→ October 2, 2020
→ By

Enola Holmes.

Enola Holmes is utter dreck, a mediocre mystery wrapped in the cloak of a superior writer’s creation and some quality set design, wasting two solid actresses on a script desperate to tell you how clever it is. There have been worthwhile adaptations and continuations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work and iconic character, but this is just plain boring.

Enola Holmes, you see, is Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister, a fabrication by the author Nancy Springer for a series of books that posit that this 14-year-old girl, unmentioned by Doyle, was as quick-witted as her older brothers, with a special talent for cryptography. When her brothers try to send her off to finishing school, she absconds to London and starts a detective agency of her own, specializing in missing persons cases (as, I presume, murder was a bit much for the young adult literature market).

This Netflix adaptation of the series’ first book, The Case of the Missing Marquess, starts with Enola (Millie Bobby Brown, so critical as El on Stranger Things) at home with her mother (Helena Bonham Carter), but when the latter vanishes, Enola’s brothers show up to decide her fate. Mycroft is especially disdainful of her most unladylike ways and thus the stronger advocate of sending her off to a finishing school run by a Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw, also wasted in a minor role), while Sherlock (Henry Cavill, decidedly un-super here) equivocates and shows a soft spot for his younger sister. Enola takes off and encounters another fugitive, Lord Tewksbury, and the two pair up while on the run, separating in London before circumstances throw them together again – while both are pursued by a mysterious, creepy man named Linthorn who looks too much like a young Willem Dafoe. Enola tries to secure her freedom while figuring out the mystery around Tewksbury’s flight and avoiding her brothers and the interference of Inspector Lestrade.

The story is a convoluted mess, overly reliant on coincidence and failing to give Enola enough of a reason to solve the Tewksbury tangle. Enola’s character is just Sherlock as a teenaged girl, transmuting his disregard for rules and cold manner into a mischievous pixie who breaks the fourth wall with irritating frequency. (And of course she has to say “the game is afoot,” a hackneyedphrase Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes said exactly one time in all of the stories.) She takes off for London with a pile of money her mother presciently left hidden for her in a location she’s disguised with a cipher that Enola cracks, and has little trouble tracking her mother’s movements through the London underground – that’s another preposterous subplot that I won’t spoil because it’s just so stupid. While there, she just bumps into Tewksbury again, because the story needs them to run into each other.

The Sherlock character is a softer and kinder version of the one present in most of the stories and in film versions, which has made the film the subject of a peculiar lawsuit by the Doyle estate. (The character of Sherlock is in the public domain because most of the works that include him have lost their copyright protection; the estate claims that this film uses a later version of Sherlock where he shows emotion, and thus isn’t in the public domain.) This poses two problems: It’s not the Sherlock most of us know from canon or from depictions like Benedict Cumberbatch’s, and it also makes Sherlock really, really boring. There are no pithy observations, no witty ripostes, and none of the charm of watching his brain at work, which is a huge part of the appeal of Doyle’s writing – the same as it is for Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Wimsey.

This feels more than anything like an attempt to profit from someone else’s creation, because it’s devoid of anything original or interesting. Brown might play the single most important character in Stranger Things‘ ever-growing ensemble, although I think there are times the script pushes her to overact. She never inhabits this character, however, and the reason is probably that the character itself is two-dimensional and cartoonish. For a movie that’s been heavily hyped and received positive reviews, Enola Holmes is a shocking dud. If you’re a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, you’d do well to stay away.

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→ September 18, 2018
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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.

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→ August 23, 2017
→ By

Moriarty.

I’m on record as saying Anthony Horowitz’s Foyle’s War is my favorite television series ever, although I admit I’m sort of stretching the boundaries – like many British series, Foyle’s War is more like an ongoing sequence of made-for-TV movies, with each episode running about 90 minutes and with a completely self-contained story. The mystery series, starring Michael Kitchen as the marvelously taciturn DCS Foyle, ran for eight seasons across fourteen years, with 28 episodes set from 1940 to 1947. Horowitz wrote most of the episodes himself, crafting memorable three-dimensional characters along with tightly-plotted mysteries worthy of the greats of the genre.

Horowitz is also a successful novelist and has the distinction of being the first writer authorized by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle to use the Sherlock Holmes and John Watson characters in a new work of fiction. (The characters are in the public domain in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, so any author can use them in his/her works.) The second of his two novels in the Holmes universe, Moriarty, doesn’t actually include Holmes or Watson, but instead builds a new mystery around some secondary characters, including the titular villain who himself only appeared in one Holmes story, “The Final Problem,” where the two tangle at the Reichenbach Falls and appear to drop to their deaths. In the wake of that event, a leader of American organized crime appears to be moving into London to fill the void left by Moriarty’s death, and it is up to Scotland Yard Inspector Athelney Jones and Pinkerton detective Frederick Chase (who narrates) to try to track the killer down.

