one-off fictions are better than her series, particularly her pastiche series. Since my interaction with King is mostly through her pastiche, I find I have the opposite reaction (though see below about my view of the quality of that series). I find King's real strength in her Holmes books to be capturing how excruciating having Holmes' genius must be. Gone is the easily brilliant, suave gentleman sleuth of Doyle and his more slavish imitators. Instead, I see something on the level of the Jeremy Brett performance - dark, emotionally convoluted, painful, loveable, and absolutely above all utterly cerebrally powerful. King does tend to cheat by indirect discoursing (amazing turn of phrase, that) past the sticky bits of deduction, but she has a real gift for plausible Holmesian hat tricks. The problem is, all the stand alones of hers I've read (well, that's only Touchstone and A Darker Place) utterly rely on that same ability for their protagonists. So, instead of seeing King being "unfettered" in her oneshots, I see her replicating the Holmes trick in an inappropriate context. That combined with her poor structuring makes me rather take the opposite stance on King's non-Holmes work.

2) But even King's Holmes series does the same thing. After the sparkle of the first book and the quiet fun of the third (I tend to ignore the mess of the second one), the books devolved into a grey mishmash of repetative disguises and anticlimactic rushed resolutions. The Language of Bees, her second to most recent as of this comment book in the series, gave me hope that after seven boring sludges Holmes might be back on track, but the followup, The God of the Hive, gave us another shadowy villain who does mysterious stuff and dies at the end.

3) Watson is a big problem. King promised seven or more years ago that Watson would get to be the hero, but she hasn't followed through on that. And I hate her sub-Bruce fatso with a passion.

4) I think Russell's main flaw is actually her completely warped morality - she generally is compassionate, but when a character is okay to hate (not politically correct), she really, really hates them. And sees nothing wrong with this. This, more than anything else, really feels like the Mary Sue/self-insert problem - at those times, King really seems to lose perspective on her character, otherwise I would assume she'd call Russell on that kind of vicious self-righteousness.

Apologies for cluttering up the discussion, but it's rare to see this kind of critical yet fun discussion on King's series.