{"id":10097,"date":"2023-12-12T17:33:25","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T22:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10097"},"modified":"2023-12-12T17:33:25","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T22:33:25","slug":"the-house-of-silk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/12\/the-house-of-silk\/","title":{"rendered":"The House of Silk."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve loved much of the work of Anthony Horowitz, who created Foyle\u2019s War<\/em>, one of my favorite TV series of all time, and wrote the book Magpie Murders<\/a> <\/em>and the authorized James Bond novel Forever and a Day<\/em>. He\u2019s also written two authorized Sherlock Holmes novels \u2013 Moriarty<\/a>, <\/em>which was well-written but relied too much on a gimmick; and The House of Silk<\/em>, which, unlike Moriarty<\/em>, actually features Holmes as the main character. It\u2019s also well-written, and moves along well, but falls into the trap of so many authorized continuations, where the author is trying so hard to be true to or respectful of the characters\/settings that the story itself ends up suffering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The House of Silk<\/a><\/em> builds slowly to the first of multiple murders that all seem to tie to some mysterious entity by that title, although it\u2019s unclear to whom or what it refers. Holmes enters at the behest of an art dealer whose shipment of paintings was destroyed by Irish gang members and whose client is later found murdered. When Holmes uses his Baker Street Irregulars to look for evidence, one of them ends up murdered himself, spurring the detective to continue his investigations even when others, including his brother Mycroft, warn him away from anything involving the House of Silk. Holmes finds himself framed for murder, and Watson has to find a way to spring him before they can solve the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horowitz\u2019s Holmes is the one you expect. He repeats his catchphrase \u201cThe game is afoot!\u201d which actually comes from Shakespeare\u2019s Henry V<\/em> and just made me roll my eyes for its obviousness here. He does his parlor trick of glancing at a person and immediately coming up with a lengthy biographical sketch or a rundown of everything that person might have done that day, which has very little to do with the actual mystery here and didn\u2019t happen nearly as often in the original Conan Doyle works because nearly all of them were short stories. He\u2019s actually less disdainful towards Watson and the police in The House of Silk<\/em>, where authenticity ends up lost to make him a kinder, gentler Holmes, and nobody asked for that. Watson, meanwhile, is even more of a cipher of a character here than he is in the original stories, retreating mostly to observer and chronicler status outside of the scenes while Holmes is in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

That\u2019s one of my two main problems with The<\/em> House of Silk<\/em> \u2013 the characters are just not very interesting, including the man we all know and love. If you enjoy this sort of fiction, you likely have a favorite detective character; I\u2019m a Hercule Poirot fan, and never enjoy the Miss Marple stories as much because she\u2019s just not as interesting to me. Horowitz\u2019s Holmes feels flat on the page, and none of the side characters are anything more than stock figures, some there because the reader might expect them (Lestrade, Mycroft), some there for the new plot, but none memorable at all once they leave the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other is that the resolution to the story here is exceptionally lurid, and thus out of character with any of the original stories. Such things do happen in the real world, and did during the era of the novel, but putting Holmes into such a story is not only a break with the novel\u2019s otherwise overzealous effort to stay authentic to the original material but requires a huge tonal shift for the character that the author can\u2019t manage. It\u2019s jarring in the wrong way, and Horowitz shows he\u2019s a better craftsman than artist, able to frame and write the story but not to give it the panache or appeal of Conan Doyle\u2019s works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I\u2019m currently about a third of the way through R.F. Kuang\u2019s Babel<\/a><\/em>, the most recent winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve loved much of the work of Anthony Horowitz, who created Foyle\u2019s War, one of my favorite TV series of all time, and wrote the book Magpie Murders and the authorized James Bond novel Forever and a Day. He\u2019s also written two authorized Sherlock Holmes novels \u2013 Moriarty, which was well-written but relied too much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[66,100,102,219],"class_list":["post-10097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-british-literature","tag-detectives","tag-disappointments","tag-mysteries","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10098,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10097\/revisions\/10098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}