Moriarty doesn’t seem at all like Conan Doyle’s work; it’s fast, breezy, light on character, and frankly loaded with silliness, both poor work by Inspector Jones and overuse of graphic violence by Horowitz. Holmes is legend because he’s charming in his aloofness and impressive in his deductive powers. Neither Jones nor Chase brings an ounce of charisma to the book, while the various tough guys they encounter are garden-variety bimbos who could have left the pages of any pulp noir story to make a few extra bucks by appearing here. We even get the ultimate cliché, the scene where the protagonist (in this case, both of them) gets knocked unconscious and wakes up in captivity, to which Horowitz brings nothing new whatsoever.

To the extent that Moriarty works at all, it’s because of the Twist, and it’s a big one. Without that, this is a bad mystery or a bad detective novel. With it, well, it’s something. It might be a clever puzzle, but I felt like I’d been conned. The reveal includes references to some of the clues you might have picked up on earlier in the book, but not only did I not see them, nothing even tipped me off that I should be considering the possibility of a con. You can write an entire novel in the first person, and then open the last chapter with, “Whoops! I lied,” but that doesn’t make it a good novel. Give me a fair shot to figure out the truth and I won’t feel cheated when I fail to do so. Horowitz always did that in his TV work, but left that element out of Moriarty, ruining the work for me.

Next up: I’m still several books behind but am back on the Pulitzer trail with Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary, which won in 1929.

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→ February 8, 2016
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The Meursault Investigation.

Standard reminder, since I’ve been asked this several times a day lately: The top 100 prospects package starts to roll out on Wednesday, February 10th, with the organizational rankings; the top 100 list itself follows on Thursday, with the org reports (including top tens) posting the following week.

I did not like Camus’ The Stranger, which is widely considered one of the greatest novels ever written – it was #58 on the Novel 100, and appeared on the Bloomsbury “100 must-read classic novels” list too – because it is a book completely devoid of … well, anything. Emotion. Feeling. Heart, at which I suppose Camus would have laughed derisively. Camus rejected the “existentialist” label often applied to him, and devoted much of his writing, fiction and philosophy, to refuting the nihilist philosophies of his contemporaries in the surrealist movement. Yet The Stranger struck me as nothing if not nihilist, a book that argues that there is no meaning in anything, not even in the killing of another man, in this case the nameless Arab (later made famous a second time in a song by the Cure) whom the protagonist kills, leading to his own execution. It’s a story of disaffection turned into total disconnection, a novel that is both atheist and anti-humanist at the same time. If that’s not nihilistic, I’m more than a bit confused (again).

Kamel Daoud’s critically acclaimed 2014 novel The Meursault Investigation is a response to Camus-cum-Meursault, written as a serious of monologues delivered by the narrator to an unseen journalist. The narrator, it turns out, is the younger brother of the nameless Arab, and he is seriously pissed off. Mostly at Camus for killing his brother “twice,” once in the murder, a second time by refusing to deign to give the victim a name, even while creating this enduring novel about the act. The victim’s name was Musa, and his brother, Harun, would like us all to know that – and in so doing, opens up a series of doors on the historical relationship between west and east, white and nonwhite, European and African or Asian, and so on down the line.

Daoud’s angry narrator distills the rage of a race and a religion and a color into the righteous indignation of a younger brother whose life was irreperably altered by the senseless murder of his older brother. Harun’s father had abandoned the family, and with Musa dead – and no body to bury – he and his mother end up moving out of their city home to a village outside of Oran, but not before Harun fulfills his mother’s wish that he kill a Frenchman in symmetrical vengeance for the death of her son. This event splits his life into before and after, and becomes part of the foundation of his own anti-nihilist philosophy, one that simultaneously rejects religion and views God as “a question, not an answer,” one that blames France for screwing up Algeria through colonialism and then blames Algeria for screwing up Algeria once the French have left. And let’s not even start on how much he blames his mother, whose inability to grieve for the dead son whose body was never found (because Camus erased it) has derailed the life of her younger child.

The Stranger struck me as a work of dead prose, what a novel would look like if the author stripped out any sense of emotion, feeling, even senses like wonder or fear. It’s like Gadsby, the novel written without the use of the letter ‘e,’ a neat trick that does nothing to make the novel any better for the reader and probably makes it worse. The Meursault Investigation infuses all of that missing emotion back into the book, as the pages practically glow with the narrator’s rage and weep with his frustrations. It’s alternately funny and infuriating, the extended monologue of a man drunk on emotion rather than alcohol. Daoud is giving Camus a giant middle finger by turning the French author’s novel inside out and revealing to us everything that Camus left out. As someone who simply can not understand the mountains of praise heaped upon the earlier work, I read The Meursault Investigation with great joy, as if I’d finally found a kindred spirit who rejected The Stranger for its nihilistic implications, yet one who providers layer upon layer of complexity that a reader of Camus would likely never have begun to consider.

