Just shy of a decade ago, the majority of the Sherlock Holmes world entered the public domain. That left aficionados, fans, pastiche professionals and anyone with a keyboard or a pen free to craft their own history and destiny for the famed detective and his stalwart companion, Dr. John H. Watson. During his lifetime, the creator of Holmes and company, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote 56 short stories and four novels. Now, there are hundreds upon hundreds of them – and no sign that the presses will slow down any time soon. For those who wish endless iterations of Victorian sleuth, this is welcome news.
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For readers in search of a holiday Holmes, Doyle’s Victorian Christmas fare is restricted to a single story. In 1892, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle found Holmes and Watson in search of a stolen gemstone. Christmas ends up as a character in the story, in a sense – or at least an essential plot element. Doyle captures the snowy cobbled streets and heavy hearths of the era in such a compelling way as to anticipate, if by accident, a contemporary obsession with coziness. Others have recently attempted to replicate that feeling and the timeless appeal of the cold logician.
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In Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Thefts of Christmas, Tim Major offers one of the most compelling pastiches on the market. With writing that nearly matches that of Holmes’s originator, Major tells a literary tale that sees the return of “the woman,” Irene Adler, who we met in Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia. At once a nemesis, rival and muse for Holmes, Adler was a character ahead of her time in the 19th century, and she remains a fascinating, layered one today.
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In Twelve Thefts, fictional “Adler variations” – musical compositions – serve as a plot device and link to a dozen “thefts without thefts” that send Holmes and Watson running about London and beyond during Christmastime on a kind of scavenger hunt. The plot is byzantine and utterly enjoyable. We encounter a Greenland monster, a corpse in a dry riverbed, a museum heist and plenty more. The book reads like an advent calendar of crimes. It’s perfect for a holiday break with a little challenge by way of the writing style.
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Major’s effort is not the only holiday Holmes that offers some lightly layered material. More than a century ago, Doyle’s stories were not just whodunnits. They were didactic tales that offered a lesson, or a critique if you prefer, without being preachy. In What Child is This: A Sherlock Holmes Christmas Adventure, Bonnie MacBird carries on that tradition. The volume is illustrated by Frank Cho, a nod to the original stories that ran in The Strand Magazine and featured timeliness drawings.
In What Child, MacBird’s fifth Holmes novel, she addresses gender and sexuality issues that explore the layers of human needs that were present, if repressed, in the Victorian era and remain during our own. We see Holmes encounter a situation that would have been beyond scandalous for the time. He declines to pass judgment on character. Or at least claims to. “Madam, I neither approve nor disprove,” he says. “Parents often want something different for their offspring, other … than what the child actually needs.” The underlying sentiment is that we ought to accept that people are who they are and ought to be respected as such, which is to say Holmes passes judgment after all.
At times a bit too saccharine, the book is still a thoughtful holiday read. With its subtle and not so subtle critiques of the overbearing sorts who wish to decide for others how they should live, Holmes purists may find the tale inconsistent with the character. But a reading of Doyle’s Holmes offers a man with a strong moral commitment to justice and self-determination, which fits with MacBird’s treatment.
That moral fortitude includes a not-so-subtle assessment of the vagaries of fortune. Late in the novel, we find Holmes reflecting on success and failure. “Consider this,” he says. “Poverty and ill luck can bring down the strongest of men. The poorest in this city are so constrained by their circumstances that, no matter what their gifts or innate proclivities, it is hard to rise above the morass in which they are trapped.” If that too seems out of character for Holmes, recall that Doyle had the consulting detective offer apprenticeships and paths to success for his Baker Street Irregulars (“street urchins”) more than 130 years ago.
In the same spirit, Martin Davies offers a holiday story in his sixth installment of his Holmes and Hudson mysteries. Mrs Hudson and the Christmas Canary is less a pastiche of Doyle’s style than it is reminiscent of the early 20th-century golden age of detective fiction. At once a love story and locked-room mystery with intersecting puzzles, an enigmatic question – “Who painted the Christmas trees?” – subsumes a lost golden canary ornament, decapitated Tannenbaums, a missing violinist and a series of fowl deliveries.
A bit slow to start and long at the end, Christmas Canary finds its pace and rewards time spent turning the pages. Holmes and Watson are secondary characters in this novel and series, as Davies centres housekeeper Mrs. Hudson and housemaid Flotsam (or Flottie, who was not part of Doyle’s stories). Those keen to read of the further adventures of Holmes and Watson aren’t likely to be disappointed by the substitution, just as those who prefer a Victorian pastiche are likely to find themselves enjoying an old British take on the Holmes universe.
Davies manages to capture some of the engrossing backstory and motive psychology that made Doyle’s tales A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four enduring classics. This novel may not prove itself a classic, but it is well worth a cozy fireside read – even if the fireplace is, as so many are now, on a screen.
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