Krishna
This is a book featuring Sherlock Holmes but as a loving husband of Mary Russell. We have reviewed two such books earlier :
The Moor was the first one and O Jerusalem was the second one.
We liked the first one not at all, if you have read the review and the second one was better, but only slightly.
The complaints I have about those books still remain. This book too pretends to be a real life event with a manuscript sent to the author by some unknown source. Still Sherlock is only ornamental and Russell does all the thinking and the work. However, these are old laments, and for this book, I am going to try and overlook familiar issues and judge the story on its merits.
Starts interesting enough. An archeological friend of Russell, Miss Ruskin, brings an old document – it is a letter sent by Mary, father of Christ, to her sister, Mary of Magdalene! Russell always considered Maria Magdalina as one of the disciples of Christ, and not the famous prostitute who was rescued by Jesus.
When Ruskin is killed in London, they both visit the place and realize that it was a trap set for Ruskin – with a ‘beggar’ sitting at the street corner with an invisible tripwire and an automobile ready to make use of the moment she tripped onto the road.
Sherlock calmly announces that their home has meanwhile been vandalized. He had anticipated it and had give the day off for the servant so that she will not be in harm’s way. Also, the parchment (letter from Mary) was discreetly moved to a place inside a beehive where no intruder could have gone to search.
The Scotland Yard is given the letter that Russell got (after steaming open the letter, reading it and carefully resealing it, of course). They learn that two people had come looking for Ruskin and enquired about her with Ruskin’s sister, who had given them the hotel’s address and also told them that she was planning to meet Holmes and Russell, which explained the vandalism they faced.
The inspector Legrade, who was assigned to the case, goes to see Ruskin’s sister, and Russell goes with him in the guise of his ‘assistant’.
They all go to Mycroft Holmes, the portly but extremely intelligent brother of Sherlock. Russell dresses up as an innocent uncertain young girl new to the city to go meet Colonel Edwards in a pub in London. He is the man that Ruskin saw last, and is furious that Ruskin is a ‘woman’ and no one told him before he agreed to meet a V D Ruskin.
She goes in disguise as Mary Small, a helpless newcomer to London and gets “rescued” by Edwards and beautifully manages to secure the position of his secretary being ‘helpless and new to London’. She quickly discovers that he is of the ‘keep women barefoot and in the kitchen’ variety of a misogynist. Unless of course they want to be nurses or secretaries.
When the young Edwards, who is the son, tries to act fresh with “Mary Small’ the little girl nearly maims him ‘by accident’. Meanwhile Holmes is acting as a manservant in the house of another character close to Ruskin.
Even discounting my usual lament that Holmes does not use his gray cells as much in this series as he is known to, instead using his muscles in the legs and arms by running around, the book sags a lot. The interesting point about Mary’s letter is fully forgotten as the couple go around trying to find who murdered Dorothy and that too is a slow way.
Finally, after much flailing around, Russell manages to track down an old friend of Dorothy who talks under hypnosis.
When they capture the children of the sister, the inspector is frustrated by the lack of evidence and she openly sneers at Holmes deceiving her and Russell acting as a simple girl. She taunts them with the lack of evidence. Defeated, Holmes and Russell come back and realize that they have missed something critical. Ruminating over the past in frustration, Russell remembers a chance remark by Ruskin about Holmes being very good with his hands which seem to have an intuition all their own in opening complex boxes.
A sudden epiphany there! They fetch the box for another closer look.
The story ends, and ends explaining the plot fully without loose ends. But my complaints about this one is the same as the ones I had about the previous books we reviewed in the series: Sherlock does not do any thinking on the lines that made him famous; Russell and Sherlock run around sleuthing heavily to no specific purpose and with no specific results; the denouement in the story comes suddenly and has absolutely nothing to do with the chain of events earlier; suddenly everything is solved and all the swagger of the evil ones is quashed.
This is not the Holmes I remember. And the cop out about the letter of Mary, which kickstarts this story is simply another annoyance on top of many.
Still, this is a moderately interesting book and so let us give it a 4/10
= = Krishna