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→ October 25, 2011
→ By

Poodle Springs.

I’m generally not a fan of continuations or parallel novels where one author attempts to complete or extend the work of another. Very few such works earn any kind of critical acclaim; I think Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre that tells the story of Rochester’s first wife before madness overtakes her, is the only one I’ve read that is considered a strong work of literature in its own right, and it was more a work of social criticism than a narrative.

Continuations are, in my view, tougher than “authorized” sequels or prequels, because they stitch together two different prose styles and require the second writer to guess at the intended direction of the first – or to ignore it altogether. I’ve read the most popular continuation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon* and found it utterly lifeless; where even a bad Austen novel has its memorable moments, usually humorous ones, all I recall of the completed Sanditon is a lot of walking around on the rocks.

*It’s funny how often these final, unfinished novels are proclaimed by fans of the authors in question as potentially the authors’ best work; you’ll certainly hear how Sanditon, which Austen abandoned after eleven chapters due to ill health, signaled a new direction for her writing, blah blah blah – just look at the unsourced praise in the Wikipedia entry on the book. This is nearly always wishful thinking on the part of fans, combined with the fact that a fragment of a novel is miles away from a completed book.

This is the long way of telling you that I entered Poodle Springs, in which Robert Parker (creator of the Spenser character) starts with the four short chapters left behind by Raymond Chandler and builds a Philip Marlowe novel on that scant foundation, with some skepticism. Chandler is, in my view, a prose master (although novelist Martin Amis would disagree), and his style is often imitated but never matched. Take the sparse, clipped phrasings of Hammett and add some of the greatest similes ever put to paper and you might build a reasonable fake, but Chandler’s writing remains unique in this or any genre. I gave Poodle Springs a fair shake, but at the end of the day it is just a nice detective novel, nowhere close to any of the five Marlowe books I’ve read.

Chandler’s four chapters include a shocking opener – Marlowe is married to Linda Loring, who first appeared in The Long Goodbye
 and seems as ill-fitting a wife for the loner detective as any candidate. They’ve moved to a tony California hamlet called Poodle Springs, but Marlowe insists on earning his own living rather than becoming a kept man for his wealthy bride. He’s approached by the proprietor of a local casino of dubious legality, at which point Parker takes over. He wisely dispenses with the Loring subplot (if we can even call it that) for much of the book and focuses instead on the crime story, one that has the typical hallmarks of hard-boiled detective fiction (small number of characters in a tangled web) but with a leering crudeness that is horribly out of place in a Marlowe novel, and prose that simply can’t match the master’s:

There was a big clock shaped like a banjo on the wall back of the receptionist. It ticked so softly it took me a while to hear it. Occasionally the phone made a soft murmur and the receptionist said brightly, “Triton Agency, good afternoon.” While I was there she said it maybe 40 times, without variation. My cigarette was down to the stub. I put it out in the ashtray and arched my back, and while I was arching it in came Sondra Lee. She was wearing a little yellow dress and a big yellow hat. She didn’t recognize me, even when I stood up and said, “Miss Lee.”

That’s a lot of words without telling us anything at all. The waiting room in question has no relevance in the story. Chandler doesn’t normally waste the reader’s time like that, nor does prose ever have that choppy sound like ever period is an obstacle you hit at full speed. Parker occasionally hits with a good metaphor – “Hollywood Boulevard looked like it always did in the morning, like a hooker with her make-up off” – although even that one would never have come out of Chandler’s pen.

Parker’s plot revolves around a bigamist, some nude pictures, and a few people with behavioral issues, standard stuff for this sort of novel, but his obsession with sex borders on the puerile, at least compared to the subtle approach of Chandler, where sex is always under the surface but never out in the open. An exhibitionist wife bares all to Marlowe – who passes because he’s married, so really, what was the point of this? – and we get too much about Marlowe in the boudoir with Linda when she’s not involved in the plot at all, including a tacked-on ending that feels like a nod to Chandler’s stillborn introduction.

Which gets back to the fundamental problem with Poodle Springs: It seems likely that Chandler never intended to finish this book. Marlowe probably shouldn’t be married, and certainly shouldn’t be married to Linda Loring. Perhaps these four chapters were just Chandler exploring an idea; perhaps he realized it wasn’t going to work. Perhaps it was his own depression after the death of his wife Cissy that led him to put Marlowe into a marriage. (He only finished one novel after her death, Playback, which I haven’t read but which seems to be considered his worst completed work.) The continuation of Poodle Springs was a commercial success, but the positive reviews of the time that claim that “you can’t see the seam where Chandler stopped and Parker picked up the pen” are an insult to fans of the master’s work.

Next up: A Finnish novel, Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare, currently on sale through that link for $5.60.

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