Unquiet Spirits.

The character of Sherlock Holmes, like all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings, is now in the public domain, which has the rather unfortunate effect of letting anybody who wants to write something involving him do so without restriction. If someone wanted to write a story involving Holmes with the supernatural, which would be entirely antithetical to the character and to the author’s beliefs during the period when he was writing Sherlock Holmes stories, they could do so. That’s why I tend to avoid these ‘continuations,’ whether it’s completing an unfinished story or crafting something out of whole cloth – it’s too much to ask most authors to write a compelling story with someone else’s characters while also capturing the prose and dialogue unique to the original author.

Bonnie MacBird is one of many authors who’ve attempted to write something new involving the famous fictional detective, with two novels to date, including 2017’s Unquiet Spirits. She hadn’t published any novels prior to her first Holmes story, with the screenplay to the original Tron film her best-known work, but there’s no evidence here to indicate her inexperience with the form. Her prose is light but mimics the style of Conan Doyle’s late 19th century British vocabulary and syntax, and the story itself moves along quite well until the resolution. The problem here, however, is that she’s managed to turn Holmes dull, and Watson along with him, while also whiffing on the form and structure of the standard Sherlock Holmes mystery – not least by writing a novel of nearly 500 pages, twice as long as the longest of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Unquiet Spirits is set mostly in a Scottish distillery and the castle of the family that owns the firm, the Maclarens, some of whom believe their castle is haunted by various specters, giving the title its wordplay and creating too many puns on the word ‘spirit’ within the text. A chance encounter takes Holmes and Watson to the south of France, where the central murder is revealed in gruesome fashion, after which they repair to the glens outside Aberdeen and investigate the crime. Aside from perhaps putting Holmes in more mortal danger than Conan Doyle did in most of his works, save “The Final Problem,” MacBird does a credible job unfurling the mystery at the book’s heart through the eyes of Watson watching Holmes investigate it, using observation, knowledge, and ability to extract truth from unwilling interviewees.

There’s a cadence to Holmes’ dialogue and a bent to his character that MacBird simply fails to capture, however, so in the process of writing this overlong story she manages to denude him of most of why his character remains so beloved. His discoveries and revelations are less wondrous than in the original stories, and his speech less sparkling, so he becomes tedious rather than charming. The mystery itself involves something from Holmes’ past, which is the same mistake many other Holmes adapters have made, including the creators of the BBC series – who seem obsessed with Holmes’ history, to the point that it’s truly taken away from the show more than once in the last two seasons – with MacBird going way too far in creating a failed romance, a lengthy back story involving prep school rivalries, and an emotional side to Holmes that simply did not exist in the originals.

The sheer length of the book makes the inventions and extrapolations all the harder to overlook. Unquiet Spirits needed an editor, badly, to trim much of the fat and perhaps simplify the resolution to the central mystery, which is both convoluted (not necessarily a problem) and far too personal to Holmes (almost always a problem) to be true to the spirit, no pun intended, of the character. Holmes is beloved because of how Conan Doyle wrote him – rational to a fault, observant of everything except how his demeanor and speech affected others, and exhaustingly brilliant. He’s still brilliant in Unquiet Spirits, but the rest of him seems to have been left somewhere in the Scottish highlands.

Next up: I’m nearly through Lauren Groff’s Florida.