Concerning Mr. Sherlock Holmes
Mar. 21st, 2003 08:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThoughts 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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:
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:
And:
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.
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.
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Date: 2003-03-21 11:03 am (UTC)GAUDY NIGHT on tv
Date: 2003-03-24 07:42 am (UTC)