Echoes of Sherlock Holmes

Of the making of Sherlock Holmes pastiches there is no end.  As there is clearly a market for mock-Sherlock--mocklock? Let's go with Fauxlock--this is hardly a surprise.  But as I've been none-too-subtly complaining in my year-end roundups, the results are frequently formulaic at best, endless repetitions on the same theme and the same tropes.   Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story proved premature in its titular prediction.   Sherlock Holmes pastiches are endlessly citational, forever returning to choice Holmes quotations (the game is so frequently afoot), forever revealing cases long-concealed for the sake of national security, forever complaining about the London fog.  Even the mashups have begun to rehash old territory--Sherlock Holmes meets Dracula, Sherlock Holmes meets Jack the Ripper.  The recent exceptions to this rule have been either straightforwardly parodic, like Kim Newman's The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, or thoroughly revisionist, like Michael Chabon's The Final Solution and Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind--although I also like Robert Ryan's Dr. Watson series, which marginalizes Holmes and sends Watson off to WWI.  What Newman, Chabon, Cullin, and indeed Ryan have in common (in common with Dibdin, for that matter) is that their works acknowledge, whether consistently or in passing, that they carry a heavy burden of readerly Holmesian expectation on their backs--a burden not necessarily lightened by endlessly cobbling together bits and pieces from Doyle's corpus, which begins to look rather like a corpse.  (Appropriately enough, it appears that there are multiple self-published Holmes vs. Frankenstein novels out there.) To wax Bloomian (Harold, not Leopold), these authors understand that they're a bit belated; the most interesting Holmes pastiches are often strong misreadings, not zombie reanimations. 

Which brings me to Laurie R. King's and Leslie S. Klinger's anthology Echoes of Sherlock Holmes.  Refreshingly, this is not a straight-up Holmes anthology, but an anthology of Holmes refracted, updated, alluded to, and otherwise revised.   This is not, in other words, Holmes as something out of Walking Dead. Dana Cameron's "Where There Is Honey" features badly-broken versions of Holmes and Watson, both of whom border--indeed, frequently cross the border--on criminal; unlike Dibdin's Watson, an honorable man who turns a monster into a national heroic myth, this Watson recreates himself along with Holmes in his "moral tales" with their "model heroes" (47).  The question of Holmes-as-mythos also arises in both John Connolly's "Holmes on the Range" and David Morrell's "The Spiritualist": in Connolly's tale, Doyle's skill has made Holmes and Watson so vivid that they enter into a living afterlife of sorts once Holmes is killed off, leading to complications when Doyle brings him back; in Morrell's more serious tale, Holmes' "ghost" (95) confronts Doyle over the psychology behind Doyle's obsession with spiritualism.  In both stories, Doyle-the-author finds himself faced with the paradox that successfully murdering his most famous creation only reveals his total lack of power over Holmes' future.  A ghost Holmes of sorts returns in Jonathan Maberry's "The Adventure of the Empty Grave," in which someone who is clearly Holmes visits Watson at Holmes' (empty) grave under the guise of Poe's Dupin, one literary character incarnating himself as another.  Watson, hopeless, brings back Holmes to life for himself by rereading his own case notes; that he fails to identify the real Holmes in front of him is appropriate enough, but his inability to see a way out of the situation, with "so much left undone" (307), suggests how Holmes-the-character enables the reader to fantasize about a universe in which all can be set right.  This Holmes-function, as it were, returns in Anne Perry's "Raffa," which explores the mythic Holmes from a different angle: an actor playing Holmes finds himself looking for a little girl's kidnapped mother.  In succeeding, the actor discovers the secret of Holmes' success--namely, that "Sherlock Holmes would always be [here], because he would be needed" (178).  The promise of comfort in the Holmes stories arises again in William Kent Kruger's "The Painted Smile," featuring a small boy, disturbed by his mother's new relationship, who discovers his own agency in identifying entirely with Holmes; faced with a Moriarty, the boy determines to engineer a suitably Holmesian conclusion.  (By contrast, Cory Doctorow's "The Adventure of the Extraordinary Rendition" subverts this trope entirely, as Holmes and Watson wind up very much at Mycroft's mercy, with no definite end in sight; similarly, Denise Mina's "Limited Resources," whose narrator is not quite trustworthy, has a Holmes figure for whom detecting is pain rather than pleasure.)  Holmes and acting intersect again in Hallie Ephron's "Understudy in Scarlet," in which a middle-aged actress who has been trying to move into directing discovers shenanigans on the set of A Scandal in Bohemia; here, the actress' insights lead her to a post-Holmesian destination, with women openly taking charge instead of surviving via a combination of men and subterfuge.  On the same lines, Tony Lee's and Bevis Musson's graphic tale "Mrs. Hudson Investigates" has fun centering the marginal characters and, more seriously, playing with the original tales' gender stereotypes: despite Watson's condescension (complete with patting her on the head near the end!), Mrs. H out-detects all the men and engages in Holmesian fisticuffs, leaving Watson and Lestrade to pursue a hitherto-undisclosed romantic relationship. 

Both "Understudy in Scarlet" and "Mrs. Hudson Investigates" further represent this collection's interest in female detective figures.  (It's not so interested in thinking about race, with the notable exception of Gary Phillips' "Martin X," set in a politically-corrupt mid-70s New York; its African-American John "Dock" Watson is every bit Holmes' equal.)  The Holmes canon is notoriously short on significant female characters of any sort; here, though, they take over operations, usually out-doing the men.  Most of the detecting women aren't professional detectives, although the female Holmes of Hank Phillippi Ryan's "The Adventure of the Dancing Women" is a struggling ex-geology teacher turned private investigator.  Ryan's citations to the Holmes tales are amusingly ironic, as only Holmes' Watson seems to be familiar with the canon.    Catriona McPherson's "The First Mrs. Coulter" is closer to "Mrs. Hudson Investigates" in that its protagonist is an ex-actress just hanging on as a lady's maid, but like "The Painted Smile" and "Raffa," it also suggest how identifying with Holmes is not just comforting, but empowering. Meg Gardiner's "Irregular," starring a female equivalent to Wiggins, both dramatizes how the socially marginalized see more than they let on, and quietly criticizes the canon's cavalier attitude to its street urchins; another female Wiggins appears in Deborah Crombie's "The Case of the Speckled Trout," as a young woman on her gap year learns about attention to detail.  Similarly, Tasha Alexander's "Before a Bohemian Scandal," introducing the woman, highlights the system of social and sexual exploitation that leaves Irene Adler struggling to hang on to whatever agency she can find.  Holmes is referenced only briefly in Michael Scott's "The Crown Jewel Affair," in which a powerful madam out-investigates the local police force, but like "Irregular," the story develops a canonical trope--that the poor and criminalized classes know and see everything--to its logical conclusion.  Overall, a thoughtful return to Holmes.