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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 7, No. 39 |
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Ron reviews an unusual new mystery novel...
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Kate Martinelli enters
Sherlock Holmes' realm
of TheColumnists.com
It's not unheard of for a mystery writer with two separate detective heroes to occasionally have them cross each other's paths just to give the fans an extra kick now and then.
Examples: Robert B. Parker has routed Spenser, his Boston private eye, and some of his pals through the nearby domain of Police Chief Jesse Stone in recent years. J.A. Jance has brought her Seattle detective J. P. Beaumont together with her Arizona Sheriff Joanna Brady and P.D. James even had Scotland Yard's Adam Dalgliesh do a "cameo" in her first novel about British private detective Cordelia Gray.
But the most tantalizing rumor of the last several years was that Laurie R. King was going to somehow bring her lesbian police detective Kate Martinelli together with Mary Russell, her post-Victorian sleuth who solves crimes in tandem with her famous husband, Sherlock Holmes. But how on Earth would that be possible without using a time machine? Martinelli works in contemporary San Francisco while Holmes and Russell are, presumably, long dead by now.
Well, rumors often aren't quite on target, which is why you won't be finding Mary Russell in King's latest novel, "The Art of Detection" (Bantam, $24), even though Sherlock Holmes is definitely up front in this tantalizing, generation -spanning mystery novel. It's definitely the best Kate Martinelli novel in some time, but also has this ingenious second tier of mystery from the 1920s that King has worked into the storyline.
Here's the setup: Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, become the primary investigators looking into the bizarre death of Philip Gilbert, a leading authority on Sherlock Holmes. Though his body is found in one of the old gun implacements on the Marin County headlands facing the entrance to San Francisco Bay, he lived in San Francisco and there is evidence suggesting he was murdered in his home, then dumped in this odd location.
Gilbert was the head of a dining club whose members are all "Sherlockians," avid fans of the stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from the late 1800s through the 1920s. The first two floors of Gilbert's elaborate Victorian home are preserved exactly as they were in the Victorian era and contain much of his collection of Holmesian material. The club members are the kind who often dress up as Holmes characters when getting together.
Gilbert presumably died from a savage blow to the head, probably delivered by someone he knew well enough to allow into his third floor home office. The murder weapon? That may be a "special" item, too. Gilbert's duplicate of the "Maltese Falcon." the iconic figurine from Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel. The statuette is missing from its display area and fragments of it were found on the floor near the spot where Gilbert's blood was found.
Motive? Though Gilbert wasn't universally loved, he didn't seem to have anybody so mad at him that they'd resort to his murder. Yet it's unlikely any burglar could have surprised him in his office, considering the security on his museum-like home.
Then Martinelli discovers the most unusual aspect of the case yet: Gilbert had found what might be a "lost" manuscript by Conan Doyle--an unpublished Sherlock Holmes story that takes place in San Francisco in the 1920s. In the story, the hero, presumably Holmes, is trying to find the killer of a man who was having an affair with a local entertainer, a female impersonator. The man's body was found in the same gun implacement where Gilbert's corpse was found.
The core of King's novel has us plunge into the actual "lost" Holmes story, taking us back to 1920s San Francisco. It's a nifty mystery within a mystery.
Though King has some fun showing us how silly some of these modern "Sherlockians" can be, she obviously isn't using this story to get back at the few "Sherlockians" who have criticized her for writing her own series of Holmes pastiches and giving him a much younger, very bright wife. In fact, her pastiches probably are the most popular of all the pastiches among Holmes fans. And "The Art of Detection" seems almost designed to delight Holmes freaks.
For instance, the Holmes-like character in the story calls himself Sigerson, a name that pops up now and then in the Holmes canon. She's careful never to identify him as Sherlock Holmes and, in fact, has some of the characters refer to Holmes as "a fictional character."
King also has "Sigerson" narrate his own story. This is not unheard of in the actual Holmes stories by Doyle, who weren't all narrated by Dr. Watson. Holmes did narrate his own adventure upon occasion. King also raises all the skeptical points today's Sherlockians would raise if asked to accept a "lost" manuscript as a Doyle authentic. She points out Holmes rarely dealt with sex in his stories, but this one has a gay love affair quite prominent in the plot. The counter-argument: Many Victorians led flamboyant sex lives, but kept them from public exposure. Perhaps Doyle didn't publish this story for that reason--a fear that it would damage the image of Holmes to have him involved in something so sordid. (Doyle never had Holmes involved in spiritualism, even though Doyle himself was obsessed with it. Contemporary wisdom in his day suggested that might damage the Holmes image, too.)
We also learn that Conan Doyle did visit San Francisco in the 1920s, but liked Los Angeles better. (Nobody's perfect!) Even more important: King's last Mary Russell-Holmes novel, "Locked Rooms," takes place in San Francisco. In that equally fascinating novel, Russell leaves Holmes alone in the city while she's investigating the death of her own parents, In the "lost" story, the narrator tells us he found himself alone in the city because his "travelling companion" was "temporarily about other business." Is King telling us Sherlock became involved in this adventure while Mary was down the coast, doing her own investigation? It's tantalizing.
Ultimately, the modern mystery is solved because Martinelli is able to draw certain clues from the "lost" manuscript and fit them into the modern investigation in places where forensic science has misled the San Francisco P.D.
Though I'll readily admit a certain bias here because Laurie King and I are acquainted and I have a great deal of personal respect for her, I sincerely believe she's getting better and better as a mystery writer, especially with the Russell-Holmes series. She's incredibly inventive. You won't read anything like this anywhere else--and her ability to evoke the era of Sherlock Holmes is unmatched by all the other writers who've tried. I mean, let's face it: She has a series going that already includes eight novels, most of them very popular titles. People love these mysteries--and for good reason.
Consequently, I highly recommend "The Art of Detection" to fans of both series. She keeps both streams of storyline flowing swiftly and the wrapup is wholly satisfying.
©2006 by Ron Miller. The book cover illustration is courtesy of Bantam. This column first posted Nov. 20.
Ron Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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